Like Molly and like Mommo, the later, bed-ridden heroine of Tom Murphy's play Bailegangaire, we find Mary in a state of language where words are stepping stones over the dark.
In 2006 only half of all students took a foreign-language GCSE exam the standard test for 16-year-olds.Rattled by the rush to the exit, in October the education secretary, Alan Johnson, asked Lord Ronn) Dearing, a former boss of the Post Office, to look at the state of language teaching in English schools.
The Language Festival may have set out to be a celebration of cultural and linguistic diversity, but the first session of the weekend – the Born Global Synposium – didn't shy away from some of the big, and difficult, questions around the state of language learning in the UK.
But it was the steep decline in entries for French, down by 6.5% on the year, as well as German and Spanish, that set off alarm bells over the poor state of language teaching and take-up in Britain's schools.
One of the most cited factors contributing to this poor state of language education in Australia is a shortage of foreign language teachers (Nancarrow 2000; Weldon 2015).
The authors give the brief characteristics of current state of language training in National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University and describe achievements and problems based on the experience gained.
In such contexts, it is more natural to talk proposition-language than state-of-affairs-language. It feels odd (wrong) to say that someone believes a state of affairs, or that states of affairs are true or false.
Two diachronically distinct states of the language would differ in this respect in the same way as two coexistent but geographically or socially distinct accents of the same language might differ.
The comparative method in historical linguistics is concerned with the reconstruction of an earlier language or earlier state of a language on the basis of a comparison of related words and expressions in different languages or dialects derived from it.
It is also called comparative philology when the emphasis is on the comparison of the historical states of different languages.
