Key Ideas in Support of Basic and GDM

Bill Templer for Enough English

... we need a powerful but condensed and simplified version of the language that can be learned more quickly -- without the gargantuan waste of time and energy in trying to master endless confusing lexis and synonyms... need for a wealth of serious reading materials of all kinds in that more simplified form of English as an instrument for democratising knowledge, for 'talking science and humanities' in a far leaner and more 'analytic' medium. Not 'graded readers', but another species of discourse. --- Bill Templer ¹

... it is not the quantity of the words we are acquainted with, but the quality of our understanding of them, which matters. The chief vice of foreign-language learning (and indeed of much native-language learning) is picking up words without learning quite what they mean, accepting them with indefinite and vague meanings that thereafter obscure their real uses from us. -- I.A. Richards ¹

... On current teaching practice, years of study don't get most of the students anywhere. It's really daunting to think of the billions of boy-girl years of toil that have been and will be wasted In the absence of an introduction to English which will take them more quickly to a useful point.. . . It is a grim picture... We propose to free more time for... [other studies] I.A. Richards ¹

David Graddol on EFL Failure

... Within traditional EFL methodology there is an inbuilt ideological positioning of the student as outsider and failure – however proficient they become... ²

I.A. Richards on teachng English and Place

I think we have a better way of teaching English, but while you're teaching beginning English, you might as well teach everything else. That is to say, a world position, what's needed for living, a philosophy of religion, how to find things out and the whole works - mental and moral seed for the planet. ³

Enough Philosophy

• They who know they have enough are content.
• They who konw that enough is enough will always have enough.

He who knows he has enough is rich.

... he who knows that enough is enough will always have enough. ⁴

EndNotes