English only? I think not!

 To create my TEDed lesson, I was looking for a  TED talk to stress to my students the importance of language and why it is beneficial to know more than one language. I thought I had found that in Mark Pagel's "How Language Transformed Humanity." I could not have been more wrong! Mr. Pagel closed by arguing that in our new globalized world, we are destined to have but one language. I was fit to be tied! I couldn't believe that this view would even be allowed on TED.
  After I calmed down and thought, however, I decided that I could still make a lesson out of this. My objective would be to have students listen to this opinion and form their own and discuss it in class with each other and with me. I would assign this TEDed lesson to do at home(but make sure they did not look at the and finally section) and use the next day in class to be have a discussion, first making sure that the students understood what they heard from Mr. Pagel by reviewing the brief questions I added to my lesson. Then, I would allow the students to share their opinions with me. I would close by sharing my conclusions in the "and finally" section. Although communication would be slightly easier if we  all spoke the same language; the cost of loosing all of that diversity is too great.

Our globalized,multilingual world.