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World Englishes and English Language Teaching: A pragmatic and humanistic approach

Paper · 2015 · Subrata Kumar Bhowmik

Summary

This is a reflective position paper, not an empirical study. It argues that English language teaching (ELT) has not kept pace with the global spread of English. Most English users are now nonnative speakers who use many local varieties, yet inner-circle "native" countries still set norms, write syllabi, produce materials and design tests. Using a World Englishes (WE) lens, Bhowmik examines four core parts of any language programme: choosing a target variety, curriculum and materials, testing, and teacher training. In each area, stated teaching goals fail to match real learning outcomes and learners' needs. He draws on Widdowson's split between conventional and communicative uses of language, and on Aloni's humanism. From these he proposes a pragmatic, humanistic ELT built on pluricentrism: goals that are realistic for learners, respect for their cultures, and an end to treating native-like proficiency as the default target. There is no dataset or experiment. The contribution is a framework and a research agenda, which matters for anyone building teaching or assessment around a single "standard" English.

Key points

  • The paper cites Crystal's estimate for 1995: about 377 million L1 users of English and about 235 million L2 users. Second/foreign-language users were projected to nearly double within 50 years.
  • Citing Lowenberg (2000), it notes that nonnative–nonnative interaction now outweighs native–native and native–nonnative interaction. Native speakers may be a fifth or less of all English users.
  • The current situation is framed with Seidlhofer's phrase "unstable equilibrium." The abstract dates this to 2005, while the body cites 2004.
  • Kachru's inner/outer/expanding circle model is used but qualified. Tripathi (1998) argues that each circle is internally diverse and that membership changes over time.
  • Examples of mismatch include González (2010), who reports resistance from students and teachers when Colombia adopted the CEFR as its policy standard.
  • Proposed future work includes:
    • gatekeeping in nonnative–nonnative settings;
    • how well high-stakes tests serve diverse needs;
    • whether nonnative speakers also accommodate native speakers.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Widdowson separates the communal side of language (conventions like spelling and accent, which can be used to exclude people) from the communicative side (whether the message gets through), and judges usage mainly by the second.
  • I2. No single variety is treated as the reference; English is taken as pluricentric, with several legitimate norms existing side by side.
  • I3. The paper audits whether goals and outcomes line up across target, materials, testing and training, rather than judging one component alone.
  • I4. Successful communication is presented as a shared effort, so both sides should adapt to keep each other intelligible.
  • I5. The critique of the circle model shows that tidy groupings hide variation inside each group and can shift over time.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (tokens): Non-standard spellings and variety-specific forms could be tagged as convention variants and normalised to lemmas, so the tagger keeps the meaning instead of failing on them.
  • I2 (tree): Treebank training and UD dialect conversion could deliberately cover several Englishes, with parser LAS reported per variety so a single-norm bias becomes visible.
  • I3 (learn): Evaluation sets should match the text Mova will actually meet, and each pipeline stage's target should be checked against downstream answer quality so that misaligned objectives are caught.
  • I4 (back): Generation from the meaning graph could prefer widely intelligible constructions and adjust to the reader, instead of assuming one idealised native reader.
  • I5 (world): Ontology and knowledge-graph categories could carry time-scoped membership and allow internal heterogeneity, rather than being frozen as fixed classes.

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

🎓University of CalgaryCalgary · Canada2 works · 265 citations

📚 Shelves 3 Arts and Humanities · 9,296 works Language and Linguistics · 9,206 works Literature and Literary Theory · 340 works

🧭 Topics 1 English · 1,373 works

Cite

Cite as Subrata Kumar Bhowmik. 2015. World Englishes and English Language Teaching: A pragmatic and humanistic approach. Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal 17.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.14483/udistrital.jour.calj.2015.1.a10

@article{bhowmik2015world,
  title = {{World Englishes and English Language Teaching: A pragmatic and humanistic approach}},
  author = {Subrata Kumar Bhowmik},
  journal = {Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal 17},
  year = {2015},
  doi = {10.14483/udistrital.jour.calj.2015.1.a10},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.14483/udistrital.jour.calj.2015.1.a10}
}

References

57 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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