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New Englishes and teaching models 171 respondents may not be sensitised to the sociolinguistic issues involved in the debate over the appropriacy of British or American norms. Wright (2004: 176) reports, meanwhile, that European teacher participants at the 2002 Paris TESOL conference displayed a strong attachment to the British Standard English model. If public attitudes are difficult to determine, there is less uncertainty regarding the stance at the highest levels of government, this tending toward the negative. In Singapore, for instance, the former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew has expressed concern at the popularisation of Singlish in television sitcoms, arguing that prolonged exposure to this colloquial variety might adversely affect school pupils’ acquisition of standard English. In the extract below from a speech reported in the (Singapore) Sunday Herald he spells out the disadvantages of Singlish and the advantages of what he refers to as ‘Standard English’. The context makes clear that in referring to Standard English he has an exonormative rather than endonormative standard in mind. We are learning English so that we can understand the world and the world can understand us. It is therefore important to speak and write Standard English. The more the media makes Singlish socially acceptable by popularising it in TV shows, the more we make people believe that they can get by with Singlish. This will be a disadvantage to the less educated half of the population. (Source: Sunday Herald 30 January 2000) In India, too, similar sentiments have been expressed. Quirk (1988: 236), for example, reports a conversation with Indira Gandhi, the late Indian prime minister, in which she expressed horror ‘at the idea of India establishing its own standard’. There is little current evidence, 9 then, of any great enthusiasm in leading political circles for the establishment of an endonormative Standard Indian or Standard Singapore English. And this has significant pedagogical import, for while the conservative views expressed may be sociolinguistically naïve, high-level political endorsement is surely necessary if a local variety, however sociolinguistically valid, is to find adoption as a teaching model. But even if a standard Indian English, say, were to be codified and authoritatively disseminated as a pedagogical model, it is not inevitable that it would everywhere supplant a British English model. Prestige based on social factors is stubborn and recalcitrant to top-down planning, and so it is not impossible that some Indians at least might seek out institutions advertising themselves as adhering to British standard English and as teaching to British pronunciation norms. And, in these circumstances, it is not impossible to imagine a new hierarchy emerging, related perhaps to class, where British English was taught in private schools and Indian English in state schools (see Sypher 2000). 6.4.3 Teaching models and the New Englishes: some pedagogic conclusions The remarks above may appear to suggest that it would be easier for the time being to stick with a British or American standard English model. This would not, one
172 Language Planning and Education suspects, be entirely displeasing to many ELT teachers worldwide, who tend (see Timmis 2002) to be rather conservative in matters of norms for reasons that are not too difficult to understand. First, they have to face the daily practical realities of using textbooks and tests that more often than not remain based on standard British or American English. Second, they are duty-bound to equip students with the skills and knowledge needed to prosper in the world beyond the school, and this constrains them to teach a language variety that is accepted and prestigious in society at large. Third, and perhaps most fundamentally, they – and many others besides – remain wedded to the notion that native-like competence is the ultimate benchmark of learning achievement (Timmis 2002: 243). However, to argue for a blanket acceptance of British or American norms would be unjustifiable and unsustainable. As we have seen – reviewing Kachru (1992a), Jenkins (2000) and others – shifts in the demographics and sociolinguistics of English use worldwide render anachronistic any continued insistence on the idealised native speaker as the ultimate source of authoritative norms. The fact is New Englishes have emerged that are systematic in their own right, and they are institutionalised in communities that have reshaped the language as they have taken ownership of it, incorporating English-using into their identities. What is needed, then, is a more nuanced position, one that attempts to reconcile, if this is possible, the complex sociolinguistic realities of variation and change with the need for pedagogical clarity, and the demands of international intelligibility with the pull of local identities. 6.4.3.1 Writing and speaking compared A starting point might be to recognise that the substantial differences between writing and speaking call for different models depending on whether the teaching focus is on speech or writing. We have already argued that the standard is most clearly realised in the grammar of the written language and that, while there are different versions of the standard, there is in fact little variation between these relative to the full range of grammatical constructions in the language (Huddleston and Pullum 2002: 5). Indeed, Crystal (1999: 16) claims there is already an embryonic de facto World Standard Print English (WSPE), a variety that admits only minor regional differences. It may be sensible, therefore, in the case of writing to teach to the model of written grammar codified and available in, say, the Huddleston and Pullum (2002) grammar, especially as this is the literate, written variety that gives access to higher education, international business and science. Qualifications and caveats are necessary, however, first of all concerning the divergent grammatical features of colloquial subvarieties of the New Englishes – the levelling of the mass/count distinction, innovation in preposition usage and variant verb complementation, for example – all of which could profitably be reconceptualised not as errors but as non-standard dialectal features, and on a par therefore with Tyneside English, say, compared to standard British English. Pedagogically, this would imply a more generous treatment of such features, a policy not of error
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