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New Englishes and teaching models 169 grammar (the morpho-syntax) of a written print variety, a variety that happens to vary little across regions of the world, and not to lexis or phonology. Clearly, there are other pedagogic implications, but we shall return to these once we have discussed two further important factors: practicality and acceptability. 6.4.2.5 Practicality Turning first to practicality, we find two considerations recurring with noticeable frequency, though they point in opposing directions: towards the educational recognition of local varieties of English in one case and away from this in the other. The first has to do with the teaching cadre in outer circle countries such as Nigeria, India, Singapore or Zambia, where the teaching of English has long been in the hands of local teachers who themselves speak an educated indigenised variety of English. It is rather awkward, therefore, even paradoxical, Bamgbose (1992) observes, to insist on forms of speech in class that the teacher herself does not model when speaking out of the classroom: One noticeable effect of the refusal to accept the existence of a Nigerian English is the perpetuation of the myth that the English taught in Nigeria is the same as, say, British English … In our teaching and examinations we concentrate on drilling out of existence forms of speech that even the teachers will use freely when they do not have the textbooks open before them. (Bamgbose 1992: 149) The point is well made, but there is an opposing consideration to which the same writer draws attention: the relative dearth of codification of indigenised varieties of English, which is important not just because codification is essential to standardisation (see Chapter 1) but because in its absence teachers will be unclear as to what is correct and what not, what is to be discouraged and what tolerated; an uncertainty likely to be aggravated by the complexity of the sociolinguistic environment of English teaching in the outer circle, where local educated varieties coexist with basilectal varieties, mixed varieties and metropolitan standard Englishes. Crucial to the entrenchment of innovations and non-native norms is codification. Without it users will continue to be uncertain about what is and what is not correct and, by default, such doubts are bound to be resolved on the basis of existing codified norms, which are derived from an exonormative standard. (Bamgbose 1998: 12) A similar point is made by Quirk (1988), writing some ten years earlier but from a quite different perspective. For Bamgbose the lack of codification is an obstacle to be overcome by radical reform; for Quirk it functions as a conservative argument for adhering to well-established British or American Standard English models: although Kachru has been publishing on Indian English for twenty-five years … prolifically, eloquently, elegantly … there is still no grammar, dictionary, or phonological description for any of these non-native norms that is, or could hope
170 Language Planning and Education to become, recognised as authoritative in India, a description to which teacher and learner in India could turn for normative guidance and from which pedagogical materials could be derived. (Quirk 1988: 235) Since Quirk penned these words, significant progress has been made towards developing authoritative descriptions of the New Englishes, not least through the establishment of an International Corpus of English (ICE). Nevertheless, as Bamgbose (1998: 12) says, there is work yet to be done, and codification therefore remains for him ‘the priority of the moment’. It needs, moreover, to encompass the implementation of various educational changes: the reform of textbooks, for example, so that they cease to stigmatise localised features as errors, reform in examinations and perhaps most important of all change in teacher education so that all teachers are sensitised to the difference between divergence and error. 6.4.2.6 Acceptability This leads us to a final factor of equal importance to codification – acceptability, which is, in turn, linked to attitudes and status. It is important because recognition of a new language, or a new standardising variety, depends, it is widely agreed (see Joseph 2004: 139), on both formal linguistic difference and acceptance of that difference as valid, as having status. Bamgbose (1998: 4) acknowledges as much when he remarks with respect to the New Englishes that ‘the acceptability factor is the ultimate test of admission of an innovation’. On the sociolinguistic plane, then, the existence of a New English is at least as much a matter of attitudes, belief and confidence as of linguistic difference. So, if a community of speakers chooses – for reasons of identity or whatever – to describe themselves as speakers, say, of Singapore English, and if they have the confidence to accept their way of using English as an appropriate model for themselves (see Davies 1999c), then these are good grounds for conceding the sociolinguistic reality of the indigenised variety. Whether the requisite level of acceptance and confidence is actually present in outer circle societies remains unclear, however. Certainly, many ELT teachers and applied linguists no longer regard every deviation from British or American norms as an error: they have moved on conceptually. But it is uncertain to what extent this is true of educated users outside the academic community. Are they prepared to describe themselves as speakers of a standardising Singapore, Indian or Nigerian English, or do native norms still retain, as Bamgbose (1998: 5) implies, a degree of attractiveness as benchmarks of what is taken to be competence in English? The evidence here is slender, of course, but what little there is does suggest a stubborn residual preference for British or American Standard English norms. Timmis (2002: 248), for example, on the basis of an attitude questionnaire drawing four hundred student responses from fourteen different countries, concludes that ‘there is still some desire among students to conform to native speaker norms, and this desire is not necessarily restricted to those students who use or anticipate using English primarily with native speakers’, admitting, though, that many of these
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