Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

158 Language Planning and Education
consequence of incomplete learning, which generates features that become stabilised
in the new speech community.
If there is, as we have suggested, some measure of agreement on the ontogenesis
of New Englishes, there is far less on the status of the variation that has arisen as a
result, with differing interpretations stemming from the quite different theoretical
perspectives through which commentators view such variation. For convenience, the
two most important of these can be labelled the SLA/interlanguage paradigm and
the macroacquisition/language change paradigm.
6.3.1 New Englishes and SLA: interrogating a paradigm
In the SLA paradigm, successful acquisition is viewed as successive approximation to
a target language norm, usually assumed to be a native-like language competence. As
individual learners strive to approximate this norm, they pass through a range of
interim, intermediate stages – coherent in their own terms but unstable and deviant
from target norms. Such stages, or more precisely the individual transitional
linguistic systems in operation, are commonly referred to as the learner’s interlanguage.
It is possible, however, and in fact typical, for the learner’s interlanguage to
stabilise at a point short of the target norm, in which case it is said to have fossilised.
This, some argue, is precisely the process by which many of the distinctive features
of New Englishes arise: learners fall short of the target norm, their interlanguage
fossilises and the resultant forms disseminate and are institutionalised within the
community. And, of course, from such perspective there is logic to regarding these
features not as deviations but as errors.
The logic may be mistaken, however, for – as various commentators (e.g. Kachru
1992b, Sridhar and Sridhar 1992, Stroud 2002, Brutt-Griffler 2002) have pointed
out – there are sound reasons for questioning the applicability of an SLA conceptual
framework to New Englishes, the fundamental consideration being that in its typical
focus on the individual learner, whose target is a standard variety spoken by native
speakers, the standard SLA approach discounts external social factors – including,
crucially, the complex multilingual environment in which New Englishes are
acquired. Below we comment further on this complex context of acquisition,
summarising some of the key criticisms made of the SLA/ interlanguage approach.
One cluster of arguments disputes both the feasibility and appropriacy of taking
the endpoint of acquisition to be a standard metropolitan variety spoken by native
speakers (e.g. standard British English). The relevant points here are as follows:
1. In the contexts where New Englishes are acquired there is very little, or no,
input available from metropolitan native speakers. Learning is therefore very
largely modelled on the production of variably proficient second language
speakers whose speech will be liberally laced with localised features, even while
they sometimes believe that it instantiates a standard British English model. In
such circumstances, it is unclear whether the variety normally assumed to be
the target in standard SLA theory (an idealised native speaker standard) is in
fact attainable.