Don't Laugh! It's great!

This board was outside a cafe just two hundred yards from the Park Plaza Hotel (near Waterloo station) where this year's ALPHE educational fair and workshop was held last weekend. I had a bit of a chuckle... and then started thinking about it.

Yes, there's loads of irony, of course. Representatives from nearly every English language school in the country were just a stone's throw away, talking to agents from all over the world about how great their schools are, how wonderful the English language still is and how great their teaching is.... honestly.

Then I thought - there's nothing wrong with this billboard. Really. In fact, it's great! It gets the message across, makes my laugh and also made me stop to take a photo of it. I even looked inside for a moment to see if I could get a snack from there.

Purists will pour scorn on the spelling and debatable grammar, but this is modern English. English at the cutting edge. Street English. Which is great - even if it was probably unintended. But anyway, who's to say that this is bad English? This is the English that is spoken nowadays. Said no one ever!

And that's just the English.

What about the marketing bit? I remember lesson one on my marketing course many years ago and the tutor saying: ' Don't ever put a negative into a three-line headline on an advertisement, unless you're either suicidal or dabbling in the dangerous waters of anti-marketing.' Best avoid completely. And yet this billboard is full of negatives and even has a 'regret' thrown in. Terrible. My tutor would have cringed visibly.

The misspelling of healthy is great too. Yes, it really is. I like to think that the writer was running out of space and thought the 'H' was a pretty useless letter and dropped it from the word. I love 'healty.' Sounds much cooler without the H. It's probably a simple mistake, but who cares?

Anyway, all in all, the perfect advert. Much better than if it had been written by me. Or by a representative of a school at the language fair... or by my marketing tutor.

I read last week a great article by a Canadian education guru called Judy Thompson, where she totally rejects the whole history of language teaching and how people have been taught to learn a language in the past. I was fascinated. I was like a rabbit in the headlights. It all seemed so true. And very logical too. The whole language school industry started crumbling before my eyes. Here was a totally new way of learning a language, which promised not to be painful, but to be ridiculously easy to learn and immediately usable in the street. Incredible. If you get a chance have a look at her website. It's really eye-opening.

http://www.thompsonlanguagecenter.com

So, I walked away from the sandwich shop and entered the ALPHE workshop, where I was immediately told at my first appointment that grammatical English was making a comeback in forward-thinking schools today. I sighed inwardly and wondered if this school director would become 'wealty' if he really believed that.