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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
150 Language Planning and Education brief outline of the sociolinguistic circumstances of the global use of English may be useful. 6.1 SOCIOLINGUISTIC CONTEXTS OF THE GLOBAL USE OF ENGLISH One of the most widely cited representations of the macro-sociolinguistic contexts within which English is used is Kachru’s (1985: 12) schema of the three circles of English (see Figure 6.1 below). Although certainly not unproblematic (see Bruthiaux 2003 for a critique), it is so widely known that it is a convenient entry point into the topic. India, Nigeria, Singapore, etc. USA, UK, etc Japan, Denmark, etc. Outer circle: ESL countries Norm-developing Inner circle: Native Speaker countries: Norm-providing Expanding circle: EFL countries: norm-dependent Figure 6.1 The three circles of English (after Kachru 1985: 12) The inner circle above comprises the traditional native-speaking English countries – the United States, USA, the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and so on – that have historically been the norm-providing centres. The outer circle – the focus until recently for much of the debate over norms and models – includes countries such as Singapore, India and Nigeria, where English is an official language, is of long standing, has a wide range of intranational functions and, crucially, is widely used as a medium of education. The resulting pervasiveness, and depth of use, of English has encouraged what Kachru (1985, 1992b) refers to as ‘nativisation’ or ‘indigenisation’, the evolution, that is, of usages that diverge from those found in the United States or Britain as a consequence of the distinctive communicative needs of speakers living in very different physical and cultural environments. The expanding circle, outermost in the diagram, includes countries such as Japan, China, Spain, Austria and Egypt, where English has no official status, few internal functions and is learnt primarily for international communication or for academic study. Reflecting these more limited internal functions, these countries have
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