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World Englishes in English Language Teaching Textbook of Public Primary Schools

Paper · 2023 · Zehra Batool, Humaira Irfan and Farwa Qazalbash

Summary

The authors look at which variety of English shows up in an English textbook that Pakistani public primary schools actually use. Their concern is that local textbook writers think in terms of two standards, British and American, and do not notice that they also write in Pakistani English (PakE). The study is qualitative. It takes the Grade 5 English textbook published by the Punjab Curriculum Textbook Board (PCTB), extracts its nouns, and sorts each one into one of four groups: the standard British variety (SBrE), the standard American variety (SAmE), words the two standards share, or PakE. Kachru's three concentric circles model (inner, outer, expanding) is the interpretive frame. Most of the vocabulary comes from the inner-circle standards or from their shared core. Even so, PakE items appear about as often as specifically American ones, and they cluster in chapters on Islamic and national topics. The authors argue that the textbook mixes varieties without a plan because the national curriculum gives writers no guidance. They see this mixing as a possible source of confusion for learners and as a reason PakE goes unrecognised.

Key points

  • The data is one textbook: the PCTB English textbook for Grade 5, used in Punjab public primary schools. The analysis covers nouns only.
  • The framework is Kachru's three concentric circle model, with Pakistan placed among the ESL/outer-circle users. The paper also cites Rahman's four sub-varieties of PakE: Anglicised, Acrolect, Mesolect and Basilect ("bazaar" English).
  • Nouns are sorted into four bins: SBrE, SAmE, common SBrE/SAmE, and PakE. The inner-circle and shared vocabulary dominates, and PakE is roughly as frequent as SAmE.
  • Which variety a chapter uses depends on its topic. Islamic and nationalistic chapters lean toward PakE, while the remaining chapters lean toward a British/American blend.
  • The suggested cause is that the Single National Curriculum (SNC) offers no variety guidelines to authors, reviewers, editors or publishers. Future work proposed includes other parts of speech, other grade levels, interviews with authors and policymakers, and accent analysis of teachers' and students' speech.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Each word is labelled by variety, and "shared by SBrE and SAmE" is a category of its own, so neutral words are not forced into one standard; this avoids inflating counts for either side.
  • I2. How often a variety appears depends on the theme of the chapter, so dialect use is unevenly spread through a document and tied to topic.
  • I3. Rahman's four-level scale (anglicised, acrolect, mesolect, basilect) describes variation within one national English as a gradient of register, not a single label.
  • I4. Restricting the first pass to one part of speech (nouns) keeps the variety analysis small and checkable, and other word classes can be added later.
  • I5. Surface forms from different varieties can name the same concept, and the textbook mixes them freely.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tokens): Lemma entries in crate en could carry a variety tag (BrE, AmE, shared, PakE). Spelling and lexical variants would then map to one lemma while the tagger keeps the dialect information.
  • I2 (learn): Evaluation sets should be split by topic and source region, not only pooled. This would show whether the parser or readers weaken on culturally specific chapters, such as religious or national content in South Asian school texts.
  • I3 (learn): Test sets could be built along such a lectal gradient and used as a structured stress test. Pipeline accuracy could then be tracked as input moves away from inner-circle norms.
  • I4 (world): Local nouns (foods, garments, religious and civic terms) could be added to the ontology as their own entities linked to WordNet/Wikidata. Entity tracking in non-inner-circle school texts would then not fail on unknown items.
  • I5 (answer): School-course and QA readers should resolve such variants to a single world entity before answering. This way a question in American wording can be matched to a passage that uses the British or Pakistani term.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Also on the byline: University of Education · Riphah International University.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as Zehra Batool, Humaira Irfan and Farwa Qazalbash. 2023. World Englishes in English Language Teaching Textbook of Public Primary Schools. Journal of Communication and Cultural Trends 5.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.32350/jcct.52.01

@article{batool2023world,
  title = {{World Englishes in English Language Teaching Textbook of Public Primary Schools}},
  author = {Zehra Batool, Humaira Irfan and Farwa Qazalbash},
  journal = {Journal of Communication and Cultural Trends 5},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.32350/jcct.52.01},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.32350/jcct.52.01}
}

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