GUY: Probably. I saw another web page – it was about the future of English and, erm, it said English has 375 million first language speakers, but there are around 750 million people learning it as a foreign language, like you.2


CHEN: Wow … so many! What about this figure: Internet penetration?


GUY: Well, I think it shows which languages already have a high percentage of their speakers online. So you can see Japan is high, and Germany and Korea have quite high percentages, too.


CHEN: Oh, OK – I know for Japan and Korea that’s probably because most of the speakers are just in one small country … erm ... not spread around the world.


GUY: Same for Germany, too. It’s a big country, but its share of the world population is small.


CHEN: Look at Table 2. Where is China? In Asia? GUY: Uh huh. CHEN: But we don’t have that many people.


GUY: I think they put India in with China and call it Asia. Probably it includes South-East Asia, too. It’s like the UK is in with Europe and Canada is together with the USA in North America. So it’s not really very accurate data, either.


CHEN: OK, so we got 657 million Internet users in Asia, but that’s only 17 per cent of the population so, you know, we got a lot of potential for increasing Internet access.


GUY: Yes, and it’s a wealthy region. Look at the figure for GDP – it’s a bit less than North America and Europe, so more people are getting rich and can afford to access the Internet.


CHEN: That’s right. GUY: Probably the online population will grow quickly.


CHEN: Not like North America and even Europe; most of the people in these regions already have access, so these figures won’t change much in the future – even though they’re rich, too.


GUY: So, Chen, I guess we both win. I was right about English. It’s still the most popular language on the Internet, but you were right about Chinese, probably it will soon grow bigger than English – so I’d better get going with my Chinese lessons!


Unit 10, Lesson 1, Task 1 MAYSOUN: Hello, you two. Good to see you. Are you busy these days? CHEN: Me, yes. I’m revising for my exams. GUY: Mmm, me too.


CHEN: Actually, I’m really worried, ‘cos, you know, I haven’t done exams like this before. I mean, only exams in high school. So I don’t, erm, I don’t know what I have to do.


MAYSOUN: Well, we did English exams on our pre-sessional course – 228


2Figures sourced from: http://www.britishcouncil.org/learning-elt-future.pdf ACCESS EAP: Foundations


Key words these days


Key words not very accurate


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