Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

Chapter 6
New Englishes and teaching models:
the continuing debate
We now turn, as indicated in the previous chapter, to another major effect of the
global spread of English – one with significant implications for education, ELT and
for social equity. This is the diversification in the language that global spread has
induced, a phenomenon signalled by the increasingly widely accepted pluralisation
of ‘English’ in, for example, the journal World Englishes, the phrase ‘New Englishes’,
and in the arresting title of McArthur’s (1998) book The English Languages.
There has, of course, always been variation and change in English from the Old
English period on, but what is different now, and exceptional, is the scale of the
proliferation of regional/national varieties, of newly standardising second language
varieties (New Englishes) and of hybrid varieties, the latter referring to the mixed
varieties created by English ‘flowing into’ (McArthur 1998: 15) local languages –
Singlish, Spanglish, Japlish, Franglais, Chinglish, as they are sometimes, though
not always felicitously, labelled. It is the luxuriance, then, as well as the fact of
diversification that the plural connotes.
Accompanying, and causally linked to, this linguistic diversification is a demographic
change in the users of English. No longer, according to various estimates (e.g.
Graddol 1999: 62), are native speakers numerically the most populous group of
users: they are about to be, or have already been, overtaken in number by L2 users,
many of whom learn and use English not so much for communication with native
speakers but with other bilingual L2 users either intranationally or as an international
lingua franca.
Such changes in use, in form and in demography – in combination with the
ideological and pedagogic challenges to the centrality of the native speaker mounted
by commentators such as Cook (1999) and Seidlhofer (1999) – have brought into
question the continued dominance of British and American standard varieties as the
most appropriate models for teaching English, and as the most suitable target for
learners to aim at. For how much longer, Graddol (1999: 68) and others ask, can, or
should, native speaker varieties be the ultimate source for authoritative norms of
usage?
This chapter addresses this question from a language education policy and
planning perspective, but before we enter into the debate on norms and models, a