Investigating English Discourse

Language, Literacy, Literature

Ronald Carter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134769759
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In this challenging and at times controversial book, Ronald Carter addresses the discourse of 'English' as a subject of teaching and learning.
Among the key topics investigated are:
* grammar
* correctness and standard English
* critical language awareness and literacy
* language and creativity
* the methodological integration of language and literature in the curriculum
* discourse theory and textual interpretation.
Investigating English Discourse is a collection of revised, re-edited and newly written papers which contain extensive contrastive analyses of different styles of international English. These range from casual conversation to advertisement, poetry, jokes, metaphor, stories by canonical writers, public notices and children's writing. Ronald Carter highlights key issues for the study and teaching of 'English' for the year 2000 and beyond, focusing in particular on its political and ideological inflections.
Investigating English Discourse is of relevance to teachers and students and researchers in the fields of discourse analysis, English as a first, second and foreign language, language and education, applied and literary linguistics.

Part I

LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE AND ‘ENGLISH’

1

PROPER ENGLISH: LANGUAGE, CULTURE AND CURRICULUM

Every time the question of the language surfaces, in one way or another, it means that a series of other problems are coming to the fore: the formation and enlargement of the governing class, the need to establish more intimate and secure relationships between the governing groups and the national-popular mass, in other words to reorganise the cultural hegemony.

(Gramsci, 1985: 183–4)

Let me begin by drawing your attention to some words. When and where have you heard them? When did you first hear them? How long ago?

enterprise zone/initiative	insider-dealing
fax	compassion fatigue
interface	golden hello
theme park	brat pack
street cred	loony left
wets	heritage business
handbagging	polyunsaturates
on yer bike	lean cuisine
wicked	comic relief
brill	bad
ECU	North South Divide
militant tendency	‘quality time’
ozone-friendly	niche marketing
Reaganomics	‘care in the community’
greenhouse effect	community service
flexible friend	community charge

These words, as I'm sure you will have inferred, are eighties words. They are eighties words because they did not appear in British English, at least with the meanings accrued during that decade, before the 1980s. They are also eighties words in that they have been made to fill particular semantic spaces which had not previously been occupied or for which previously there had been no semantic need. These eighties words thus reflect particular preoccupations of the decade with health foods, with the environment, with credit, with anti-egalitarianism and, above all, with accountancy and economics.

I have already noted a few words in the first years of this decade, some of them recycled from previous decades, which are strong candidates for inclusion in a lexicon of the 1990s. One term is ‘ethnic cleansing’ (‘killing people of a different race, or creed’); others are ‘friendly fire’ (used to describe accidentally killing people on your own side) and ‘efficiency gains’, generally used to describe reductions in staffing. An ‘efficiency gain’ is a particularly clever nineties collocation. It accentuates the positive by a simultaneous removal of the negative associations of the seventies and 1980s word ‘cuts’. Finally, the word ‘community’ is changing before our very eyes in the eighties and 1990s. From a basic sixties and seventies meaning which referred to an organic social group, to the eighties meaning wrested from the left wing by the right wing and established as referring to the approved practices of the state (community service; care in the community), the word now appears to be undergoing a reversal of this meaning, prompted no doubt by the cancellation of local taxes, somewhat inappropriately named the ‘community’ charge.

This lexical exercise has an underlying serious purpose. It is to stress two very basic points which will form the main recurring refrain for this chapter. The first is that language is subject to constant change. It is dynamic, not static. New words evolve for new contexts. Old words, no longer needed, simply die, are replaced or acquire modified meanings. My second point is that language simultaneously reflects and encodes social and cultural patterns. Words may be chosen which openly reveal shifts in the cultural order, or they may be chosen, like ‘efficiency gain’ or ‘community charge’, subtly to conceal those same changes. But the tight, indeed mutually reinforcing relationship between language and society remains.

Words always move into semantic spaces left vacant or created by shifts in ideology and in cultural practices. It can therefore be no surprise, in a society whose discourses are impregnated with the semantics of monetarist economics, that even the language of the curriculum reflects the language of the dominant culture. For example, the accountancy metaphors we now live by reveal the underlying ideology that learning has to be more measurable, that teachers, lecturers, schools and universities should compete in a market to produce an annual output, that the output satisfies (possibly at a given percentile level) externally controlled tests and that league tables of performance indicators can then be drawn up, rather in the manner of an annual balance sheet, with its clear accounts of profit and loss. I cannot help but point out the close association of ‘language, culture and curriculum’: the subtitle of this chapter.

During the past few years a number of linguists and English language specialists have found themselves at the centre of cultural debates about the English language, its teaching, and its formation as a subject in the new National Curriculum. It has been a fascinating if somewhat enervating exercise. The enervation comes from having been overruled in arguments for the view of language variation I have just espoused. The fascination comes from interrogating and attempting to understand better the ways in which the very terms of debate are rooted in ideologies, in the relationship between language and power and, in particular, in the different understandings of what is the proper in ‘Proper English’. This will provide the main focus. I will not be talking about the rights and wrongs of split infinitives or subject-verb agreement, but rather about the attitudes to such matters which the discourses about them reveal.

There are many keywords which are central to these debates and discourses. The following statement by the British heir to the throne, Prince Charles, much cited and commented on by press, media and government ministers, is a useful starting point. The statement was made in 1989, one week after the publication of the Cox Report (DES, 1989), the report of the government-established working party set up to devise an English curriculum within the context of National Curriculum requirements:

We've got to produce people who can write proper English. It's a fundamental problem. All the people I have in my office, they can't speak English properly, they can't write English properly. All the letters sent from my office I have to correct myself, and that is because English is taught so bloody badly. If we want people who write good English and write plays for the future, it cannot be done with the present system and all the nonsense academics come up with. It is a fundamental problem. We must educate for character. This matters a great deal. The whole way schools are operating is not right. I do not believe English is being taught properly. You cannot educate people properly unless you do it on a basic framework and drilling system.

(Prince Charles, 28 June 1989)¹

Prince Charles makes an equation here between proper English and playwrights, which he has elaborated in subsequent pleas for the centrality of Shakespeare to the curriculum – a national poet for a national curriculum. In a subsequent speech on the degeneracy of the modern English language, particularly in relation to The Book of Common Prayer, he has also argued with great conviction and an almost impeccable logic that God speaks English. That should not detain us here, for even I don't regard the study of the English language as a religion, except that we should record the close connection perceived by almost all linguistic conservatives between order in language and a proper sense of spiritual and religious order.

Two especially key words used by Prince Charles in this quotation here are proper and drill. They are words which appear repeatedly in pronouncements about the English curriculum of the 1990s proposed by the Cox Committee. The attachment to drills reveals a commitment to a pedagogy in which teachers instruct pupils in the correct forms of the language, using techniques which allow pupils regular practice in these forms. The word ‘drill’ is especially revealing in that it derives from a militaristic context, in fact from the army parade ground, encoding an armed-services view of the individual pupil or student, who is required to march in step with a series of instructions issued by someone invested with unambiguous authority. If at first the individual cannot appropriate the required linguistic behaviour then this can be corrected by further instruction and practice. Drills thus ensure uniform linguistic behaviour according to the rules and regulations of an externally established authority to which individual differences are submitted. Marching in uniform and standardised linguistic steps with others ensures a language without differences, distinctions or variations. Language drills provide the framework within which differences are, albeit superficially, eradicated and order established.

The keyword ‘proper’ used by Prince Charles is also salient and seminal. The connection of the word ‘English’ with the word ‘proper’ is very common. It underlines how views of English and English teaching are encoded in terms of social propriety. There is nothing particularly unusual about this. A recent collection of articles edited by Tony Crowley (1991) and entitled Proper English contains numerous documents from the seventeenth century to the present day. The book ranges from Jonathan Swift's A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712) – a key essay for understanding the social and cultural pressures of the aftermath of the English revolution of the seventeenth century – to the works of Watts and Archbishop Trench in the 1850s, who are reacting through their arguments for a national language to the social unrest caused in particular by the Chartist movement. The book also includes extracts from the Newbolt Report (1921), a government report published after the First World War with the explicit aim of promoting English as a subject of national unity and cultural harmony. The collection ends with the document English, Our English published in 1987 on behalf of the Centre for Policy Studies by John Marenbon which attacks much current theory and practice in the field of English teaching. Over nearly three hundred years the debates cover remarkably similar ground; the place of a standard language in relation to non-standard forms; the place of absolute rules of correctness in grammar and punctuation; the perception of a degeneracy in standards of language use. Such perceptions are most prominent when issues of nationhood and threats to national identity and to the established social order are to the fore. The quotation from Antonio Gramsci at the beginning of this chapter illustrates such points neatly.

Swift's essay is of special interest, since in it he argues for an ascertaining or standardisation of the English language which is being corrupted by the perpetual change to which it is subject. Particularly responsible for this degeneracy in language are those individuals in a period of post-Restoration moral decline such as ‘university boys’ and frequenters of coffee houses. In his essay Swift writes in the following terms:

My lord, I do here, in the name of all the learned and Polite Persons of the Nation, complain to Your lordship as First Minister, that our language is extremely imperfect; that its daily improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions; that the Pretenders to polish and refine it, have chiefly multiplied Abuses and Absurdities; and that in many instances it offends against every Part of Grammar.

Swift is here addressing the Earl of Oxford, the Lord Treasurer of England, underlining yet again a connection between the linguistic currency and the general social and economic well-being of the nation.

It is no semantic accident that words such as ‘standard’, ‘correct’ and ‘proper’ are keywords in relation to English for, as I have already suggested, debates about the state and status of the English language are only rarely debates about language alone. English is synonymous with Englishness, that is, with an understanding of who the proper English are.

A view of one standard English with a single set of rules accords with a monolingual, monocultural version of society intent on preserving an existing order in which everyone can be drilled into knowing their place. A view which recognises Englishes as well as English and which stresses variable rules accords with a multilingual, culturally diverse view of society: Most teachers occupy a middle ground between these two positions, recognising both the importance of standard English (and teaching it accordingly as a national and international medium) and the classroom reality of the need to uphold pupils’ confidence and self-esteem by working with the continua between standard language and non-standard forms. And most teachers also reject as both unremittingly naive and disempowering the extreme left-wing position that standard English is simply a class-based dialect and can be ignored in favour of local dialects.

Finally, the keyword ‘standard’ must be interrogated. On one level it is connected, of course, with proper and correct notions of language. There is also, however, especially in the discourses of many politicians and their media allies, a constant slippage from the word ‘standard’ to educational behavioural and social standards. Here is an example from a former Chairman of the British Conservative Party:

we've allowed so many standards to slip … teachers weren't bothering to teach kids to spell and to punctuate properly … if you allow standards to slip to the stage where good English is...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• INVESTIGATING ENGLISH DISCOURSE
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• CONTENT
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Language, Discourse and ‘English’
• Part II Literature, Discourse and ‘English’
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index