Pig Sty Avenue

Goodman (2011) refers (p252) to "the public perception that countries are inundated with immigrants and governments are incapable of managing immigration", (and this was before the "Arab Spring" and the current Syrian "migrant crisis"). Which opens a door onto the bigger picture of xenophobia in populations, the process of "othering", and where it all comes from. It's easy enough to say it comes from a right-wing press, but that oversimplifies it: their words do seem to fall on fertile soil.  This is being thrown into sharp relief for those of us going through what is likely to become an extremely tedious UK Leave/Stay EU Referendum campaign. I can't say, objectively, how representative of any statistically apparent population of people in the UK Cllr Lisa Parker is when s he says of her own Party's Conservative government ,  "We’ve sold this country out and we’re being ruled by the European Union – by people who hate us, who...

"Mastering the language of a country of immigration is a skill acquired over time through residence and social interaction and is therefore one of the most prevailing markers of an applicant’s personal level of integration," (Goodman, 2010). "Mastery" has a specific meaning in CEFR terms, referring to C2 level. Most EU states' language requirements are in the A2/B1 region. Many language learners will reach A2/B1 levels in the L1 of a country which they have never visited, or at any rate never resided in or had social interaction with L1 speakers, for example [get hard data] school learners of French in the UK, or English in China or the Netherlands.  At p14 Goodman (2010) refers to the Austrian requirement that learners do 300 hours of instruction. Is this an alternative to the A2 referred to in that paper's Table 4, below?  So that 300 hours of instruction can be sufficient regardless of test result? That would be a rather honest acknowledgement of the fa...

I'm researching the PM David Cameron's  recent remarks on the Today Programme about spousal visas. Here's my transcript of the interview, and the Downing Street press release is here , but it refers to an article in The Times which is behind a pay-wall. Fortunately, the text can be found (eventually) on Cameron's Facebook page, here , (Cameron, 2016).  ' Ed Husain put it brilliantly last week when he said that our political correctness stops us from identifying this separatist mentality – terming it “the racism of low expectations”.' (Cameron, 2016). 'Think about the young boy growing up in Bradford. His parents came from a village in Pakistan. His mum can’t speak English and rarely leaves the home, so he finds it hard to communicate with her, and she doesn’t understand what is happening in his life. At the same time, as a teenager he is struggling to identify with Western culture.' (Cameron, 2016). But doesn't he speak Urdu with her? Are we ...