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Ensuring social relevance
Reflective task 11.2
Focus on three different settings, i.e., (a) immigrants in an English-speaking country like the United States or United Kingdom, (b) learners of English as a second language in countries like India or Singapore, and (c) learners of English as a foreign language in countries like China or Japan. If you were part of the language policy planning team in these countries, what variety (or standard) would you recommend for purposes of learning and teaching in these settings? Why?
Raising and answering the question, Who owns English? Widdow- son (1994, p. 384) argues that “the very fact that English is an inter- national language means that no nation can have a custody over it. To grant such custody of the language is necessarily to arrest its development and so undermine its international status.” He further reckons that native speakers of English cannot claim the language to be exclusively their own because it is “not a possession which they lease out to others, while still retaining the freehold. Other people actually own it.”
If “other people” actually own a variety of the English language and use it effectively within their speech community, how does such ownership conflict with the politics of standardization? And, how does that conflict affect English language learning and teaching in various educational settings? Let us consider these and other re- lated issues with reference to two different settings: (a) English in the L1 setting, (b) English in the L2 setting.
Standardization in the L1 Context
Aboriginal English spoken in Australia, Scottish and Irish spoken in the United Kingdom, and African-American Vernacular English spoken in the United States are all examples of English that are in contact with a dominant variety of English. All these varieties are rule-governed with phonological, morphological, syntactic, seman- tic, and rhetorical structures. Speakers of these varieties use them with members of their families or with members of their communi- ties but may switch to a dominant variety for other purposes. While