Standard English

“To teach Standard English or world Englishes? A balanced approach to instruction” is an article that argues about the supposed Standard English students search to learn. It discusses about many English’s languages that we have around the world trying to find a consensus about if there is a single Standard English for teachers of English as a second language to teach. As English has become a “global language” it is used for business, science and politics and readers think of Standard English as just the one used in United States of America or the one spoken in Great Britain.

They disregard other English such as the English spoken in Africa, Asia, The West Indies, The Philippines and Singapore. Standard English is not easy to be essentially defined, since what is Standard English for a Canadian differs from what an iris person would conceive it,   nevertheless, McArthur (2003, 442) defends that Standard English has three main features: “1) It is easiest to recognize in print because written conventions are similar world-wide. 2) It is usually used by news presenters. 3) Its usage relates to the speaker’s social class and education”.        

English teachers constantly face this pressure to teach an English Standard to their students, and for that reason they´ve been searching for any information that would clarify about the proper Standard English for them to teach, but what they find is more confusion. This urge to learn a Standard English can bring negative effects as: Standard English is difficult for leaners of a second language to speak because they would never be able to speak exactly the way of a native speaker. As there are other varieties of English around the world, claiming a single Standard English would also devalue others as if they were inferior. For instance, the English from Singapore differs not just with the intonation but also with some grammatical features and lexical items, e.g. “The absence of past tense marking, such as: what happen yesterday?” “The absence of possessive inflections: My mummy friend” “Use of particles: Hurry up lah!” “Use of borrowings: Don´t be so kiasu.”, “Inversion for questions with be: You don´t want to go is it?”,  “Inversion for questions with can: Like that can or not?” 

Among variations of English language some may say that those varieties can be even unintelligible to one another. Is it enough to consider them as an inferior language? It would bring also discrimination and racism against people who do not belong to American or British English Standard, which would create impasses for them to conquer a job, for example.        

 

World Englishes

 

According to Kachru (1985) English language can be divided into three concentric circles: the inner circle, the outer circle and the expanding circle.

The inner circle is composed by the most traditional bases of English and the most influential countries such as: The United Kingdom, The United States of America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The outer circle is formed by nations that suffered long periods of colonization, they were colonized by some of the inner circle countries and they are: Nigeria, Singapore and India.

The expanding circle is made by countries that use English language mainly for business and international purposes and they had not suffered from colonization as the outer circle. They include: China, Greece, Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Kachru (1985, 14) comes up with that English nowadays embraces “a unique cultural pluralism, and a linguistic heterogeneity and diversity.”

Thus, it is important to reflect upon the matter that the target language to teach should belong just to the inner circle, for language represents the expression of cultural identity and by selecting some we would be discriminating other people uniqueness.

 

As the Standard English as a second language teaching is already chosen by the government of a given country it is then fundamental that teachers explain the existence of all those English varieties around the world explaining why the government has selected the inner circle English to be taught and also consider a balanced approach to teach English. Such approaches can be comprised with three key considerations:

1.      Teachers need to carefully consider their teaching context (McKay, 2002).

2.      After choosing their target of instruction based on that context, teachers should value their learner’s current English usage (El-Sayed 1991).

3.      Teachers need to prepare learners for future international English encounters by exposing them to other varieties of English (Matsuda 2003) and by teaching them strategic competence when interacting with speakers who speak other variety of English.         

 

Teachers should raise awareness to students that there’s no a wrong spoken English but rather explain to them that there are many varieties that are as important as the inner circle English. Educators also have to help students accept and value their own way of speaking as also to accept and value other classmates’ different way to speak. The rule of the teacher is to show the proper speech students need to develop in order to communicate and make them conscious and accept the linguistic differences of the English around the world. Teacher should also prepare them to interact with different world’s Englishes. And when the teacher exposes them to different varieties of English, “teacher should focus on teaching both strategic and intercultural competence skills which will help learners be able to “adjust their speech in order to be intelligible to interlocutors from a wide range of backgrounds, most of whom are not inner circle native speakers.” (Jenkins 2006, 174)