Elt in the Expanding Circle

ELT in the Expanding Circle and/or Outer Circle

The 2001 maven conference bore testimony to the growth of interest in EW L' over the past few decades.

In the years between ? The first major academic gathering on this subject, the seminal conference on cross-cultural communication held at the University of Illinois in 1978 (Kachru 1992), and MAVEN 2001, much has been written and spoken about the spread of English around the world, the diverse ways in which the language has developed in this process, especially in the Outer Circle,2 and about the wider implications of this unique socio- linguistic development. Crystal (2003) lists 75 territories in which English is currently spoken as either a) the principal or only L1, or b) as an L2 with official or institutionalized status (World Englishes). These range from Antigua to Zambia, spread across vast distances and exceptionally varied linguacultural contexts. Among these implications, the issue of the ownership of English and its passing from native to non-native speakers has received considerable comment. Graddol typically points out that ?native speakers may feel the language 'belongs' to them, but it will be those who speak English as a second or foreign language who will determine its world future? (1997: 10).

In this essay, we will pick up some of the ideas which have originated in the Outer Circle and investigate what their significance may be for the Expanding Circle of foreign language users - which is, indeed, expanding rapidly.

Varieties of English

The current situation of English globally has led to a blurring of the conventional categories:

ENL -- English as a 'native' language

ESL -- English as a second language

EFL -- English as a foreign language

Historically, EFL contexts have involved speakers learning the language in order to use it with its native speakers, the assumption being that English serves no purpose within their own countries (World Englishes).

The global spread of English has provoked a broad spectrum of responses over the last decade or so. For example, we find the following in a British Council conference prospectus: The incredible success of the English language is Britain's greatest asset. It enhances Britain's image as a modem, dynamic country and brings wide- spread political, economic and cultural advantages, both to Britain and to our partners. (the British Council, Conference prospectus, ELT conference 1998)

The front page of the Observer newspaper reveals that

This week the Government will announce that the number of people with English as a second language has overtaken the number who speak it as their native tongue. [...] Insiders say the drive to make English the global lingua franca comes directly from Tony Blair. (the Observer, 29 October 2000)

In this article, we also learn that [the then British Education and Employment Secretary] ?David Blunkett [...] will tell a meeting of business leaders on Tuesday to capitalize on their advantage as native speakers. The same native speaker 'advantage' enables materials based on the Cobuild Bank of English to ?help learners with real English? (front cover of the Collins COB UILD English Dictionary). At the other end of the spectrum, English is accused of being a ?killer language? guilty of ?linguistic genocide? (Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). With regard to language pedagogy, Swales (1997: 373) in an article entitled 'English as Tyrannosaurus rex' asks whether English has become too successful and argues that resistance to the 'triumphalism' of English is also a responsibility of EAP teachers, and Canagarajah 1999 details options for resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching.

However, the question which is not addressed in all these deliberations is what exactly the 'English' in EWL actually is. In this respect, different though they are in ideological perspective, the above quotations are all alike in failing to problematize the notion of the linguistic entity 'English'. The difference between the various perspectives is thus only a partial one: it does not reside in the way English is defined, but only in the way its global spread is viewed.

This can be illustrated in the following way:

CONCEPTUALIZATION of the LANGUAGE: English is English?

RESPONSE to ITS SPREAD: This is wonderful! This is appalling ?

British Council Skutnabb-Kangas COBUILD/Bank of English Swales etc. etc.

Despite all the (necessary and welcome) theorizing, one might be forgiven for saying that the state of the art in this area a ?hubbub without a hub, 3 for surprisingly little thought has so far gone into what certainly must be the extreme core of the matter: the life of the language itself as an international means of communique in the Expanding Circle, and in what respects English as a lingua franca (EL F) may differ from 'English as a native language' (ENL). ). In most Outer Circle contexts, of course, the long and vigorous struggle for the acknowledgement of their very own sociopolitical identities has been largely successful (Bamgeboe, Banjo & Thomas 1995, Kachru 1992, Smith & Forman 1997).

The naive notion of a monolithic, uniform, unadoptable linguistic medium owned by its original speakers and forever linked to their rule(s) has been recognized as simply contrary to the facts, and has therefore given way to the realization that indigenized varieties of English are legitimate English's in their own right, accordingly emancipating themselves vis-a-vis British and American Standard English. Codification has been recognized as a crucial prerequisite for the emergence of endonormative standards in indigenized varieties (Bamgeboe 1998), and important research programs are under way in order to provide language descriptions as a basis for dictionaries and grammars (Greenbaum 1996). Outer Circle linguistic independence has, on the whole, been given the linguistic seal of approval.

In the Expanding Circle, however, a totally different situation presents itself. In spite of the all-pervasive use of English all the way through what many like to be called the 'international community' and notwithstanding countless anecdotes about up-and-coming varieties such as 'Euro-English', professional linguists have up to now shown only limited interest in describing 'lingua franca' English as a legitimate language variety. The received wisdom appears to be that only when English is a majority first language or an official extra language does it merit explanation. So, while the Outer Circle has at long last successfully asserted its right to appropriate the language for the expression of its diverse cultures and identities, while postcolonial literatures flourish and language use by writers such as Achebe, Okara, Rushdie, Saro-Wiwa and many others constitutes a prolific area of research, Expanding Circle English is not thought of as worthy of such attention: users of English who have been taught the language as a foreign language are likely to conform to Inner Circle norms, albeit using English constitutes a significant part of their lived knowledge and personal uniqueness.

No right to 'rotten English' for them, in that case. Quite the opposite: for Expanding Circle consumption, the chief effort remains, as it has forever been, to explain English as it is used among its British and American native speakers and then to "allocate" (Widdowson 1997: 139) the resulting descriptions to those who speak English in non-native contexts around the world. This is probably why, when it comes to practicalities, those who have had so much to say at the theoretical level tend to fall silent. Alastair Pennycook, for example, in an article entitled ?Pedagogical implications of different frameworks for understanding the global spread of English, argues as follows: Drawing on notions of post colonialism and resistance, it [the postcolonial performative response] suggests that English can be appropriated and used for different ends. But it also suggests that such appropriation is not achieved without considerable struggle. Thus the postcolonial performative position is one that sees English language teaching as part of a battle over forms of culture and knowledge [...] an attempt to challenge central norms of language, culture and knowledge, and to seek ways of appropriating English to serve alternative ends. The challenge to develop contextual (i.e. location-specific) postcolonial pedagogies for English is, to my mind, one of the crucial challenges facing English language teachers today. (1999: 153; our emphasis) a language teacher in search of suggestions as to how to ?challenge central norms of language? within his or her classroom practice, however, would be sorely disappointed. Nothing of a practical nature is suggested in this article, despite its title and the fact that the challenge is presented in the article as ?crucial. In another area of activity, efforts are being made to 'empower' non-native speaker teachers through direct access to large corpora, as the authors of the BNC Handbook point out:

In language teaching increasing access to corpora may modify the traditional role of the teacher as authority about the use of the language to be learned, and reduce the sense of inferiority felt by many non-native speaker teachers. More generally, there is much to be said about the way in which thinking about language, particularly the English language, is politicized, and hence about the political implications of changing the basis on which assessments of correctness or appropriateness of usage are made. (Aston & Burnard 1998: 43, our emphasis) but again, the corpora that are being referred to contain only native-speaker English.

The confidence of non-native speaker teachers is expected to be strengthened by better, more direct, access to the way native speakers use the language. But an option not on offer so far (and, of course, a task impossible for a corpus called the British National Corpus) is to give these non-native speaker teachers access to a corpus capturing the successful use of English among non-native speakers, as a lingua franca, thus offering supremely relevant models for many learners wishing to use the language for similar purposes. So when Aston and Burnard refer to ?the political implications of changing the basis on which assessments of correctness or appropriateness of usage are made? what has changed about the "basis" is how it can be accessed, not how it is defined. There is also another problem that operates at a deeper and unrecognized level: the language attitudes of those who, paradoxically, are themselves re- commending the challenge to native-speaker norms. This is evident in the contradictory statements made by those such as van Els, who, in the same essay, claims on the one hand that the ownership of a lingua franca passes to its non-native speakers and on the other that the Dutch should not be satisfied about their English because ?simply very few are able to attain a level of proficiency that matches the native or native-like level? (2000: 29).

Similarly, Hoffman (2000: 19) calls the English of European learners as straddling ?the whole spectrum from non-fluent to native-like, as if fluency in English were not an option for those whose speech does not imitate that of a native speaker. In other words, non-native speakers own the English which they speak, but unless it conforms to native speaker norms, it is un- acceptable. English as a world language is to be judged as if it were English as a native language. No change there, then. The abstract nature of the proposals put forward by Pennycook (above), for example, has done little to allay the sense of insecurity and unease among English language teachers about what is for them the most critical issue: that of the language norm which they teach - the main basis of their professional qualification, the hub around which their daily practices revolve. Widespread politically correct rhetoric is no effective antidote for this unsatisfactory situation, and so the familiar chip-on-the-shoulder syndrome among non-native teachers of English persists.

In a paper which addresses topics of linguistic as well as literary interest, it seems apposite - though admittedly unconventional - to point out parallels between the writings of two well-known authors in language teacher education and postcolonial literature:

We suffer from an inferiority the effect of the cultural bomb is to complex caused by glaring defects annihilate a people's belief in their names, in our knowledge of English. We in their languages, in their environment, are in constant distress as we [...] in their capacities and ultimately in realize how little we know about themselves. It makes them see their past as the language we are supposed to one wasteland of non-achievement and it teach. makes them want to distance themselves (Medgyes 1999: 40, our em from that wasteland. It makes them want phases) to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other people's languages rather than their own. (Ngugi 1981: 3, our emphases)

In an essay whose main point is the renegotiation of the customary distinction between the Outer and Expanding Circles, it is interesting to note that Medgyes comes from the latter and Ngugi from the former. Both, however, share the assumption of the uniformity of English and seem to deny the inherent flexibility of the language, its adaptability to change: English is English. The distress expressed in Medgyes' book, whose objective, after all, is to foreground the particular strengths of non-native language teachers, indicates that (in Ngugi's words) these teachers' ?belief [...] in themselves? has been "annihilated," and we think it is not an exaggeration to say that the ?inferiority complex? ascribed to these teachers on the basis of the ?glaring defects? In their ?knowledge of English? causes them to ?see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement.

We would argue that what is most likely to arrest this negative spiral is not giving non-native teachers pep-talks about their linguistic human rights, nor access to ever-larger native-speaker corpora Rather, what is required is a reconceptualization and concomitant description of ?the language they are supposed to teach? In terms of what it predominantly is in the world at large, namely English as a lingua franca, not English as a native language (Seidlhofer 2001). As long as no empirically-based description exists of how English is actually used as a global lingua franca, the merely, hence obvious, descriptive reality accessible when speaking about 'English' is ENL.

In the remainder of this essay, we will therefore argue that it is necessary and feasible to conduct a conceptual and empirical enquiry into the actual nature of ELF. We will summarize relevant work already undertaken, offer suggestions for further enquiry and point to some socio-psychological and pedagogical implications. Of course, no empirical investigation starts from scratch; there are always preconceptions and predecessors. Notions of how characteristics of English as an international language may be captured and how the language may be modified or simplified have some history which it would be foolish to ignore. There are points of reference in the past which will help us in our enquiry: important work, along conceptual as well as empirical dimensions, directed at identifying salient features of EL F. use has already been achieved. A first tradition of research on track from the early decades of the twentieth century however is now all but forgotten: notably Ogden's Basic English (eg, 1930), Palmer & Hornby's Thousand Word English (1937) as well as West's s empirically derived Service List (1953).

These anticipate, and offer many profound insights into, many of the EWL issues that we are confronted with today.4 in addition, many theoretical and methodological problems discussed in reference to varieties captured in the ICE corpus are also highly relevant for the description of ELF (Mair 1992). In recent years, a small number of descriptions and analyses of selected aspects of ELF use have been conducted, in particular in the area of the (intercultural) pragmatics of 'non-native - non-native' communication in English (House 1999 and 2002). James (2000) offers a conceptually rich discussion of the place of English in bi/multilingualism, making allusion to a project, at present in its pilot phase, called ?English as a lingua franca in the Alpine-Adriatic district. He also outlines hypotheses as to what findings the future analysis of this use of English by speakers of German, Italian, Slovene and Friulian might yield. Last (but not least, we think) is our own work, focusing on ELF phonology (Jenkins 1998, 2000, 2002) and lexico-grammar (Seidlhofer 2000, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c).

The work on phonology, culminating in the 'Lingua Franca Core', takes as its starting-point the need for empirical data drawn from interactions between L2 speakers of English in order to assess which phonological features are (and which are not) essential for intelligible pronunciation when English is spoken in lingua franca contexts. This data, then, replaces NS intuition and data drawn from NS-NS (or NS-NNS) interactions, both of which up to now have formed the basis of pedagogic pronunciation decisions (Benrabah's 1997 study of word stress is one of very many such studies). If the concern is with intelligibility among NN Ss of English, which is by definition the case in ELF, however, it makes no sense whatsoever to look to non- EL F. contexts for evidence of such intelligibility.