Selecting an Instructional Variety for an EIL Curriculum

Aya Matsuda and Patricia Friedrich

The linguistic, cultural and functional diversity associated with English today challenges some of the fundamental assumptions of English Language Teaching (ELT) and requires that we revisit our pedagogical practices, especially in classrooms where English is taught as an international language (EIL). One of the first questions teachers and program administrators are confronted with is which instructional variety to use. What options are available and how to arrive at the decision are common follow-up concerns. There are also other important decisions that need to be made in an EIL curriculum, as illustrated in other chapters in this volume; the selection of the instructional variety, however, is one of the most significant ones because it affects other aspects of the curriculum as well, including material selection and assessment.

Three Options

In most English language courses, instructors or administrators are expected to select a particular variety of English as the instructional variety to guide various aspects of a curriculum. Such decisions are often made quickly and without much deliberation, based on the prior practices and status quo, but they ideally should be based on factors such as students' goals and needs, teachers' expertise and availability of materials and resources. In considering instructional varieties vis-à-vis the needs of EIL classes that prepare learners for future international use of English, three possibilities usually surface immediately: an international variety of English, the speakers' own variety of English and an established variety of English. Advantages and disadvantages of each option are examined below.

The International Variety of English

One possibility is to teach a particular variety of English, or a set of characteristics of English, that would be intelligible and effective in all international communication. The adoption of 'World Standard English' as proposed by McArthur (1987: 11) fits the description. In his model of 'The circle of World English', McArthur 'highlight[ed] the broad three-part spectrum that ranges from the "innumerable" popular Englishes through the various national and regional standards to the remarkably homogeneous but negotiable "common core" of World Standard English'. Unlike national and regional varieties of English that demonstrate a wide range of personal and situational variations, World Standard English is 'a more or less "monolithic" core, a text-linked World Standard negotiated among a variety of more or less established national standards' (McArthur, 1987: 11). It is indeed an attractive idea to have a set of static rules that we can teach and be assured that our students will be successful in all future encounters with other English users. The adoption of such a variety, in theory, would mainstream the materials, simplify the assessment and allow teachers to overpass the recognition of the messy reality of multiple Englishes found in the world.

Some scholars, such as Jenkins and Seidlhofer, have attempted to capture the characteristics of this elusive variety. Jenkins (2000, 2002) identified the Lingua Franca Core, or a set of pronunciation characteristics found among NNS-NNS interactions that she 'found to be essential to mutual intelligibility in ELF [English as a lingua franca] across a wide range of L1s' (Jenkins, 2006: 37). Similarly, the VOICE project (n.d.), directed by Barbara Seidlhofer, has resulted in a number of publications that describe various linguistic characteristics of ELF in a similar way. While both Jenkins (2006) and Seidlhofer (2006) have stated that their attempt is descriptive rather than prescriptive (or even pedagogical), their suggestions are likely to serve as the basis for the establishment of a 'teachable' international English variety to be used in classrooms in the future.

However, several problems exist with this approach to the variety selection. First, suggesting one or a limited set of specialized varieties of English for international use does not reflect the reality of international communication and the use of EIL. In most communicative exchanges that involve language users from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, which variety of English (or even which language, as discussed by Kubota in this volume) is used depends on the speakers involved and is thus unpredictable. Furthermore, once it is (tacitly) decided that English is used, more than one variety of English is often represented in such situations because each speaker brings a variety that he or she is most familiar with. For instance, if a Chilean, an Indian and an American attend a business meeting in Hong Kong, each participant may use a variety of English that they are most fluent in – e.g. Chilean English, Indian English and American English, respectively. They are also likely to employ various strategies to negotiate linguistic and other differences to make themselves mutually intelligible and to communicate effectively (see Friedrich's chapter in this book for more discussion on this matter). While a new international variety of English may develop in a particular, stable international community, there is no one variety that is or can be used successfully in all situations of international communication. It is so because the selection of an English variety is context-dependent, and thus it cannot be expected that one unique international variety of English should emerge in all EIL situations, especially when those situations do not necessarily overlap. As Canagarajah (2007: 925–926) eloquently phrases:

The form of this English...