Transcript

SURESH

I think everybody starts any discussion on World Englishes from Kachru … He did important service to English language and speakers of this language by I think for the first time showing that English is not one language. It's a heterogeneous language. It's a composite of many varieties of English and I think more importantly he showed that there are other new varieties that are evolving which are also standardised and he made the case that other varieties like, you know, Sri Lankan English, Indian English have their own rules. They have a grammar. So it was important breakthrough in linguistics to show that other varieties of English should be accepted as legitimate. I think it is a classic distinction of ESL countries in the outer circle and EFL kind of usage in the expanding circle.

And he also used a couple of other terms. I think he called the inner circle as non-providing and, you know, the norms come from there and go out to other communities. The outer circle he called non-developing because you know they are developing their own standards. But the third circle, the expanding circle, he called nondependent because, you know, he assumed that they borrow their norms from the inner circle because they don’t have a history of usage in their own country.

But things have changed since then. We find that there are a lot more uses of the English language outside the inner circle, you know, people who use English as an additional language are more in number and also the currency of English, its usage is much more among multilinguals. They are the people who need this language. So people think that the native speakers have lost their clout, you know, have lost their say over this language because others are using it much more and they are more importantly for their purposes. A lot of people wonder whether the inner circle is the inner circle any more. It has lost its status as norm providing. Youth all over the world are using English for their identity.

And there are also some articles I read recently from both Mexico and Germany where people say, you know, we have a variety of our own. So it looks like these countries are not norm dependent. They are evolving norms of their own. So in a sense a lot of people now doubt this tripartite distinction even native speakerhood is being critiqued and there are others outside the traditional native speaker countries, the USA, England, etc., who are claiming English as one of their local languages and part of their repertoire.

Now to be proficient in English from the way I look at the global scene is a person with a repertoire, a person who can shuttle between different varieties but then we come across a very practical problem. You can't teach all these varieties to everybody. So what I find interesting is to change the kind of paradigm of teaching English as we always taught in terms of a target language or a target variety and we had a good understanding of where we want these students to go, towards which model. But now I think that we need a repertoire rather than just one target variety. I think a lot of teachers are wondering whether it's better to teach students to become learners of English or people who can decipher the different varieties that are – that they are engaging with and accommodate those varieties, negotiate those varieties to outsiders so that we are not now thinking of variety X, variety Y etc. But developing in students a language awareness so that they know how varieties work or develop a social linguistic sensitivity to why people speak differently and then they can negotiate with these speakers.

So I think two things are happening. One is people, I at least am thinking in terms of developing language awareness. On the other hand we can also teach students negotiation strategies. So I'm thinking of moving away from grammar to strategies. So what I find is these are very traditional sociolinguistic constructs which might come to use like speech accommodation theory, code switching, things which will help us show empathy and show solidarity with another person but at the same time understand, you know, what they are saying. So what I think is, a lot of people this looks like a difficult kind of pedagogy where it goes against a lot of things we’ve been doing in language classrooms.

But I think this comes very naturally to multilinguals because they negotiate different languages in their communities. So I think multilinguals come with a readiness to negotiate. It's very intuitive. It's developed through social practice, you know, in their own communities. But eventually I … language teachers should learn from communication outside. We have a lot of research also, you know, recorded interactions between multilinguals they negotiate each other’s difference and sometimes come up with a third option. They may not end up with a native speaker, lexical items or grammatical structures but they end up using English in their own way. They develop their own norms and they are able to succeed in the business transacted in that particular location. Part of the assumption that there is multilinguals develop an intersubjective norm, you know. As they talk they negotiate and then come up with a usage, a particular structure or a word that native speakers won't use but it was just OK for them.

So there are a lot of scholars who feel English as a lingua franca is being negotiated in more dynamic ways. People are developing new norms on the spot as they talk to each other. And we have to if we are preparing students for those kinds of communication. I guess the shift will be from expecting students to look for grammar rules and, you know, the product of language, you know, in our particular system to work it out as a process in how do you communicate in a situation like this in English and then reflect on it to see what did you do in order to be understood and to understand each other. But I would say that it's still, because we've not been doing this kind of teaching, there's a lot more to be done. It's important to not only have high stakes kind of encounters where students are evaluated and assessed all the time.

Safe houses I've used it in terms of an intercultural classroom where there are students from different communities, formed hidden communities, to resolve some of their problems and they would talk about issues that seemed to be off task but when you look at them carefully they are framing the discussion in a way that’s relevant to them, you know. They are bringing things from popular culture or from music or, you know, cinema. And what I found was this at one level looks like deviating from the expectations of the teacher but at another level this is framing the discussion in their own terms and it's equally valid. Students need spaces to play, not always to be judged. They need spaces to be creative, to make mistakes, to have fun.

So I think in those sites that people will negotiate much more freely whereas if they sense that the teacher is looking for correctness they're not going to be negotiating on equal terms to try to understand other people and to make themselves understood. I think a lot of these things might not make sense if we look at language teaching and language through the glasses of traditional linguistics. So I think a lot of people are coming to the idea of a native speaker and using native speaker varieties as the norm might have to be re-thought for all kinds of reasons. We don’t know who the native speaker is now. I guess all of us are multilinguals in a sense. For a lot of us it's difficult to identify one language as sole or main language compared to the others. But more importantly I think for multilinguals it's the idea of a native speaker norm is unfair and even irrelevant because they are using English with other multilinguals to negotiate transactions at their own level so they are not necessarily thinking of satisfying a native speaker who is not present on that occasion. So that will affect assessment and so many other things, teaching materials.

In one sense it was easy to construct all these things because we had one variety as the target and as the norm but now when we are thinking in terms of repertoires and people negotiating one on one at an equal level the native speaker idea, you know, would be a hindrance it would, you know, stifle all this creativity. So people are thinking of newer terms. I have actually used in the summer recent articles used a term called ‘poorly lingual English’ to distinguish it from World English. World English is still oriented towards stable varieties of English; something that is stabilised, used for a long time. But what we find is the way people negotiate English varieties all the time now, there are new words and grammatical structures which are emergent and they are not wrong in the sense for that occasion it works perfectly well for them. You shuttle in between those languages to use them for your needs. And English is one of them.

It's one of those languages and with English, people might mix their own varieties of local languages. So we are bringing into question terms like inter language, error, competence, you know. I think competence where we are beginning to understand it's not perfect competence in every language but a social competence to use the language appropriately for your needs and functions. I think also the connection language is a separate system as, you know, English is different from Tamil and Brazilian or Portuguese, etc. I think people are beginning to acknowledge that language is so much more fluid. They interact with each other. They form a repertoire where English is part of other languages. So there are kind of major shifts in human linguistics about how we think of language. People are thinking of language as much more mixed and so that – sometimes kind of very disturbing kind of implications for the field.