READ any publicity aimed at investors to Northern Ireland and ‘English-speaking workforce’ is at the top of our list of advantages.
This will only become more important post-Brexit, as we struggle to make the best of whatever advantages we have.
So perhaps we should take our language advantage a little more seriously. As native speakers there is an assumption that our English is good enough, which may be philosophically true but economically complacent.
We are competing for a wide range of potential employers, from call centres to film studios, promising opportunities across the workforce. Any of these jobs could involve dealing with international colleagues and customers.
We are also competing against other regions and countries where accents are perceived to be softer and multilingual abilities are undoubtedly better.
There is no authoritative measure of how good Northern Ireland’s spoken English is, objectively or in investor perception.
There is an international standardised survey of workforce English proficiency but it does not cover countries where English is the first language. Sweden came top last year; low-wage Estonia and Poland were not far behind. Polish people also tend to speak German and Russian. So where would you open your next call centre or back-office professional services company?
Despite the lack of a measure there has to be a suspicion that our spoken English is like every other product of our education system - above average results from a narrow majority, masking abysmally low outcomes for everyone else. This is clearly tied to issues of social class and income, just as it was 103 ago when George Bernard Shaw wrote about it in Pygmalion.
A century later, speech is the one issue of class and income where society still squirms to intervene. Although officialdom bombards us with all manner of intrusive advice, correcting another person’s English is regarded as the height of arrogance.
This attitude can be discerned in the education system. You can argue over whether parents or schools are responsible for teaching children to speak but whatever your view, the education system has taken on this responsibility regardless. The Northern Ireland Curriculum begins with an early years stage that covers all childcare providers, meaning it aspires to guide development almost from birth.
The curriculum has a great deal to say about “talking” but is remarkably coy about improving speech quality. Unless a poor performance can be medicalised, it is essentially ignored.
In the curriculum stages covering primary school, for example, there are endless lists of things to talk about. However, the only statutory requirements for speech quality are that it should be “clear, audible and appropriate”, with no details on what this means or how to achieve it.
This is significantly weaker than the National Curriculum for England, which makes speaking “Standard English” a statutory underpinning aim from the first day of school.
In the Northern Ireland Curriculum for ages 11 to 16, the only reference to speech quality is that it should be “clear”. Again, no guidance on how to deliver this is given, despite supplementary documents on “key skills and capabilities”.
The concept of standard English does not really crop up until GCSE level, where it is introduced as something to be used when “appropriate”, in contrast to “variations in spoken language”, which should be understood “in relation to contexts.”
The whole thing reeks of a reticence to correct even a child. There is no equivalent anywhere in the curriculum of the private elocution lessons or speech and drama classes benefiting pupils whose parents seek them out.
Children are encouraged to examine the use of spoken English in the media, noting for example that standard English might be “appropriate” for reading the news. But is anybody warning these children, let alone teaching them, that this is the quality of English they will need to get a job in the media, or in most of the creative industries we hope to grow?
The quality of speech in Northern Ireland is probably better than it sounds. People here often pretend to be less well-spoken than they are, presumably for reasons of reverse snobbery. No doubt they all speak appropriately in work situations. However, their mentality is what feeds back through society and stops schools and parents helping those who cannot switch their interview voice on and off like a tap.
Whatever the economic future holds, good spoken English is a prerequisite for getting almost any job - a more key skill could scarcely be imagined. Why is it not being specifically taught?
