Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

English as an International Language 91
SSE
SCE
Cline of Formality Cline of Proficiency
Formal Advanced
Careful Adept
Consultative Intermediate
Casual Basic
Intimate Rudimentary
Figure 4.1 Pakir’s expanding triangles of Singapore English (SSE, Singapore
Standard English; SCE, Singapore Colloquial English) (Source: Pakir, 1991: 174)
triangle have lower levels of profi ciency, typically have lower levels of
education, and tend to come from a lower socio-economic background.
They are more restricted in their movement along the formality cline, and
can usually speak only the colloquial forms of Singapore English.
What World Englishes interpretations attempt to do is to develop a
model that describes and legitimizes a pluricentric view of English, and
one that moves away from a view of there being just one standard form
against which all others are measured. As argued by Kachru (1983, 1992),
English has ‘blended itself with the cultural and social complex’ (1983:
139) of the country and has thereby become ‘culture-bound’ (1983: 140) in
it. Therefore, he argues, new Englishes cannot be characterized in terms of
acquisitional inadequacy, or be judged by the norms of English in Inner
Circle countries. The World Englishes paradigm attempts to place all varieties
of English on par with each other without any one being a reference
point. Although the paradigm has made a signifi cant contribution to our
understanding of international English in its recognition of the pluricentric
nature of current English use, what it fails to do is to recognize the
localized nature of English language use in which bilingual/multilingual
individuals draw on their full linguistic repertoire to signal their local and
global identity.
English as a Lingua Franca
Recently, a good deal of attention has been focused on an analysis of
interactions between L2 speakers of English, termed English as a Lingua
Franca (ELF) talk. Firth (1996) provided one of the earliest defi nitions of
ELF stating that ELF interactions are those in which English is used as ‘a
“contact language” between persons who share neither a common native
tongue nor a common (national) culture, and for whom English is the