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New Englishes and teaching models 161 6.4 NEW ENGLISHES AND MODELS FOR TEACHING Our discussion is divided into two main parts: one where we outline the terms of the debate, placing it in historical perspective, and a second where we assess the key arguments. We move first to the historical perspective. 6.4.1 Models for teaching English: the debate in historical perspective The debate over the models of English that should be employed in teaching the language around the world is a long-standing one, surfacing first in Halliday, MacIntosh and Strevens’s (1964: 293) interrogation of the continued dominance of British or American models in a post-colonial era, and in Prator’s (1968) riposte titled ‘The British Heresy in TESL’. Referring to the views of the former as a ‘pernicious heresy’, Prator argues that it would be most unwise to recognise second language varieties as teaching models: it is doubtful, he says (1968: 464), whether they really exist ‘as coherent, homogenous linguistic systems’, and even if they do, they are qualitatively different from, and inherently less stable than, ‘mother-tongue types of English’. Prator’s central concern, however, is for intelligibility. English has value for learners because it is an international language, but it can only remain so if mutual intelligibility between different groups of users is maintained. Because second language varieties are less stable than ‘mother tongue’ varieties, and because change at one linguistic level (e.g. phonology) is not self-contained but impacts on other levels (e.g. syntax/morphology), concessions to what he refers to as ‘non-native’ models are likely in the long run to encourage the drifting apart of the different varieties of English. The scenario of Latin and its break-up into mutually unintelligible languages beckons. Prator’s (1968: 469) conclusion is that it is prudent to recognise only a native British or American standard English as a model: if teachers in many parts of the world aim at the same stable well-documented model, the general effect of their instruction will be convergent … if many diverse models are chosen … the overall effect is bound to be divergent. Widespread intercomprehensibility will be lost with no guaranteed corresponding gain in local intelligibility. We return to an assessment of these arguments shortly, but staying for the moment with out historical perspective we may note that Prator’s 1968 paper foreshadows, almost uncannily, the debate joined nearly twenty years later by Quirk and Kachru on the occasion of the British Council’s fiftieth anniversary (1984), and pursued subsequently in the pages of the journal English Today, and elsewhere (Quirk 1985, 1988, 1990a; Kachru 1985, 1988, 1991, 1992a). Disturbed by what he considered to be the diminished respect for the importance of Standard English and by the excessive fascination with varieties, Quirk – like Prator before him – adopts a conservative position, maintaining that ‘a single monochrome standard form’, exemplified in the production of the BBC World
162 Language Planning and Education Service, All India Radio, the Straits Times and the Japan Times of Tokyo, is the most appropriate model (Quirk 1985: 6). Supporting this position, he argues first that ‘non-native’ varieties are uncodified and non-institutionalised, and second that there is in any case an important qualitative difference between ‘non-native’ and ‘native’ varieties. Here, Quirk adduces psycholinguistic evidence, derived from Coppieters (1987), that natives have ‘radically different internalisations’ from non-natives’, the implication being that ‘non-native teachers need to be in constant touch with the native language’ (Quirk 1990a: as reprinted in Seidlhofer 2003: 13–14). Taking a directly opposed outlook and rejecting what he regards as Quirk’s deficit view of the New Englishes, Kachru (1985, 1988, 1991, 1992b) argues for a greater degree of sociolinguistic realism, one that would acknowledge that spread inevitably entails some divergence from British or American norms as the language ceases to be the exponent of any one culture, and that would recognise that if English is to be an international language, then the native speakers need to accept that they ‘have lost the exclusive prerogative to control its standardisation’ (Kachru 1985: 30; see also Widdowson 1994). He also calls for greater educational realism, making the practical point that it is often simply not possible for teachers in the outer circle to remain in constant touch with the native language as modelled by native speakers. As for the radically different internalisations of native speakers, Kachru (1991) invites us to consider just what these internalisations are internalisations of: native speakers certainly have internalised representations of their native language (their L1), but users of English in the outer circle, some of whom are in fact native speakers of localised varieties, may also have internalisations ‘linked to their own multilinguistic, sociolinguistic and sociocultural contexts’ (Kachru 1991: as reprinted in Seidlhofer 2003: 21). Kachru goes on to argue that Quirk’s position rests on a set of false assumptions, specifically: 1. That in the outer and expanding circles, English is mainly learnt to interact with native speakers. In fact, Kachru suggests, its main use is in communication with other L2 users, intranationally or internationally; 2. That English is learnt to understand British or American culture. In fact, in the outer circle, it imparts and expresses local cultural values and identities; 3. That ‘non-native’ varieties are interlanguages, when, in fact, they are ‘varieties in their own right rather than stages on the way to a more native-like English’; 4. That native speakers – as teachers, administrators and materials developers – are heavily involved in the global teaching of English, when, in fact, most of the teaching of English worldwide lies in the hands of L2 users (Kachru 1991: as reprinted in Seidlhofer 2003: 28). Kachru’s position, then, is that the New Englishes are stable varieties indexing local identities and capable of imparting local cultural values, and that they should therefore have greater recognition in the teaching of English in outer circle contexts. Surveying recent literature (for example, articles in English Today and book-length publications, such as McKay 2002), one senses that in the applied linguistics
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