Global Education and Language: Proposing a Universal Variety of English as Medium of Instruction

Abstract

Global Education begins with raising an awareness of global challenges, creating an in-depth understanding of what the challenges entail with the goal of changing people’s thoughts and attitudes, encouraging them to live out their lives to the fullest and play their special parts effectively. To this end, in order to enhance these goals, communication is crucial especially being that it entails making use of an acceptable and intelligible language variety. How can Global Education attain its goals if it does not begin to prescribe and describe for itself, a Global variety of the English language developed just for instructional purpose in the delivery of Global Education? This paper therefore proposes a move towards the prescription and description of a mutually intelligible variety of the English language, to be used just for Global Education. This proposal is born out of our experience during our first collaboration with three other Universities in taking the course ‘Global English Varieties’. One of the major challenges that impeded our flow was the variety barrier. This paper will also ascertain the percentage of Covenant University students confronted with this same challenge by the use of questionnaire. A hundred questionnaires was distributed and analyzed.