Neither party speaks English as their first language - idioms can easily be misunderstood.
In Miami, for example, one of the questions is what's the student's first language.
Cornish is believed to have died out as a first language in the late 18th Century.
English must be your first language, as that's what you'll be writing for us in.
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Somali is a close second to English as the most-spoken first language in Moss Side schools.
And 28% of test takers reported that English wasn't exclusively their first language, up from 24% in 2008.
Her assessment was that although Columbus wrote in Spanish (the majority Spanish dialect), it was not his first language.
His lyrics, however, often suffer from being imprecise, and sometimes give away that English is not his first language.
Four-fifths of the students, with Turks the biggest group, come from homes where German is not the first language.
Cornish is believed to have died out as a first language in 1777.
After viewing the programme, I realised that we "English as our first language" speakers may be missing some important point.
It has altered the sound of the streets: English is not the first language of 22% of Londoners and 42% of London children.
The French essayist Michel de Montaigne was brought up speaking Latin as his first language and as a boy read Ovid's Metamorphoses for fun.
Speaking mostly Low German (the majority of Belizeans speak Kriol or Spanish as their first language), they run their own schools, banks and churches.
As "American English" is my first language, I agreed with her.
The zipper suddenly finds that the tricks that it has picked up to encode the first language are not much help in encoding the second.
"We identified problems with access to interpreting services for people who do not speak English as their first language and for those who are deaf, " Ms Drown said.
Those supporting bilingual education argue that the state's 162, 000 Spanish-speaking pupils achieve more if taught through their first language and that attending an all-English schools would put Spanish-speakers at an immediate disadvantage.
However, after this programme, I am wondering if people that speak a different language as their "first language" are more aware of the variances of English throughout the UK, US, Australia, Canada, etc.
"It's terrible business ethics to be lying and then just get people to sign a contract, especially if English isn't their first language, " says Richard Painter, professor of corporate law at the University of Minnesota.
Some civil-rights groups also argue that by relying too heavily on standardised tests to decide whether a child goes up a grade or not, pupils whose first language is not English are at a disadvantage.
Computers invaded my life in 1985, when my mother, a master's student at UTEP, bought a RadioShack Tandy TRS-80 4P to pound out her thesis on the negative transfer of speech sounds from second to first language.
And yet, by some estimates, Esperanto still has more speakers than six thousand of the languages spoken around the world today, including approximately a thousand native speakers (among them George Soros) who learned it as their first language.
Not really, just evidence of the familiar problem of British skills shortages a problem so acute that many employers prefer to hire a worker who does not have English as a first language, in preference to a less-skilled native.
For the equivalency exam field tests, the state Education Department is trying to select a representative group of schools and students, including schools in rural, urban and suburban areas, as well as students who speak Spanish as their first language.
WSJ: Test Maker Pays New York State Students to Take a Trial Exam
The scion of a long line of illiterate peasants and benefit scroungers, he was born in Leeds, educated in Worcestershire and took a degree (in English, although it does not sound to be his first language) at St Catharine's College, Cambridge.
In his gloominess, Charlemagne missed an important point: the linguistic unification of Europe can yield economic returns in addition to the cultural and social ones enjoyed by those of us who speak English, whether or not it is our first language.
But Ms. Sutton, a confessed devotee of Sinatra and Tony Bennett, is closer to that realm of quality saloon singing than she is to the Sarah Vaughans and Ella Fitzgeralds of this world, whose liberties with melody and rhythm seemed unforced, like a first language...
In Tokyo, I met with John Gauntner, an American wine expert who had just penned what was then the very first English language guide to sake (there are now several).
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