Daily Archives: May 21, 2006

Browsing through my WordPress referers section and checking out my Technorati links reveals some interesting information about who is stumbling on this particular blog and who is actually referencing its contents. As a blogroll is a form of recommendation, it is always flattering and humbling to see where Teaching Generation Z pops up. Recently I've noticed a link to Spanish blogger, Alvaro Gregori who writes in his native language (although as his blogroll attests, he reads English language blogs widely) and the latest on my Technorati "blogs that link here" list is Canadian French language blog authored by Dominic Villiard referencing me as Teaching Generation X. I'm not sure how they go interpreting Australian slang and turns of phrase, but it actually makes me realise that as an English language only educator, I am quite limited in my reading and interaction in the international edublogosphere. Thankfully language translation services like Altavista's Babelfish mean it isn't too hard to enjoy other non-English bloggers, although the varying grammar rules of different languages means some meaning is lost in translation. My German teaching colleagues at work assure me that learning a foreign language can actually improve my own grasp of English but my knowledge of foreign languages withered in the boredom of Year 10 German classes whilst in high school. I should actually be making some attempts to learn Italian to impress my in-laws of Calabrian origin. However, it may well be in the online flattened world that neither of those two languages are the ones high on anyone's priority list. A recent post by Vicki Davis analysing a Technorati graph of languages used in the blogosphere highlighted that 37% of blogs are written in Japanese while English, long thought of as the dominant international language only has 31% of the pie. So it's highly likely that bloggers using their own choice of first language could be reading your blog and while they may be comfortable using their bilingual and trilingual skills, monolingual bloggers like me will need to develop skills in decoding other language grammar structures in order to fully participate in true global discussions.