Paper 1- Text 1 no listo

This article by Michael Hofmann in The Observer newspaper is a critical argument about modern British society and the failure of their educational system in relation to learning new languages. This idea is suggested in the title as it says "It's not civilized" as the author "attacks", by the use of these words the British people who normally think of themselves as 1st world citizens, so well, civilized.

Most of the article is written in informal language, using phrases as: "grammas? Pronunciation? [...]" This is mainly because by using language this way, the author can keep the reader engaged to the article by not showing boring facts and complicated formal language, so making it more interesting to read (so the reader doesn't get bored with a monotonous text). As well, its easier for any kind of audience to understand the message, as the targeted audience intends in all British people who are not interested in learning new languages, by the use of comparations and similiraities to explain in simple words complicated topics as in paragraph two: "Educaton is a field hospital, where the little troops [...]" The author uses this kind of comparations in order to explain in a simple way his point of view, rather than using complicated and specific words.
The use of language is very important in this text as it doesn´t only keep the reader interesten in the paper by making it dynamic and a simple lecture, in addition, this language serves the purpose of displaying the authors message about learning lenguages. In some sense, the author appeals to the British emotions as making them feel lousy with themselves: "The country is so rooted, so settled, one thinks it has survived everything others can throw at it, but it won´t survive its own wildly irresponsible experiments on itself". The author tryies on challenging the reader to learn new languages, and encourgages him to do this in order to save his country.

The author appeals not only to emotions like anger to try to convinve people to adopt his point of view by the use of ironies like: "the so called world language, english" to hurt tem on their pride, but it also makes interpretations of famous quotes like Les Murray's. Which is used to refer to the importance  of knowing at least two languages by scaring the reader, telling him that he would be "condemned" to only use the same words, phrases over and over again for he rest of his life, so by, to be chained to the same positions. Then he wouldn't be able to even comunicate with others, because "it requires two to speak English"

 The article itself and the illustration is a criticism about British society, in which depicts the British people as narrow minded, living inside a box, and because of this, as the illustration depicts, living in a different world than the rest of the people, as they refuse to communicate with the other "fish" (in the illustration countries or people are personofied by fish), and that´s why the british fish is facing the other way, not even looking at the others. As well, the author blames no one but the British, as its only because of them this is happening, destroying arguments like that English is the World's Language by giving facts about the numbers of people who actually can speak English, so there's no excuse for smeone to say that they don't need to learn another language because they know english, because is we imagine the world with only four inhabitants, considering 75% of them don't speak english, if you don't know any other language, who would you talk to?