Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

New Englishes and teaching models 173
eradication but of repertoire expansion.
A second qualification concerns lexis, which – as we have seen – is less strongly
standardised than grammar, if at all (Trudgill 1999: 17), and more open than other
areas to innovations introduced by speakers grappling with new communicative
demands. There is also obvious variation between standard varieties, between British
and American English for example, and if this is so, and if we allow innovation in
native speaker lexis, then we cannot but concede the same licence to creativity to
users of English in the outer circle. Pedagogically, this implies accepting novel
collocations, semantic extensions and restrictions and coinage of new words for what
they are – the inevitable consequence of the transplantation of English to new
communicative settings and its appropriation by new users.
That said, the lexical objectives of teaching will need – as ever – to be tailored to
the specific needs of the learners. Those wishing to use English as an international
lingua franca in science, academia or business will need reminding that not all the
items they use will have an international currency. But the same is true, of course, of
British native speakers, whose ‘unilateral idiomaticity’ (Seidlhofer 2002a: 211), the
use that is of idioms and metaphors specific to Britain or other inner circle countries,
is one of the more regular causes of misunderstandings in lingua franca communication.
The third and final qualification is that the written standard itself is not immune
to change. It is possible, for instance, though perhaps unlikely, that a colloquial
subvariety of Indian, Singaporean or Nigerian English, once codified, might garner
sufficient political support and general acceptance to be introduced as a pedagogical
model, and if this were to happen, it would, as Widdowson (2003: 43) puts it, be ‘no
business … of native speakers in England, the United States, or anywhere else’.
Turning now to speaking, we find a very different situation compared with
writing, the most obvious differences being that that there is no standard pronunciation
of English and a good deal of regional phonological variation even among
those claiming to speak a metropolitan version of standard English. Accent, too,
along with vocabulary is one of the more distinctive markers of local, regional or
national identities, to the extent that a markedly British or American accent issuing
from an outer circle speaker will typically be regarded as signifying affectation rather
than high proficiency.
All this, in combination with the tendency to more frequent use of the language
with fellow members of the speech community than with inner circle native
speakers, suggests that it is no longer appropriate to seek to ‘instil L1 pronunciation
norms into learners who are rarely likely to communicate with an L1 (especially a
RP) speaker of English’ (Jenkins 2000: 11). The preferable course may be either to
teach to norms that provide for international intelligibility (e.g. Jenkins’s ‘Lingua
Franca Core’) or to accept the local educated variety, the acrolect, as a suitable
pronunciation model. The latter is in fact more likely because, as Gupta (1999: 70)
observes, the accent learners will actually acquire, through a process of ‘catching’
rather than learning, is the one they are most exposed to.
For aspects of speaking other than pronunciation – lexicogrammar for instance –