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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
160 Language Planning and Education only acquires the language but makes the language its own. (Brutt Griffler 2002: 137) Together, these various arguments are persuasive and suggest that it would be more appropriate to locate features of New Englishes in a conceptual framework of variation and change rather than in one of error, fossilisation and acquisitional deficiency. 5 6.3.1.2 Discriminating errors and innovations To do so, however, does not resolve all difficulties. First of all, there remains the delicate matter – highly relevant to teachers and testers (see Davies et al. 2003) – of discriminating forms that are acceptable and widely distributed within a local variety of English from those that are individually idiosyncratic and hence erroneous. The boundaries between the two, between what is and what is not a New Englishes feature, might conventionally be established by codification (see Chapter 2), but, as Bamgbose (1998) observes, there is a continuing dearth of codification of local norms. It is true, of course, that there is a substantial and growing body of descriptive work on New Englishes, including that based on the International Corpus of English (the ICE corpus), which does offer some guidance, but, as Mesthrie (2003: 451) observes, not all this work conforms to the canons of formal sociolinguistic work. It is not enough, he implies, to document the occurrence of some localised feature. If we wish to separate out errors from features forming part of a legitimate, autonomous variety, we need additional data that only a more formal sociolinguistic investigation can provide: information, for example, on how frequent a feature is, on which ‘subgroups use it’, on how it is regarded within the local community and on what relationships it contracts with both more standard and more colloquial equivalent constructions (Mesthrie 2003: 451). A second issue is that accepting New Englishes as legitimate varieties, and viewing diversification as an indicator of vitality rather than decay, does not necessarily commit one to a recommendation that teachers in Singapore, India or elsewhere in the outer circle should teach to a local model of English any more than accepting Tyneside English as a systematic, non-degenerate variety necessarily commits one to explicitly teaching this variety in school. This is because one of the traditional roles of the school has been to teach a prestigious standard written variety of language, a variety that widens opportunities and that permits the individual to transcend the confines of the local. The choice of a model for purposes of education, therefore, involves additional considerations beyond tolerance of diversity and the internal systematicity of particular varieties, and it is to these that we now turn.
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