The Routledge Handbook of English Language Teaching

Graham Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317384465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of English Language Teaching is the definitive reference volume for postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students of Applied Linguistics, ELT/TESOL, and Language Teacher Education, and for ELT professionals engaged in in-service teacher development and/or undertaking academic study.

Progressing from 'broader' contextual issues to a 'narrower' focus on classrooms and classroom discourse, the volume's inter-related themes focus on:

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• ELT in the world: contexts and goals

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• planning and organising ELT: curriculum, resources and settings

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• methods and methodology: perspectives and practices

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• second language learning and learners

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• teaching language: knowledge, skills and pedagogy

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• understanding the language classroom.

The Handbook's 39 chapters are written by leading figures in ELT from around the world. Mindful of the diverse pedagogical, institutional and social contexts for ELT, they convincingly present the key issues, areas of debate and dispute, and likely future developments in ELT from an applied linguistics perspective.

Throughout the volume, readers are encouraged to develop their own thinking and practice in contextually appropriate ways, assisted by discussion questions and suggestions for further reading that accompany every chapter.

Advisory board: Guy Cook, Diane Larsen-Freeman, Amy Tsui, and Steve Walsh

Part I

ELT in the world

Contexts and goals

1
World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca

A changing context for ELT

Philip Seargeant

Introduction: Englishes around the world

English in the world today is a language which has an unprecedented global spread, is marked by its diversity and variety, and plays a fundamental role in the lives of millions of people in countries all around the globe. This chapter gives an overview of the current state and status of the language, and considers the implications that its global standing has for ELT theory and practice. It looks at how two notable paradigms – World Englishes studies and English as a Lingua Franca – have been instrumental in theorising the nature of English in the modern world and in refocusing debates about how the language is perceived by those responsible for its regulation in terms of planning, policy and education. The chapter reviews the development and aims of these two paradigms and explores the implications that an understanding of the diversity and variety of the language has for ELT practices.

Let us begin looking at what it means for English to be a ‘global’ language by considering the question of how many people speak English in the world today. It is a challenging task to calculate with any degree of accuracy the number of English speakers globally, but the processes involved in making these calculations illuminate a number of key issues about the language as it exists today and thus offer a good starting point for our wider discussion. There are two main difficulties in estimating the total number of current English speakers globally. The first of these is a practical issue: no purposefully designed data-gathering procedures exist for recording the use of languages around the world. As such, figures need to be deduced and pieced together from various different sources, and this inevitably results in a wide margin of error for any total one puts together.

The second problem is a more theoretical one and involves issues which have direct relevance to ELT. The difficulty here concerns decisions about precisely whom one includes in the figures. If we wish to calculate the total number of English speakers in the world, we obviously need a stable idea of what counts as an ‘English speaker’. And although at first glance the answer to this may seem self-evident, once we begin to take into account the great variety of ways in which people use and engage with English around the world, it soon becomes apparent that it is actually a rather complex issue. We need to decide, for example, what level of proficiency is necessary to qualify as a speaker of the language. Will everyday conversational ability (which is in itself difficult to define) do, or should the threshold for competence be set at a higher level? Then there is the question of what range of varieties should be included within the broad concept of ‘English’. Should we include English-based pidgins, for example, or ‘mixed’ varieties such as Singlish? With English being spoken in communities stretching all around the globe, diversity of both form and function – how the language looks and sounds, and how it is used – is a fundamental element of its modern-day identity. But this diversity makes it increasingly difficult to define ‘English’ and ‘English speakers’ in a simple or straightforward way.

Despite these difficulties, there has been much work done on compiling statistics about the number of people who speak English in the world today, and, as we shall discuss below, the nature of these statistics – and the theoretical issues that are involved in the criteria upon which they are based – have important implications for the teaching of the language. In effect, they provide the broad context in which the teaching and learning of the language takes place, and as such they are a good place to begin when thinking about how English’s global status might influence ELT.

David Crystal has estimated that, by the first decade of the twenty-first century, there were somewhere between 400 and 500 million first language speakers of English in the world (Crystal, 2012). This figure is arrived at by combining the numbers of first language users in all the English-dominant countries such as the UK, USA and Australia (while being mindful of the caveat that, in all these countries, large proportions of the population do not have English as their mother tongue, and that several of the countries are officially bi- or multilingual, such as South Africa) and adding to this estimates of people living elsewhere around the world who have English as a native language. (The concept of the ‘native speaker’ is a complicated and, at times, contentious one. I am using it here in its ‘common-sense’ frame of reference, while at the same time noting the complexities around its use. A full discussion of these can be found in Llurda, this volume.) The rough figures for the main English-dominant countries are as follows:

United States of America	approximately 250 million
United Kingdom	approx. 60m
Canada	approx. 24m
Australia and New Zealand	approx. 20m
The Caribbean	approx. 5m
Ireland	approx. 3.7m
South Africa	approx. 3.6m

This figure for native speakers is, however, only a part of the overall picture. In addition, there are approximately 60 countries (for example India, Nigeria and Singapore) where English is used as a second or additional language. In these societies, English has an official status alongside local languages and is often used as the primary means of communication in domains such as education, the law and bureaucracy. It has been estimated that only around 20 per cent to 30 per cent of the population in countries such as these are likely to speak the language, as use is predominantly clustered around urban areas and limited to white-collar workers (Mufwene, 2010). However, given the size of the population of some of these countries and the number of regions in which it is used, the total figure for speakers of English as a second or additional language around the world is in the vicinity of 600 million (Schneider, 2011).

A third and final category that can be included in the overall figures is those to whom English is taught/has been learnt as the primary foreign language: people who are or have engaged in formal education of the language for a number of years. This accounts for speakers in over another hundred countries (McArthur, 1998), further extending the reach of the language. By adding these three groups of speakers together, the total that Crystal arrives at is somewhere between one and a half and two billion people. In other words, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the world’s current population currently speak English to some level of proficiency.

There are a number of interesting implications to note from these figures, even when we take into account the lack of precision in the overall total. The first point to make is that, although English is not the language with the most native speakers in the world – Chinese overshadows it in this respect with over 1.2 billion native speakers, while Spanish is also a close rival with around 414 million first language speakers (Ethnologue, 2014) – when one adds those who speak it as a second or additional language within their communities and those who use it as a foreign or international language, English emerges as very much the pre-eminent global language of the modern era. And, as the summary of figures above reveals, a significantly larger proportion of English users – a ratio of around four to one, in fact – are now non-native rather than native speakers. In other words, the majority of people around the world who speak English – and who use it as a fundamental resource in their daily lives – have learnt it as an additional or foreign language. ELT, therefore, has played a very significant part in the spread and current role of the language around the world.

A further important point of note, however, is that over two-thirds of the world’s population do not speak English. Thus, although it can be described as the pre-eminent global language in today’s world, when compared to other languages, it is not by any means a universal resource, and a majority of the global population do not speak it. Yet, given the range of functions and the nature of the domains in which it is used (e.g. its status as the language of global business, its role in the global knowledge economy, etc.), it nevertheless often still plays some role in the lives of those who do not have any practical knowledge of it and is a significant part of the environment in which they live. For example, such is the nature of contemporary global commerce that a farmer in rural Bangladesh may well need to find ways to decode the instructions on the pesticides he (and it usually is ‘he’) uses on his crops as these are printed in English, even if the language has little other existence in his life (Erling et al., 2012). In contexts such as this, therefore, access to English language education is often desirable or in some cases necessary, although such provision is often not provided or sufficiently resourced (for a critical perspective on the access or barriers to material benefits created by the spread of English, see Pennycook, this volume).

Theoretical paradigms: a multiplex of Englishes

World Englishes

The current status of English around the world, as well as the different ways it is used and exists in different societies, is a product of the language’s global spread. The extent of this spread has meant that, since the 1980s, there has been a trend within scholarship to talk of it in the plural form. English in the world today is not a single entity; it is multiplex, with different forms, different identities and different histories. In the words of Braj Kachru, one of the pioneering scholars in this field, “The result of [its] spread is that, formally and functionally, English now has multicultural identities. The term ‘English’ does not capture this sociolinguistic reality; the term ‘Englishes’ does” (Kachru, 1992: 357).

The Three Circles of English

To highlight the multiplexity of the language, and the sociolinguistic profiles of these many ‘world Englishes’, Kachru (1992: 356–357) devised what has become a very influential descriptive model. Known as the Three Circles of English, this focuses upon a number of key issues responsible for the ways in which English is now used in particular countries. It views the language in terms of three concentric circles, each of which is composed of countries whose use of English is a product of the history of its spread, the patterns of acquisition in that country, and the ways it is used. In other words, he highlights the following three issues which he sees as fundamental for the identity the language has in different parts of the world:

• the historical process that has resulted in English occupying its current position in a particular country;
• how members of that country usually come to acquire the language (e.g. as a first language learnt from birth, as an additional language learnt via formal education later in life);
• the purposes or functions to which the language is put in that country.

Using these issues, he divides the world up into three broad groups which he terms the Inner, Outer and Expanding Circles.

The Inner Circle comprises those countries where English is the mother tongue for the great majority of the population and where it is used as the default language for most domains of society. Along with the UK, this includes countries such as the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand – i.e. those which were colonised by the British and where English displaced indigenous languages. Kachru (1992: 356–357) refers to these as “norm-providing” in that the type of English that is spoken by their populations has generally acted as the model for the English taught and learnt elsewhere in the world. That is to say, when people learn English in, for example, Japan, there has been a tradition of using standard American or standard British English as the model. American and British Englishes have been seen as the standards to which to aspire and viewed as ‘authentic’ forms of the language.

The second grouping is known as the Outer Circle, and this again comprises countries where English’s current status is the product of a colonial history. The difference here, though, is that in these countries English did not displace indigenous languages but came to be used alongside them, often fulfilling specific functions in various institutional domains. English is therefore predominantly an additional language in this circle, used in contexts such as bureaucracy and education. In 1992, Kachru referred to these countries as “norm-developing” in that the varieties of English spoken here have their “own local histories, literary traditions, pragmatic contexts, and communicative norms” (1992: 359), and have thus become indigenised to a significant degree. They do not, however, have the same status as the Inner Circle varieties (they are occasionally known as ‘new Englishes’) and have thus not normally been used as teaching models in EFL contexts. Countries in this circle include places such as India, Kenya and Singapore.

The final grouping is what Kachru calls the Expanding Circle. This, in effect, comprises the rest of the world, i.e. countries in which English has been predominantly taught as a foreign language. The spread of English here is not tied specifically to a history of colonisation but is the result of other factors, predominant amongst which are processes of globalisation. Historically, these countries have been “norm-dependent”; these are the countries which have followed an Inner Circle standard English as their model. They can be categorised as English as a Foreign Language (EFL) countries in that the education system has, at least traditionally, assumed that English is taught for purposes such as foreign travel and engagement with foreign literature – although in recent years this has been added to by the notion of English for international communication in domains such as business. Countries in this circle include China, Japan and most of the countries of Europe.

Strengths and critiques of the Three Circles model

On...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction: English language teaching in the contemporary world
• Part I ELT in the world: contexts and goals
• Part II Planning and organising ELT: curriculum, resources and settings
• Part III Methods and methodology: perspectives and practices
• Part IV Second language learning and learners
• Part V Teaching language: knowledge, skills and pedagogy
• Part VI Focus on the language classroom
• Index