The Pasteur Institute in Paris changed the language of its journal from French to English (Garfield, 1989). The editors explained that in 1973 only about 15% of articles submitted to the journal were in English, but in 1987 100% were. The journal still accepts articles written in French, however.

Coury (2001) reported what most readers of this paper know already from their own experience. She investigated the language use of 20 Brazilian academics who were university lecturers as well as researchers. All used English to communicate with scholars around the world by e-mail, all read professional literature in English, and wrote papers in English. Nineteen said they did research on the internet in English, and eighteen said they used English to talk to other scholars at international conventions. All reported that there was pressure on them to produce work in English.

The International Civil Aviation authority has recommended that English be the "default" language in ground-to-air communications; English is used if the communication is not possible in the language normally used by the ground station. This means that most international air traffic uses English (de Lotliniere, 2001).

WHAT THEY WANT AND WHAT THEY NEED

The central concern of many language students and parents is accent and apparent fluency, what Cummins (2000) refers to as "conversational" language. From the uses of English surveyed above, however, a reasonable conclusion is that the needs for English in today's world coincide with what Cummins refers to as "academic language," the use of language for cognitively demanding purposes.

The usual approaches to English fever are to offer English to very young children (and sometimes require it) and to provide a lot of it. Two "common- sense" but incorrect assumptions underlie this approach: (1) Young children are superior at language acquisition: They "soak up" other languages effortlessly. (2) It takes years of schooling to master a language. These folk beliefs appear to be supported by the apparent success of Canadian immersion programs, programs in which, it is reported, children begin the second language at kindergarten, are immersed in the language throughout the entire school day for years, and attain very high levels of proficiency.

The situation in Taiwan is typical. In the words of one writer, studying English has become a "national obsession" in Taiwan (Liu, 2002), and there are "high demands" for students to begin English as early as possible, in grade one and kindergarten (Chang, 2003). Also, English is a popular subject in cram schools; in Taiwan in 2000, about 29% of all primary school students were studying at cram schools (Taiwan Headlines, 2000).

A DIFFERENT VIEW

I propose here a plan that is more efficient, and, at the same time, is easier and less expensive than the usual options. A few preliminaries need to be discussed first, however. I list below some central findings from the research that are relevant to the discussion:

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