1.Before you listen, look at the map on the right. It shows some the places in the world where English is spoken as an official language. Guess what his listening is about. Listen to the tape and see if you are right.

2,Listen to the tape again. Work out the name of each student’s country and find the hints that help you identity them.

3.What these countries have in common?

They all speak English; they were all Non-English speakers before being Conquered or colonized by English-speaking peoples.

Listening text

S1: I live in South Asia. My country is thousand of years old and now has more than a billion people. Unlike many other countries, our people speak a lot of languages. So we use English, which we got from British rulers hundreds of years ago. Of course, we have our own way of using English.

S2: Well, I live on a huge green island in western Europe. Hundreds of years ago, my people spoke a very different language from English. Then the British rulers came. Now the old language is spoken in only a few villages in the western part of my country.

S3: My country has more than 7,000 islands. Some of them are very large but most of them are quite small. Hundreds of years ago, the Spanish rulers changed the way we live. Much later, the American rulers taught their own kind of English in our schools.

Nowadays, we speak a kind of English that borrows words from American English but is mostly our own.

S4: My country is very small. In fact, it’s really a city. It is in southeast Asia and is very rich. People come from all over Asia to do business here.     

Today, you can hear our kind of English spoken everywhere in the city and on many ships that come here.