Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

174 Language Planning and Education
the choice of model is complicated by the fact that, unlike writing, there is no
international spoken standard English, nor even a definite consensus regarding the
boundaries of a putative British spoken Standard English. Some writers (e.g. Crystal
1999: 16) believe that in time a World Standard Spoken English (WSSE) may
emerge to stabilise global diversification in the spoken language, but there is no sign
of this yet, and no consensus either as to the form it will take, Bamgbose (1998: 12)
suggesting that it may be a composite not identical with any national variety and
Crystal (1999: 16) that it may be closer in form to American English.
Complicating the picture also is that we now know, thanks to the work of Biber
et al. (1999), Carter and McCarthy (1995), Leech (2000) and others, that the
lexicogrammar of spontaneous speech is somewhat different from that depicted in
grammars based on the written language. The sentence, for instance, is hardly
applicable as a unit of analysis, and normal spontaneous speech is characterised by
‘normal disfluencies’, frequent stand-alone clauses and phrases – many verbless –
and constructions specific to speech (e.g. ‘heads’ and ‘tails’) that barely qualify as
grammatical by the standards of grammars oriented to the written language.
Faced with this complexity, the most realistic course of action once again may be
to accept the local acrolect, not the more colloquial basilect, as the most appropriate
model for the teaching of the spoken language. This, after all, will be closest in form
to the speech of local teachers. At the same time, however, consideration will need to
be given to the circumstances and specific purposes of different learners: for many
the acrolect will be appropriate and acceptable, but some may wish to be taught what
is taken to be British spoken standard English. As ever, acceptability is a significant
constraint on pedagogic innovation.
As for the receptive skills, finally, it is highly likely that over their lifetime students
will encounter English spoken in a variety of forms and accents, and it will be useful
therefore, in teaching listening, to expose students to the diversity of accents and
grammatical features found in spoken English worldwide, in the inner as well as the
outer and expanding circles.
6.4.3.2 Teacher education
None of these tentative prescriptions could be implemented, however, without some
reform of language teacher education. Most useful, specifically, would be a curricular
component aimed at raising awareness of features of the New Englishes and alerting
teachers to the sociolinguistic complexities of English use worldwide. Such a
programme would, one hopes, replace absolutist conceptions of what is proper and
correct in language with greater flexibility and principled pragmatism regarding
norms and models, yielding more sensitive pedagogic responses to the diversity
within English in a world where, as envisaged by Crystal (1999: 16), educated
individuals may in future need a multidialectal capacity to switch, as appropriate,
between three spoken dialects: a local colloquial variety functioning as a marker
of local identity (e.g. Singlish), a (future) standard national variety (e.g. educated
Singapore English), and a (future) international standard spoken English (WSSE).