Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

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