Language education often requires teachers to adapt content to the current events and issues affecting their students’ lives. This is especially true in ESL/EFL teaching, where students from different parts of the world may have learned English differently from one another and even learned different dialects, slang or vernacular. Thus, when there are changes to language as it is known in their home countries, such as when the logistics of what affect their realistic environments are changed, those changes must be integrated into material.
For example, the introduction of legislation like House Bill 1298, which allows for is lane splitting legal in pa, means that ESL/EFL teachers who have students who will be operating under that new law may have to teach the new language materials that come with it. So, what is lane splitting, why did it come into existence, and how would it be integrated into ESL/EFL teaching?
In short, lane splitting is an action in which motorcyclists move between two lanes during congestion in order to reach their destination more quickly. In Afghanistan, however, motorcycles are not a common form of transport, whereas in places where traffic may be worse motorcycles may be even more common than cars.
At the most basic level, language is about communication. Whether that communication takes the form of verbal language or body language, it all comes down to how we inform others about what is going on around us and how we feel about the things that going on around us. So, drivers in states where lane splitting is enabled by law might see motorcyclists getting around, and be confused by it.
They might then ask the question of why this occurs, and also what makes it legal. If they are, for example, drivers of trucks, their size means they may not maneuver quickly enough to avoid a motorcycle that cuts them across.
In areas where lane splitting is illegal, drivers may see motorcyclists weaving between lanes and be frustrated at the behavior. They may be frustrated by these acts of lane splitting, cutting corners or jumping ahead in line for various reasons. Regardless, the very appearance of lane splitting in traffic patterns means that those who commute need to have a language to talk about it.
Meanwhile, in order to enable such discussion, those who learn English must have the vocabulary to discuss such legal matters and their effects on people’s everyday lives.
For example, let’s say an ESL student is learning about how to identify accidents and seek help after being in one. Just like a motorcycle accident, they need to know how to describe the scene of the accident and report what happened without attempting to determine who is at fault. If they could determine who was at fault, they would need the words for understanding and determining fault under circumstances where lane splitting may be legal.
That means that the language that is built for discussions of law needs to be integrated into the curriculum of any real-life ESL and EFL students who plan to live in states where lane splitting is legal. It may be that there are more living in states where it is not, in which case the language to discuss both is still useful, even if not directly applicable.
Basically, it comes down to this. When there are legal changes, there are corresponding language changes. ESL/EFL teachers need to keep up with these changes and integrate them into their curricula as they arise, and students need to know how to speak about the things around them. This is critical to their ability to succeed in learning about what goes on around them, and is thus critical to their success in speaking English. Just as legislators should be aware of language and teaching to think of how to structure legislation so as to best teach those who will learn English anyway, teachers need to know about what people are thinking and speaking about around them to ensure that they can talk about what goes on around them.
For more information on lane splitting and its legal implications, you can visit the Wikipedia page on lane splitting.