On 7 July 2011, the British Council invited Professor David Crystal to speak at the English-Speaking Union in London about the influence of the King James Bible on the English language and especially its idioms.
'I began to think about ways in which we might actually try to tackle the process of listening rather than just test learners on whether they had roughly understood a text.'
South Africa was primarily a Dutch colony and later taken up by the British. The country was plagued by racial and cultural conflicts but has conquered over its troubles to a large extent in the recent past. It is now a multi-cultural and a multi-lingual country with 11 official languages and only 8% of its' population conversant in English. Economically, it has been doing very well and is striving to do better in the global world. Since communication is very important to further their development in world economy, the people in South Africa are educating themselves in today's lingua franca, English.