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Varieties of English in current English language teaching

Paper · 2008 · Markus Bieswanger

Summary

Bieswanger asks whether English language teaching (ELT) prepares learners for the English they will actually meet. Most users of English today are non-native speakers, and even most native speakers do not use the idealised "British" or "American" standards taught in schools. The author began from adult evening-class students in Germany. Despite five to nine years of school English, they often could not follow native speakers of other varieties, nor non-native speakers using English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). He then examined a German secondary-school ELT curriculum (Bavarian Realschule), its textbooks and selected university programs for future English teachers. In this exploratory study, varieties of English get little attention and appear late in schooling, a situation he sums up as "too little, too late". He proposes three remedies:

  • giving varieties a stronger place in curricula, with more lesson time and matching textbooks;
  • starting curriculum-based English in primary school;
  • making variety training mandatory for both prospective and practising teachers.

The study matters because communicative competence, the main goal of modern ELT, requires learners to cope with a pluricentric, constantly evolving language.

Key points

  • The cited estimates put native speakers of English at 300–400 million. Estimates of non-native speakers range from several hundred million to over two billion, and the author notes that these counts are unreliable because "speaker" and "user" are poorly defined.
  • According to Crystal, Received Pronunciation (RP) was used by at most about 5% of England's population and is probably below 2% today.
  • The material examined comes from Bavaria: the Realschule English curriculum, accompanying textbooks and selected German university teacher-training programs.
  • In years eight and nine, English gets three 45-minute lessons a week, which the author considers too little to cover varieties.
  • Primary-school English in Germany largely lacks binding curricula, so secondary teaching restarts from zero in year five. Proper primary curricula would add two to four years of meaningful learning.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The study measures the gap between what a system is trained on and the language its users actually meet, using concrete reports of communication breakdowns as evidence.
  • I2. The author argues that learners should study how varieties differ in a systematic way, not memorise one variety, because this supports life-long adaptation to new forms.
  • I3. The paper treats English as pluricentric, with no single correct norm, so a deviation from the textbook standard is not automatically an error.
  • I4. The paper audits curriculum, textbooks and teacher training together, on the view that demands written into a curriculum are useless unless the materials reflect them.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (learn): Log the inputs where Mova fails and group them by variety (spelling, lexicon, ELF-style syntax), so that silver data and evaluation sets are aimed at real gaps rather than at standard textbook prose.
  • I2 (tokens): Encode the differences between varieties as explicit, explainable mapping rules (e.g., BrE/AmE spellings and lexical pairs) feeding one shared lemma inventory, instead of treating each variant as unknown.
  • I3 (answer): When grading school-course tests or reading answers, accept forms from any standard variety (AusSE, CanSE, Indian English) as correct, and flag only genuine errors.
  • I4 (tree): Check that declared support for a dialect or variety is backed by treebank coverage and conversion rules, not only listed in the specification.

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: Europa-Universität Flensburg.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksSocial Sciences · 1,954 worksCommunication · 104 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,379 works

Cite

Cite as Markus Bieswanger. 2008. Varieties of English in current English language teaching. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics 38.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5774/38-0-21

@inproceedings{bieswanger2008varieties,
  title = {{Varieties of English in current English language teaching}},
  author = {Markus Bieswanger},
  booktitle = {Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics 38},
  year = {2008},
  doi = {10.5774/38-0-21},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5774/38-0-21}
}

References

37 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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