Chapter 10

CW10.2 Too much English for too many people?

Rogers is a teacher and teacher trainer with experience in many parts of the world. In his 1982 article he argues that too many students worldwide are taught English for reasons that do not stand up to scrutiny. He looks at some of these reasons.

A main one is related to job prospects. Youngsters (and their parents) are told that English is the key to a decent job. But, Rogers says, if you actually look at the number of jobs available in a given country where English is necessary, it can be very small indeed. Hopes for employment are thus being cruelly raised.

The need for international communication is a second reason given. In an informal survey, Rogers asked his own trainee TEFL teachers how many of their own pupils will ever actually need English for communicative purposes. ‘The replies’, he says, ‘suggest that only a very, very small percentage will need English for that purpose’ (p. 146). A third reason is that students need English for academic purposes, to study at college or university, particularly overseas. Once again, Rogers argues that the numbers involved are small. His example is Tonga, where according to one survey of the time, ‘only two percent of secondary school leavers actually need English for higher education overseas’ (p. 146).

Rogers also points out how appallingly unsuccessful much English teaching is. A huge effort is made for pathetic results. His illustration this time is Ethiopia, where he himself worked. The English level of first-year undergraduates (the ‘cream’ of school learners – those who make it to university) was very low indeed: ‘very few of them could read English passages written within a 2,000 word vocabulary … Very few could write a correct sentence in English’ (p. 148). Yet this was after ten years of learning English, including six years with English as the medium of instruction.

One answer to this depressing situation might be, he argues, to restrict English to tertiary-level students, who might be expected to have a real need for it. But he is realistic enough to concede that there are many pressures, not least from parents, for large-scale English-language teaching to continue unchecked throughout the world.

Take a moment to think about FL teaching in the country where you work. What kind of a success rate does it have? Is it teaching the ‘right’ people – those likely to make use of the FL in future life?

CW10.3 Matching variables and examples

The six variables in Stern’s model are:

1. sociocultural;
2. historical/political;
3. educational;
4. economic/technological;
5. linguistic;
6. geographic.

Below are six descriptions of these variables (one for each). The descriptions are sometimes based on examples discussed in the text. Try to match variables and descriptions. (The answers are given below.)

1. Stern (1983, p. 280) cites a study by Lewis and Massad (1975) titled The Teaching of English as a Foreign Language in Ten Countries. The study points up important administrative differences between countries regarding the provision of language teaching. For example, the switch from primary to secondary school at that time took place at age 10 in Italy but age 14 in Chile, Hungary and Thailand. In Sweden, there was no switch (pupils stayed at the same school until at least the age of 16).
2. Examples are: the different attitudes towards French in southern England and in Scotland; and the languages taught in the different regions of France.
3. Language planners, as well as teachers, have to bear in mind how much money is available for the language teaching operation. Exciting and elaborate ideas about the use of video or computers will be quite useless in situations where there is no budget for purchasing the machines.
4. This variable includes factors like the relationship between success and parental occupation, as well as the esteem (or otherwise) in which the target language is viewed within the society.
5. Japanese and Chinese are rarely taught in European schools, even though they are increasingly important languages.
6. An example of this variable is the changing policies towards the teaching of Russian in Eastern European countries.

CW10.4 What do they mean?

Parasher (1994) gives some examples of phrases which might be used in Indian English but which would be unacceptable in standard British English. Some of these examples are given below. They have been adapted by McKay (2002: 64), and I have put some of the phrases into sentences to provide a context:

1. There are many evidences to suggest he committed the crime.
2. I hope you might have received my letter.
3. We are doing what we can do to solve the problem.
4. I am sorry to mention about my inability to help you.
5. We want to discuss about this programme.
6. I shall be thankful if you can reply immediately.

For each sentence, identify the language aspect that is likely to be unacceptable in standard British English. Describe it as precisely as you can, using grammatical terminology if possible. Then change the sentence to make it acceptable to the standard British English speaker.

You will probably find it quite easy to do this, and this suggests that grammatical forms which deviate from standard English often do not cause intelligibility problems.

Here is another example, taken from Sridhar (1996):

7. It must be due to the negligence of man or some fault of women itself.

Perhaps it is slightly more difficult to work out what this sentence means. Any ideas? There is a discussion below.

Sridhar’s example

Example (7) was produced by a speaker of the Southern Indian language of Kannada. In that language the one word itself is used for all the emphatic particles – myself, himself, herself, ourselves, etc. So (7) is an example of L1 interference; probably what the speaker means here is women themselves. As examples (1)–(6) show, intelligibility is often not really impaired by the use of grammar that is at variance from standard English. But example (7) suggests that grammatical variance can sometimes be a problem.

CW10.5 ELF features

Kirkpatrick (2011) lists some of the features studied in European ELF and Asian ELF. These include:

European ELF (investigated by the VOICE team)

• dropping the –s from the third-person singular of the simple present tense;
• using who and which interchangeably;
• flexible use of definite and indefinite articles;
• using uncountable nouns in the plural;
• using a uniform question tag;
• using this with both singular and plural nouns.

Asian ELF (based initially on a small corpus)

• flexible use of definite and indefinite articles;
• absence of plural marking on nouns of measurement, e.g. ‘One three time or four time a years’ (note also the use of the non-standard –s on years);
• no marking of past tense forms (e.g. sit instead of sat);
• omitting the verb be (e.g. ‘once this blueprint adopted’).

CW10.6 Some issues about going global

A number of applied linguists have recently articulated some of the important political and social issues that arise as English becomes a global language. In an article in the Guardian newspaper, Julian Edge argues that nowadays teachers need to be particularly aware of the political implications of what they do. A question that arises after events such as the Iraq War is whether English language teaching has not become ‘an arm of imperial policy’, with language teachers as ‘a second wave of imperial troopers’. Edge urges expatriate teachers to allow countries to develop their own language policies. The role that English plays should be decided by the country itself, without the intervention of outsiders. You can find Edge’s article at www.theguardian.com/education/2004/apr/15/tefl3, and his edited collection (Edge 2006) develops such thoughts at greater length.

Widin (2010) addresses similar issues. She is concerned with the kind of ELT projects that were once very popular throughout the world and are not unknown today. In these projects, teams from countries like Australia or Britain, where English is the native language, are sent to some part of the world with the aim of developing English language teaching and teacher training. Widin looks in particular at two Australian ELT projects, one for teacher training in Laos and the other for English teachers in Japanese secondary schools. Projects like these, she argues, are often set up for the benefit of the donor nation and fail to give proper consideration to the actual needs of the receiving nations. Frequently, little thought is given to contextual features of the sort we discuss in Chapter 10, and this is one reason why such projects are ultimately unsuccessful, proving unsustainable once the expatriate team has returned home. As well as importing contextually inappropriate methodologies, the projects also often start off with a false idea of the role of English, giving it more central importance than the receiving nation really requires. Widin talks about her book at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_kZNS6YAWY&feature=youtu.be.

CW10.7 Methods as plausible fictions

In Johnson (1995), I discuss the idea that language teaching methods can be viewed as ‘works of fiction’. The paper begins by discussing what Widdowson (1980) says about linguistic theories. He makes the point that when we compare such theories, we often talk in terms of truth, perhaps claiming that one theory is ‘truer’ than another. But, he argues, a criterion of truth cannot really apply here, and theories are better described using words like ‘convincing’, ‘powerful’ and ‘plausible’. In this respect, theories are like fictions. Certainly we would not discuss a play like Shakespeare’s Hamlet in terms of whether or not it is ‘factually true’. We would use the other words (‘convincing’ and so on) to describe it.

The same points, I say, can be made about language learning theories and teaching methods. We may be tempted to describe one as ‘better’ than another, as if it were possible to apply some absolute criteria to them. But in fact, these theories and methods ‘are constructs which have more or less plausibility, more or less power, but not more or less objective truth. They are nearer to political beliefs than they are to empirical science’ (Johnson 1995: 5).

If a method is to succeed, it has to be regarded as ‘convincing’, ‘powerful’ and ‘plausible’. To do this, it must fit in with the beliefs of the main participants in the teaching process, particularly the learners and the teacher. However objectively ‘good’ we may feel a method is, it will not succeed if the learners are not convinced by it. In this context, I tell a cautionary tale about a group of students who came to study in England. The institution they attended

was eager to use various modern ‘communicative’ techniques. This did not at all fit the students’ perceptions of how a language should be learned. There must be, they insisted, grammar, dictation, and above all lots of pain, because learning a language (their experience told them) must be a painful process; without pain, learning could not be taking place. (ibid., p. 6)

This conflict between the views of the institution and its learners reached a climax, and in the end the learners simply left the institution involved.

Appealing to a teacher’s ‘sense of plausibility’ (the phrase is from Prabhu 1987) is also very important. If a teacher does not believe in what they are doing, their performance is likely to be weak. The teacher will be ‘like a cardboard fictional character in a second-rate novel’ (ibid., 8).