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it would work against your interests to do so, but you can seek to
preserve standards by implying that there is an exclusive quality in
your own brand of English, aptly called standard English. What is this
quality, then? What are these standards?
The usual answer is: quality of clear communication and standards
of intelligibility. With standard English, it is argued, these are assured.
If the language disperses into different forms, a myriad of Englishes,
then it ceases to serve as a means of international communication; in
which case the point of learning it largely disappears. As the language
spreads, there are bound to be changes out on the periphery; so much
can be conceded. But these changes must be seen not only as peripheral
but as radial also and traceableback to the stable centre of the standard.
If this centre does not hold, things fall apart, mere anarchy is loosed
upon the world. Back to Babel.
In itself, this argument sounds plausible and it is difficult to refute.
But for all that, there is something about it which is suspect. Let us
replay it again. Standard English promotes the cause of international
communication, so we must maintain the central stability of the standard as the common linguistic frame of reference.
To begin with, who are we? Obviously the promoters of standard
English must themselves have standard English at their disposal. But
to maintain it is another matter. This presupposes authority. And this
authority is claimed by those who possess the language by primogeniture and due of birth, as Shakespeare puts it. In other words, the
native speakers. They do not have to be English, of course, that would
be too restrictive a condition, and one it would (to say the least) be
tactless to propose especially in present company, but they have to be
to the language born. Not all native speakers, you understand. In fact,
come to think of it, not most native speakers, for the majority of those
who are to the language born speak nonstandard English and have
themselves to be instructed in the standard at school. We cannot have
any Tom, Jane, and Harry claiming authority, for Tom, Jane, and
Harry are likely to be speakers of some dialect or other. So the authority
to maintain the standard language is not consequent on a natural
native-speaker endowment. It is claimed by a minority of people who
have the power to impose it. The custodians of standard English are
self-elected members of a rather exclusive club.
Now it is important to be clear that in saying this I am not arguing
against standard English. You can accept the argument for language
maintenance, as indeed I do, without accepting the authority that
claims the right to maintain it. It is, I think, very generally assumed
that a particular subset of educated native speakers in England, or
New England, or wherever, have the natural entitlement to custody
of the language, that the preservation of its integrity is in their hands:
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communion with its ancestralhome but altered to suit its new African
surroundings.(p. 62)
Achebe is a novelist, and he is talking here about creative writing. But
what he says clearly has wider relevance and applies to varieties of
English in this country and elsewhere. The point is that all uses of
language are creative in the sense that they draw on linguistic resources
to express different perceptions of reality. English is called upon to
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are therefore likely to have greater influence on stabilizing the language than the pronouncements of native speakers.
The essential point is that a standard English, like other varieties
of language, develops endo-normatively, by a continuing process of
self-regulation, as appropriate to different conditions of use. It is not
fixed by exo-normative fiat from outside: not fixed, therefore, by native
speakers. They have no special say in the matter, in spite of their
claims to ownership of real English as associated with their own particular cultural contexts of use.
And yet there is no doubt that native speakers of English are deferred to in our profession. What they say is invested with both authenticity and authority. The two are closely related, and a consideration
of their relationship brings us to certain central issues in language
pedagogy. An example follows.
Over recent years, we have heard persuasive voices insisting that
the English presented in the classroom should be authentic, naturally
occurring language, not produced for instructional purposes. Generally, what this means, of course, is language naturally occurring as
communication in native-speaker contexts of use, or rather those selected contexts where standard English is the norm: real newspaper
reports, for example, real magazine articles, real advertisements, cooking recipes, horoscopes, and what have you. Now the obvious point
about this naturally occurring language is that, inevitably, it is recipient
designed and so culturally loaded. It follows that access to its meaning
is limited to those insiders who share its cultural presuppositions and
a sense of its idiomatic nuance. Those who do not, the outsiders,
cannot ratify its authenticity. In other words, the language is only
authentic in the original conditions of its use, it cannot be in the
classroom. The authenticity is nontransferable. And to the extent that
students cannot therefore engage with the language, they cannot make
it their own. It may be real language, but it is not real to them. It does
not relate to their world but to a remote one they have to find out
about by consulting a dictionary of culture. It may be that eventually
students will wish to acquire the cultural knowledge and the idiomatic
fluency which enable them to engage authentically with the language
use of a particular native-speaking community by adopting their identity in some degree, but there seems no sensible reason for insisting
on them trying to do this in the process of language learning. On the
contrary, it would seem that language for learning does need to be
specially designed for pedagogic purposes so that it can be made real
in the context of the students' own world.
The importance of getting students engaged with the language,
cognitively, affectively, personally, is widely accepted as established
wisdom. Let the learners be autonomous (at least up to a point), allow
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them to make the language their own, let them identify with it, let not
the teacher impose authority upon them in the form of an alien pattern
of behaviour. Very well. But this injunction is totally at variance with
the insistence on authentic language, which is an imposition of another
authority, namely that of native-speaker patterns of cultural behaviour. If natural language learning depends on asserting some ownership over the language, this cannot be promoted by means of language
which is authentic only because it belongs to somebody else and expresses somebody else's identity. A pedagogy which combines authenticity of use with autonomy of learning is a contradiction. You cannot
have it both ways.
The notion of authenticity, then, privileges native-speaker use (inappropriately, I have argued) as the proper language for learning. But
it also, of course, privileges the native-speaker teachers of the language. For they, of course, have acquired the language and culture as
an integrated experience and have a feel for its nuances and idiomatic
identity which the nonnative speaker cannot claim to have. Indeed,
native speakers alone can be the arbiters of what is authentic since
authenticity can only be determined by insiders. So if you give authenticity primacy as a pedagogic principle, you inevitably grant privileged
status to native-speaker teachers, and you defer to them not only in
respect to competence in the language but also in respect to competence
in language teaching. They become the custodians and arbiters not
only of proper English but of proper pedagogy as well.
But what if you shift the emphasis away from contexts of use to
contexts of learning, and consider how the language is to be specially
designed to engage the student's reality and activate the learning process? The special advantage of native-speaker teachers disappears.
Now, on the contrary, it is nonnative-speaker teachers who come into
their own. For the context of learning, contrived within the classroom
setting, has to be informed in some degree by the attitudes, beliefs,
values and so on of the students' cultural world. And in respect to this
world, of course, it is the native-speaker teacher who is the outsider.
To the extent that the design of instruction depends on a familiarity
with the student reality which English is to engage with, or on the
particular sociocultural situations in which teaching and learning take
place, then nonnative teachers have a clear and, indeed, decisive advantage.
In short, the native-speaker teacher is in a better position to know
what is appropriate in contexts of language use, and so to define
possible target objectives. Granted. But it is the nonnative-speaker
teacher who is in a better position to know what is appropriate in the
contexts of language learning which need to be set up to achieve such
objectives. And that, generally speaking, is not granted. Instead what
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REFERENCES
Achebe, C. (1975). The African writer and the English language. In Morningyet
on creationday.London: Heinemann.
* I read with interest Ann Johns's article (Vol. 27, No. 1) about giving
ESL/EFL students real writing experiences writing for real audiences.
Although Johns raises some important points about audience analysis
in grant writing situations, I have some strong reservations about the
applicability of her conclusions for general ESL/EFLwriting methodology.
Johns begins with the claim that most ESL/EFL courses "often do
not take a variety of audiences and their expectations into consideration" (p. 76). After criticizing the teaching of general principles of
composition, she then recommends teaching students how to handle
a variety of task-and-community-specific
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