Immigrants To Face English Language Test

[Guest Mrs Bradley]

Married people don't talk to one another.

Too few parents talk to their kids, which is why the standard of spoken English is dropping in the indigenous population. They'd rather spend their time on a PC, talking bullsh to people who don't share a thing in common with them.

[Patfig]

Erm, I think it was meant to be tongue in cheek.

French Kissing

[Woot]

Purely hypothetical, nobody wants to live in Wales voluntarily.

I do... but the language is utterly redundant and the amount of wastage involved in producing all materials in both languages is criminal. When the Welsh Assembly made this a legal requirement, several charities including the Children's Society had to pull out of Wales because they couldn't afford to comply. All for the sake of a few obsolete, woolly militant pseudo-celts. TBH most of the Welsh 'language' is a latter day basterdization of English - eg ambulance, apple, banana etc etc

[swissy_fit]

From the article in The Times

The new rule will come into force in the autumn and will mean that non-EU migrants seeking a visa to marry will need to be able to understand English at the level of a child of 5 or 6.

Not, I would have thought, an unreasonable level!

It is almost impossible to police language learning once someone is in the country without a level of interference unthinkable even to recent governments. If you want to ensure that all permanent residents have at least a rudimentary knowledge of English you have to do it through border control.

For f*cks sake, how many languages do you speak, and how did you learn them? Most people need to be immersed in the language to achieve any level of fluency. If you can reach the level I was at in English at 6 in say, Russian or Chinese merely by doing a course(starting in your 30s) and practicing a bit, then you're brighter than me, and I'm no dimwit.

I guess my family is not the intended target of this ridiculous legislation, it just goes to show you need to be careful when putting together supposedly bright ideas.

You can police anything you please if you are remotely organised. If you lived in an organised country you would know this. Border controls are a waste of time and money, they merely get in the way of well-meaning immigrants, anyone else comes in in a lorry or a boat.

[Woot]

I think this is probably a policy 'stone' designed to hit many birds.

It is a way to move towards cutting back on government translation costs, a way to prevent social ghettoisation, a way to stop economic and social alienation from majority culture, and a way to help slow chain-migration.

I married into a bilingual family and I support this move. People just have to toughen up and get their heads down. I understand how difficult it can be to learn another language when you marry into a family with a bilingual culture and move to live in that country because I have done it myself -- you just have to get on with it and learn the damn language.

Otherwise, it isn't fair on you, your family, or the locals. And I strongly believe that it is very rude to make a home somewhere and refuse to speak the local language. You are not just alienating yourself, you are alienating the people around you as well. You are imposing an isolation on them by not being able to communicate with them.

+1

I've friends who have moved abroad to marry - France, Israel, Japan, - and they have all fully expected to learn the language. Why would you not expect to embrace the culture of the country you choose to live in? And how can you embrace the culture if you will not speak with the locals in the local language?

[Guest Mrs Bradley]

+1

I've friends who have moved abroad to marry - France, Israel, Japan, - and they have all fully expected to learn the language. Why would you not expect to embrace the culture of the country you choose to live in? And how can you embrace the culture if you will not speak with the locals in the local language?

+1

This is what many apologists don't either realise or acknowledge. That to move to a country and not see the need to conform with the norms there, begs the question " Why are you coming here at all?"

"To make new friends and be part of a larger community" would NOT seem to be the answer. It also can't be "to work for a better life " either, as there are few - if any - jobs one can hold which do not involve communicating with workmates/customers.

[Patfig]

+1

[/b]

This is what many apologists don't either realise or acknowledge. That to move to a country and not see the need to conform with the norms there, begs the question " Why are you coming here at all?"

"To make new friends and be part of a larger community" would NOT seem to be the answer. It also can't be "to work for a better life " either, as there are few - if any - jobs one can hold which do not involve communicating with workmates/customers.

Salam

[porca misèria]

You're brighter than me.. I'd say more like 12 months to be reasonably fluent! If we are honest the whole exercise is a thinly veiled mechanism for impeding inward migration though.

Have you ever actually been 'thrown in the deep end' in a foreign country?

Happened to me in Italy in '92. My then-employer was paying for just one month in a (substandard) hotel room. By the end of that month I had summoned up the courage to buy the local advertiser, 'phone up folks advertising a flat to let, and get myself a flat. In Italian.

Had a somewhat similar experience in Germany in '85, but I'd discount that 'cos I already had a little german (including O-level).

[Riedquat]

I was in France for over a year and never managed to get better than just about able to get by (and almost certainly not on the phone). Mind you, it's not as if I spend much time talking to people anyway.

[I_Claudius]

Too few parents talk to their kids, which is why the standard of spoken English is dropping in the indigenous population. They'd rather spend their time on a PC, talking bullsh to people who don't share a thing in common with them.

Mrs Bradley

HPC Guru

Group: Members

Posts: 6,860

[Patfig]

Mrs Bradley

HPC Guru

Group: Members

Posts: 6,860

Women do multitask though ie they never shut the f_ck up

[Guest Mrs Bradley]

Mrs Bradley

HPC Guru

Group: Members

Posts: 6,860

Not really relevant as :

Both my chldren are older than you are.

I am partially disabled and retired, therefore limited in what I can do.

I must assume that the rest of you who post on here a good deal are either benefits claimants, or are taking money from your employers under false pretences.

[Guest Mrs Bradley]

Women do multitask though ie they never shut the f_ck up

Bold words from someone who averages 300 posts per year more than I do. I am old, have limited mobility and retired, and until recently was virtually housebound as a 24/7 carer.

What is your excuse?

[swissy_fit]

taking money from your employers under false pretences.

Yep that'd be me.

Edit : I spark up a bit when necessary, it must be said.

[I_Claudius]

Not really relevant as :

Both my chldren are older than you are.

I am partially disabled and retired, therefore limited in what I can do.

I must assume that the rest of you who post on here a good deal are either benefits claimants, or are taking money from your employers under false pretences.

Not that smart an assumption to make imo, not sure smearing frequent posters here as benefit claimants or workshy thieves is that accurate or warranted tbh (for instance I'm self employed and can post when ever I want, and my posting rate is half yours)

As for my not talking with my kids I post when I'm at work or when my daughter is asleep or otherwise occupied (bathing, spending time with her gran etc). Surprisingly it is possible to spend time on a forum and be a good parent.

[Patfig]

[/b]

Bold words from someone who averages 300 posts per year more than I do. I am old, have limited mobility and retired, and until recently was virtually housebound as a 24/7 carer.

What is your excuse?

It was a general observation based on my own situation.

[repetitive bleats]

If an immigrant wants to apply for a permanent visa they already need to do a pretty tough test. One which not only requires them to have a decent standard of English - it also requires that they know a book full of useless info about the UK.

If you read the Daily Mail you'd think that becoming a UK citizen is as easy as turning up. In fact it takes ages, requires a world of bureaucracy and costs a fortune.

Why not take a dummy Life In the UK test for yourself and see what your average immigrant has to deal with. See if you can get the 75% that they need to achieve.

http://www.ukcitizenshiptest.co.uk/

[indirectapproach]

Ho ho.

I just sat the test and failed.

I got 50%.

That will come as no surprise to some of my friends round here.

[I_Claudius]

It was a general observation based on my own situation.

Bit of a crass pointless generalisation imo.

With respect I think it maybe says more about the women in your life than it does about women in general.

[repetitive bleats]

Ho ho.

I just sat the test and failed.

I got 50%.

That will come as no surprise to some of my friends round here.

I got 64%

It worth reading the Life in the UK book to get an idea of just how much pointless, subjective and in some cases incorrect information your average immigrant has to learn in order to become one of us. Questions that appear in the actual test include: What percentage of Ugandan immigrants in 2005 were of Indian heritage, which two centuries saw the largest influx of Huguenot settlers and what percentage of the population attend Presbyterian church

Knowing this stuff is a prerequisite for Life in the UK...?

[Guest X-QUORK]

Fail - 64%

One of the questions I failed on:

How many parliamentary constituencies are there? Now I knew it was 600 something, but there were the options to answer 646 or 664 and I got that wrong. This is pedantry IMO, hardly that bloody important.

[Orsino]

There is no clear figure for the amount of money spent by the government and by public bodies on translation services. A very very conservative estimate from 2006 was 'over £100 million a year' but if you told me it was a cool half-billion today I wouldn't be in the slightest bit surprised. I once worked on a public consultation in London (Hammersmith and Ealing). All consultation materials had to be translated into Somali, Punjabi, Portuguese, Urdu, Chinese, Vietnamese and Arabic (no I'm not joking). The cost was considerable but we didn't get a single response from anyone in these languages.

The logic of this ridiculous waste of public money is that British citizens/residents should not have their right to consultation and inclusion in British civil life denied because they can't speak English. By insisting all British citizens and permanent residents MUST speak English you instantly remove this silly argument. I see this change in immigration rules as less to do with immigration and more to do with reining in public spending on translation services. It's long, long overdue.

[Guest Mrs Bradley]

Not that smart an assumption to make imo, not sure smearing frequent posters here as benefit claimants or workshy thieves is that accurate or warranted tbh (for instance I'm self employed and can post when ever I want, and my posting rate is half yours)

As for my not talking with my kids I post when I'm at work or when my daughter is asleep or otherwise occupied (bathing, spending time with her gran etc). Surprisingly it is possible to spend time on a forum and be a good parent.

Oh dear. That caught you on the raw and it wasn't really aimed at you - at all. I DO include myself in the group who talk to idiots- not exclusively idiots, afore you fire up in defence of your intellect:

The key reason why children are not as eloquent or literate as they might be, is that parents don't interact with them enough, possibly due to lack of interest, definitely due to the two parent-working regime, which has been inflicted on us since the 60s.

My kids always did wonder why other kids they played with were so unaware of so many things, everyday things which they took for granted.

The real reason that kids get discriminated against/ lost in the system, is their inability to make themselves clear, on paper or in their own words.

As to immigrants being fluent in English, I can only say that having dealt with a GP who spoke in pigeon English and who twice made mistakes with her daughter's prescriptions and computer notes,( one of which would have been fatal) my daughter will be avoiding anyone who wasn't reared in an English speaking country, to take charge of her precious family's health.

I can only hope our ruling bodies give us that choice.

Fine to lay on ethnic minority medics for ethnic minority patients. But for those who struggle to comprehend the language, being put in charge of such a sensitive area is a recipe for disaster.

[dissident junk]

What if the person already has a job(ie childraising) and is very keen to learn the language as she doesn't want to childraise permanently?

It's f*cking outrageous that you have to learn it before arriving, in my case if we return to the UK we'll have been married nearly 3 years. The best place to learn English is in England!

The same incompetent policy-making basing everything on border control instead of control within the country is behind this.

I disagree. I would say the best place to learn English from stratch as an adult is only England if you have a solid ESOL structure around you while you are resident -- so if you come to do a full-time language course as an ESOL student, for example, where you have lessons catered for your level that can provide guidance in your mother tongue. Otherwise, accumulating the language can be extremely difficult, particularly if you have someone who translates your needs in external situations and your mother tongue is spoken in the home. Adults don't really pick it up from scratch just through existing in another country.

The problem is that for a adult in any country where you don't know the language, the verbal communication that occurs around you can feel like an impenetrable wall. You need the basics to begin to penetrate it, and often you can't even do that without a lot of, what I would term, "teacherly help" from native speakers. This is why the principles by which a child accumulates language do not work with adults -- adults talk to children differently, they expect to speak to children differently, they use different modes of communication and do not expect nuanced adult reactions back or expect children to pick up on subtle tones.

One of the reasons children pick up languages so quickly is because their world is supported by language simplicity -- short simple words, careful pronounciation, clear direction, increased use of message reinforcement through facial reactions etc. People do not do this for adults.

As a result, as an adult, it can be very isolating and alienating to move to another country and be expected to learn the language in a "total immersion" style -- particularly when your mother tongue "sees" the world in a very different way in terms of time, actions etc. It's a bit easier with Latin languages, but languages outside of the western European tradition can require you to see the world differently -- for example, there are words for abstract concepts and grammatical structures that occur in my husband's mother tongue that simply do not exist in English, and some ways of expressing things are culturally uncomfortable for native English speakers.

My grandfather is a pretty good example of what works and what doesn't with child-like "total immersion". He's lived in Britain now for 65 years, most of that time in a very isolated situation vis a vis his mother tongue, and his English is still awkward though passible. The only reason why it is as viable as it is is because he learnt his English when my grandmother taught it to my mother -- he had the benefit of that child-like language accumulation second-hand.

To my mind, it is very hard to learn a language from scratch in a country where you don't have anyone to directly teach you on a regular basis in a childlike style or who can teach you with recourse to your own language. This is why I suspect so many migrant brides in certain communities fail to learn English -- its's not because they are somehow lazy or daft, it is just very very hard to learn English in their situations.

[Guest Mrs Bradley]

I disagree. I would say the best place to learn English from stratch as an adult is only England if you have a solid ESOL structure around you while you are resident -- so if you come to do a full-time language course as an ESOL student, for example, where you have lessons catered for your level that can provide guidance in your mother tongue. Otherwise, accumulating the language can be extremely difficult, particularly if you have someone who translates your needs in external situations and your mother tongue is spoken in the home. Adults don't really pick it up from scratch just through existing in another country.

The problem is that for a adult in any country where you don't know the language, the verbal communication that occurs around you can feel like an impenetrable wall. You need the basics to begin to penetrate it, and often you can't even do that without a lot of, what I would term, "teacherly help" from native speakers. This is why the principles by which a child accumulates language do not work with adults -- adults talk to children differently, they expect to speak to children differently, they use different modes of communication and do not expect nuanced adult reactions back or expect children to pick up on subtle tones.

One of the reasons children pick up languages so quickly is because their world is supported by language simplicity -- short simple words, careful pronounciation, clear direction, increased use of message reinforcement through facial reactions etc. People do not do this for adults.

As a result, as an adult, it can be very isolating and alienating to move to another country and be expected to learn the language in a "total immersion" style -- particularly when your mother tongue "sees" the world in a very different way in terms of time, actions etc. It's a bit easier with Latin languages, but languages outside of the western European tradition can require you to see the world differently -- for example, there are words for abstract concepts and grammatical structures that occur in my husband's mother tongue that simply do not exist in English, and some ways of expressing things are culturally uncomfortable for native English speakers.

My grandfather is a pretty good example of what works and what doesn't with child-like "total immersion". He's lived in Britain now for 65 years, most of that time in a very isolated situation vis a vis his mother tongue, and his English is still awkward though passible. The only reason why it is as viable as it is is because he learnt his English when my grandmother taught it to my mother -- he had the benefit of that child-like language accumulation second-hand.

To my mind, it is very hard to learn a language from scratch in a country where you don't have anyone to directly teach you on a regular basis in a childlike style or who can teach you with recourse to your own language. This is why I suspect so many migrant brides in certain communities fail to learn English -- its's not because they are somehow lazy or daft, it is just very very hard to learn English in their situations.

.....Situations often complicated by the overly protective attitudes of husbands. Why else did some of my work involve training outreach workers?