Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

New Englishes and teaching models 159
2. Even if attainable, it is questionable whether such a target is appropriate, or in
fact the goal of learners. In outer circle countries localised features, divergent
from British or American English, very often index a distinctive identity valued
by members of the local speech community, and by those acquiring the
language primarily for communication with other users of the localised variety.
It cannot be taken for granted, therefore, that these learners are actually aiming
at mastery of a British or American model. Indeed, too close an emulation of
such a model, whether in pronunciation or grammar, may provoke ridicule for
its pretentiousness, or else be taken as evidence of the speaker’s desire to
disassociate from the identity and norms of the local community.
3. Also addressing the appropriacy of an idealised native speaker target is Sridhar
and Sridhar’s (1992) argument that in the outer circle English is used alongside
other languages in speakers’ repertoires and for a lesser range of functions than
would the case for a monolingual native speaker. It would be wrong, therefore,
to expect their competence in English to be a mirror image of that of a
monolingual native speaker. Moreover, the transfer features found in some
varieties of English spoken by users with a similar bilingual repertoire serve,
as suggested previously, as ‘effective simplification strategies, modes of acculturation
… and as markers of membership in the community of speakers of a
given indigenised variety’ (Sridhar and Sridhar 1992: 101).
While these arguments challenge the conventional SLA view of what constitutes the
endpoint of successful second language acquisition, and hence the received notion of
‘target language’, a second cluster, also critical of the SLA/interlanguage approach,
brings into focus the distinction between the individual and the social. The key point
here is that concepts such as error or fossilisation are appropriate when applied to
individuals acquiring a second language whose speech is punctuated by individual
idiosyncrasies of grammar, phonology or lexis, marking the individual out as distinct
from the group, but are much less appropriate, and problematic, when applied to
features that are wildly distributed and accepted in the local community.
6.3.1.1 ‘Macroacquisition’
This takes us directly to Brutt-Griffler’s (2002: 135–6) point, persuasively argued,
that the New Englishes are more appropriately conceived as the products not of
individual SLA but of social SLA in specific socio-historical circumstances; what she
refers to as ‘macroacquisition’. Thus, whereas individual SLA gives rise to interlanguages,
macroacquisition, the acquisition of the same second language by a whole
community of users, gives rise to a new variety that does not antedate but is forged
in the process of macroacquisition itself:
Taking second language acquisition as a social process requires conceptual changes
in the relation of language and learner. SLA becomes a dynamic process, in which
the language no longer appears as a static category, a fixed target, but alters as a
result of its acquisition by the learning population. The speech community not