Language Programmes in English:

A Look into the Future

Robert de Beaugrande

words are like cocoa-beans packed with life;

and like cocoa-beans they grow and give life

— Gabriel Okara, The Voice

1. Four scales of education

The signs of a general movement toward a global multicultural and multilingual society have been unmistakable in many places for some years now, but their potential consequences for education are still far from clear. The increasing pressures are plainly manifested in the intense controversies over educational policy in such countries as the UK and the US, during which the really relevant issues have often been heavily obscured and distorted (cf. Apple 1985; Aronowitz and Giroux 1986).

To sort out some of those issues, I shall draw several sliding scales between contrasting poles. On one scale, traditional education favours an orientation toward earlier content and method, whereas modernist education favours openness toward new or innovative content and methods. In between we might situate reformist education, which attempts to form bridges or compromises between traditional education and modernist education. These alternatives are displayed in Fig. 1.

This simple time-line indicates that education may get pulled in contrary directions, though other factors are usually implicated as well, such as location and social class. Typically, rural and lower-class education tend to be more traditional, whereas urban and upper-class education tend to be more modernist, but these trends are relatively recent (cf. Anyon 1981).

On our second scale, exclusive education is offered only to a small portion of the population, whereas inclusive education is offered to a broad portion or even to the whole population (Fig. 2). Throughout much of historical time, exclusive education was the only tangible option: private, expensive, and elite; but urbanisation and industrialisation gradually led toward inclusive education: public, state-sponsored, and ordinary -indeed, eventually compulsory. Ranked education would be a mix of both sides, depending on the choices of citizens and parents and their ability to pay fees to buy homes in prosperous neighbourhoods.

Here also, we would predict confrontations, this time over whether education shall be a special privilege or a democratic right.

On our third scale, we can distinguish between ornamental education for indicating one’s participation in ‘high culture’, intellectual ‘refinement’, and elegant ‘life-style’, versus instrumental education for practical uses, especially in careers (Fig. 3). In between, the unusual term grouped education might designate the combination where learners get steered across a spectrum of ‘group requirements’, only some of which are potentially useful for future careers.

If instrumentality is broadly interpreted, confrontations are less imminent than for the first two scales. Seemingly ornamental courses like geometry and Latin, can help build the skills in problem-solving and communication that are needed for plainly instrumental studies as well.

These three scales might be useful for characterising a given educational system. In doing so, we should be wary of imagining that the three would line up in a single straightforward contrast between traditional, exclusive, and ornamental education on one side versus innovative, inclusive, and instrumental education on the other side. At some times and places, exclusive education has indeed been traditional and ornamental, as in elite academies for the children of aristocrats in Europe and, in a less obvious sense, in some ‘liberal arts colleges’ in the US. At other times and places, exclusive education has been powerfully instrumental and modernist, as in today’s law schools and business schools of the American Ivy League.

Conversely, education has often been ‘modernised’ without becoming decisively instrumental. In some quarters, instrumentality seems to have been considered incompatible with educational decorum. I recall from my own time at a secondary school that the more frankly instrumental areas, such as auto mechanics and home economics, were regarded with disdain when contrasted with more ornamental areas like geometry and Latin. The contrast may well have been enforced or at least re-enforced by the tendency of the former to attract rural or working-class urban learners and the latter to attract middle-class urban learners.

The athletics area of the curriculum, which, in terms of power and prestige, was a school within the school, subverted or overlaid this broad contrast, being both democratic it its neutrality regarding the social and intellectual status of the athletes, and elitist in its obsessions with champions and championships. Since relatively few of the athletes later entered the sport professions, the area was, strictly speaking, chiefly ornamental, but broadly speaking, it was hugely instrumental in winning for star athletes the respect or even adoration of the community that would later be honoured to employ them as leaders and managers, as well as placing them among the top candidates for university scholarships.

A fourth scale has only recently been recognised to hold critical importance. Monocultural education assumes a single uniform ‘mainstream’ culture for all the population of learners, whereas multicultural education assumes a diversity of cultures (Fig. 4). The intermediate position might be occupied by remedial education acknowledging that diversity is present but should be ‘educated out’ by universal initiation into the ‘mainstream’ culture.

Here, confrontations are the most divisive of all, even though public discourse virtually never highlights the term ‘monocultural education’. Instead, the latter seeks to remain the invisible universal standard against which multicultural education can be made to stick out a deviation or degradation (cf. Beaugrande 1997a, 1999).

This fourth scale encourages us to reconsider the first three from new angles. Traditional education was largely mono cultural in terms of its clientele, and cultural criteria were one basis for exclusivity. Yet in regard to its content, exclusive and ornamental education could favour a deep interest in cultural diversity, with an emphasis on learning foreign languages and attending foreign schools and universities. For centuries, university education was naturally associated with the ‘wandering scholars’, and their acquisition of foreign cultural knowledge.

Today, however, multiculturalism is being vehemently denounced by the ‘New Right Conservatives’ who seek to control all the institutions of society, especially education. For the National Review (27 April 1992) ‘multiculturalism is far more than a radical ideology or misconceived educational reform: it is a mainstream phenomenon, a systematic dismantling of America’s unitary national identity in response to unprecedented ethnic and racial transformation’. Such views are by no means isolated. To quote Stanley Fish (1994: 55, 58f), these ‘conservatives’ have

mobilised a powerful coalition of disgruntled professors, nostalgic alumni, anti-academic journalists, concerned parents, and suspicious citizens, in face of a threat they have brilliantly fabricate. Whatever the truth about the relative strengths of the warring forces on the college campus, the conservative backlash has certainly won the media battle [with their] story of subversive youths and ethnics and nihilists who are at once a lunatic fringe and a threat to a strangely endangered centre, a story of epistemological evil emerging from some unfathomable impulse to destroy and lay waste, a story of reason under siege, of the decline of culture, of the abandonment of standards, of the triumph of barbarism.

For conservatives, mono cultural education is a sacred trust, and multicultural education is no education at all. They mostly hold drastically instrumental views of education as a mechanical institution for channelling the ‘right people’ all the way through the highest levels into careers as efficient, obedient maintenance personnel for business and technology; and for pushing out the ‘wrong people’ at the lower levels and preparing them for sporadic, unskilled jobs (cf. Willis 1977).

On our other scales, conservative views tend toward mixtures. Traditional content is emphasised as an ornamental reverence for the cultural traditions of the mainstream; modernist content is instrumental for the requirements of specialisation. Reformist education is rejected as dangerous, and remedial education is spurned for wasting money on inferior groups of human beings who won’t benefit from it anyway.

 Conservatives also favour exclusive education in private schools and ranked education in public schools: superior schools in rich neighbourhoods, and abominable ones in poor neighbourhoods. This ranking results automatically wherever school districts are supported solely by the local tax-base (Ogbu 1974). The same ranking ensures the high rate of disadvantaged learners who do not go on into higher education or even drop out before completing the secondary level (Willis 1977; Apple 1985).

Struggling against the ceaseless barrage of accusations and abuse from the conservatives, multicultural education has scarcely been able to develop a sufficiently stable profile for us to characterise it. It cannot be content with those adventitious annexations of ornamental subject areas for music, dance, and handicrafts that we usually see, whilst the rest of the curriculum continues to be taught from a mono cultural perspective. Instead, the entire curriculum needs to be reconceived within a multicultural perspective, especially in such subject areas as history, civics, and communication. I shall return to this prospect in the final section of the paper.

2. Scaling the language curriculum

Could the four scales proposed in the previous section help us to characterise the language curriculum? In principle, language could figure in nearly all positions on all scales. On our first scale, language is strongly implicated in the continuity and preservation of tradition, but also in the steadfast progression of modernisation, and in most projects of educational reform as well. On our second scale, language is in its very essence inclusive, but has frequently been tuned against itself to assist the exclusion of speakers of disapproved varieties. And language has been a key factor in remedial education, whose disappointing results can be traced back to some inappropriate notions of how languages work and how they change (see section 3).

On our third scale, language education has been sometimes ornamental, notably in the study of classical Greek and Latin; and sometimes instrumental, notably in basic adult literacy programmes such as those developed by Paulo Freire in South America and Africa. Language choice and language policy are hugely influential in determining what languages or language varieties count as ornaments or instruments (Cooper 1989).

On our fourth scale, the polarity of mono cultural versus multicultural, when applied to language education, points directly to the polarity of monolingual versus multilingual, but in complex ways. A society may be de facto multilingual yet officially monocultural; such is plainly the goal of the ‘New Right’ conservatives in the UK and the US. Or, a society may be de facto multilingual and officially multicultural, as in South Africa since 1994. Societies that are both de facto monolingual and officially monocultural are rare in the today’s world of mobility, migration, and deportation. Greenland? Iceland? San Marino?

At all events, education may be multilingual without being multicultural, simply using several languages to transmit the same knowledge and world-view sustained by monocultural education, and with the same routines. Educators may be wholly unaware of how their routines to encourage individual competition and self-promotion among learners may conflict with the norms of the learners’ home cultures encouraging group co-operation and modesty (Philips 1983).

In sum, language does appear to cover the whole spectrum across all our scales. Yet if language is at the centre of the educational enterprise, it is also at the epicentre of the social earthquakes that can shake education to its very foundations. Emblematic are the effusive discourses invoking and lamenting a vast ‘literacy crisis’ in affluent societies like the US that would like to pride themselves on their modern, inclusive approaches to education. The real situation could more insightfully described as a ‘language variety crisis’, resulting naturally from an influx of learners whose home varieties were not represented in the traditional learner population and are still not adequately understood as alternative communicative systems in their own right.

This lack of preparation and understanding explains why the sporadic ‘remedial programmes’ mounted to master such ‘crises’ have not been very successful. We can hardly expect to make one language variety accessible to speakers of a different one if we are unable to provide a user-friendly workable description of either variety. Such is our dilemma when ‘standard English’ is handled negatively as if it were merely language which manifests no traces of home varieties, and when each trace is deemed merely an ‘error’ committed against the standard. Moreover, ‘remedial education’ merely fidgets with the symptoms of the real problems of social inequalities that cause the blockage of literacy skills among disadvantaged sectors of the population (Cross 1974; Ogbu 1974; Richardson Fisk, and Okun 1983). And learners who do abandon their home varieties in favour of the standard may find themselves suspected of cultural disloyalty (Fordham 1988).

The situation is substantially more precarious in societies where multiculturalism and multilingual are far more elaborated than in the US, due not merely to migration but to a long-standing co-existence of cultures and languages. When such areas were subjected to colonialism, a superstratum of supposedly ‘high culture’ based on and expressed in European languages was added. Colonial governments typically imported the educational systems of the ‘home country’ but operated them on a radically exclusive basis. The clumsy mechanisms of the importation, coupled with the determination of colonial governments to keep out modern inclusive ideas such as equal rights among races and genders, ensured that colonial education would be heavily traditional, at least one generation behind the educational methods in the home country.

Colonial education merged the ornamental with the instrumental in a peculiar way. Insofar as the educational content and methods were foreign and largely irrelevant to the indigenous cultures, the whole system would appear awkwardly ornamental, as has been bitingly portrayed by numerous classic African writers -- Soyinka, Achebe, Aidoo, Ngugi, Chindoya, and Bessie Head readily come to mind. And yet, as those same writers have made abundantly clear, a successful achievement in colonial education - never mind the content and methods - was urgently instrumental for most of the desirable careers throughout the colonial period.

And over and over, these writers recall, the colonial language was the crowning glory of educational success. In the eyes of the colonisers themselves, the crucial measure was simply how closely your use of the language matched the prestigious ‘standard’ variety of the ‘home country’. An exact match may not even have been desired. ‘If an Englishman is himself a proud speaker of RP, he may find each encounter with a person who obviously does not speak his language well a pleasantly reassuring reminder of the exclusiveness of his own social group’ (Prator 1968: 471).

What the colonisers certainly were not expecting was for the Africans to make their own versions of English, and use them to discover a multitude of possibilities the English themselves had never imagined. Yet those same writers, and many others, have done exactly that. Reading their works extensively for the first time after a long and heavy diet of European literature, plus smaller diets of literature from North America, South America, and Asia, I feel a bit like I am learning to read all over again. Or more properly, learning over again how to see and feel the things and people I am reading about, like a different and intensified reality The country, the landscape, and the culture become leading characters whose immensity and permanence offsets the fragility, anxiety, and harshness of personal lives, consoling their families and communities to the last. This desolate and dehumanised scene at the opening of Alex La Guma’s Time of the Butcherbird was precisely designed to stick in your mind until you eventually learn that here is the new ‘homeland’ apportioned by the ‘Bantu Commissioner’ of the white ‘government’ to African villagers whose ancestral homelands since time immemorial are coveted by a mining company:

Whey the government trucks had gone, the dust they had left behind hung over the plain and smudged the blistering afternoon sun so that it appeared as a daub of white-hot metal through the moving haze [...] The plain was flat and featureless except for two roads bull-dozed from the ground, bisecting each other to He like scars of a branded cross on the pocked and powdered skin of the earth. [...] The dust settled slowly on the metal of the tank and on the surface of the brackish water it contained, laboriously pumped up from below the sand; on the rough cubist mounds of folded and piled tents dumped there by officialdom; on the sullen faces of the people who had been unloaded like the odds and ends of furniture they had been allowed to bring with them, powdering them grey [and] settling on the unkempt and travel-creased clothes, so that they had the look of scarecrows left behind.

Conversely, human characters are presented and explored as if they were landscapes:

‘You may see no rivers on the ground but we keep the rivers inside us. That is why all good things and all good people are called rain. Sometimes we see the rains clouds gather even though not a cloud appears in the sky. It is all in our heart.’ He nodded his head, fully grasping this in its deepest meaning. (Bessie Head, When Rain Clouds Gather)

And so did I —- I hoped.

These writers seem to have intuitively grasped and achieved what Oyekan Owomoyela (1996: 51) has advocated as ‘the reinstatement of those habits of the heart and of the mind that constitute the African difference’. Perhaps those habits don’t need to be ‘reinstated’, because they were never lost or obliterated, and have even made over the English language for displaying African realities that are partly recorded, partly remembered, partly recreated, and totally relived.

3. Language and discourse as theory and practice

 If language is indeed at the centre of the educational enterprise, then the success or failure of education depends crucially upon how language is approached. So far, the dominant approaches have been implicitly paradoxical. High skills in using ‘school language’ are universally appreciated and rewarded all across the curriculum, yet little attention is devoted to expounding and practice those skills in terms the majority of learners can understand. Moreover, those approaches view the curriculum as an arena for ‘learning mathematics’, ‘learning physics’, ‘learning English’, and so on, whereas it should more precisely be an arena for learning to communicate about mathematics, physics, English, and so on.

The scattered ratios of success or failure, I submit, are not due to the learners’ inherent differences in ‘intelligence’ and ‘aptitude’, as is so often claimed, but to ineffective communication among the participants. Learners who do poorly are mostly those for whom ‘school language’ and ‘school discourse’ represent an unfamiliar and alienating language variety and who are thereby excluded from appropriating the very knowledge that they seem to be offered. This double-bind is particularly acute for learners who do poorly in language classes, even when they are native speakers of English. EvidentIy, our language programmes are not effective in communicating about English even when — and such is often not the case — the teachers are securely fluent in ‘Standard English’.

The situation with its overtones of ‘crisis’ is unlikely to improve until education can be firmly centred on the communicative skills which are urgently needed for success in schools and in careers, but which are not reliably made accessible by the schools. Language must be explicitly placed at the centre of education in both theory and practice, whereas at present it is implicitly placed there in practice, and not at all in theory

To indicate how we might approach this decisive task, we could define a language to be a general theory of human knowledge and experience, and could define discourse to be the open set of practices for working out the theory (cf. Halliday 1994). Such definitions seem readily compatible with Chidi Amuta’s (1989: 113) meditations on theory and practice in African literature:

Language needs to be conceptualised to mean the totality of the means available for communicating a cultural form to the greatest majority in a manner that will clearly define cognitive-ideological effect in the consciousness of the audience.

To be sure, language is not an ordinary theory, nor a scientific theory. As a theory of knowledge, a language is a theory of the possibility of theories in the usual sense, whether ordinary or scientific. Discourse in turn includes all the practices of formulating and stating theories, even when specialised symbols or formulas are deployed; these are derived from language and are not outside it.

Language is a unique type of theory in another respect: it cannot be tested and refuted by practice, as a scientific or educational theory might be. A language can instantaneously generate new practices or adapt old ones and then gets confirmed once again even by the practices it had not foreseen or predicted.

For authors of literature and even more of poetry, these definitions might sound quite congenial. The only definition of literature I have found satisfactory is: a domain of discourse in which alternative realities are derived from human knowledge and experience; poetry is in turn a domain of discourse where alternative practices are derived from the theory of the language. The ultimate and universal message is the openness of each human mind to new knowledge and experience, and the openness of each language to new practices. And this message is in no way intended to refute older knowledge or older practices, but rather to complement them, to set them off and make them seem new once again.

For linguists, my definitions might sound congenial from a different angle, but only partly so. From Saussure down through Chomsky and beyond, language has been viewed as a potential, as a virtual system of possibilities, called ‘langue’, ‘competence’, and so on, as distinct from the actual system of uses, called ‘parole’, ‘performance’, and so on. So ‘language’ was essentially viewed as a theory; but its relation to the practices of discourse was thoroughly obscured by the curious idea that ‘langue’ or ‘competence’ can and should be described independently from the data of ‘parole’ or ‘performance’ (Beaugrande 1997b, 1998a). So then ‘language’ would be a strange theory whose internal organisation is sustained not in the practices, but apart from them Saussure himself did not appear to realise that he was in effect launching a school of thought which equated language with order, and discourse with disorder when he announced that ‘language is a welt-defined object in the heterogeneous mass of speech facts’, whereas ‘speech cannot be studied,’ nor indeed can it be ‘put in any category of human facts, for we cannot discover its unity’ (1966 [original 1916]: 14,9, 11). In the same vein, Chomsky announced, half a century later, that ‘linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-hearer in a completely homogeneous speech community, who knows its language perfectly’, whereas the ‘observed use of language’ ‘surely cannot constitute the subject-matter of linguistics, if this is to be a serious discipline’, and ‘much of the actual speech observed consists of fragments and deviant expressions of a variety of sorts’ (1965: 3f, 201).

When made fully explicit, the dualistic view of a highly orderly, unified ‘theory’ of language producing highly disorderly and disunified practices when speakers use the language seems patently implausible. Surely we would be justified in concluding that the order of discourse is not the order of ‘language’ these linguists were looking to find, so they thought they were seeing disorder.

For ordinary speakers, my definitions of ‘language’ and ‘discourse’ might seem frankly bizarre. They would regard ‘theory’ as an abstruse or academic matter reserved for specialists, and their own uses of language in discourse as ‘purely practical’ matters in talking about the world around them as it is and must be. They would be amazed or even intimidated to be told that their language is a resource which enables them to construct endless vistas opening out upon new knowledge and experience ­which is just how English was used by the African writers I mentioned, and many others like them.

Perhaps the scope and power of a language are too great for ordinary speakers to grasp, let alone exploit. But I would suggest another source of their self-imposed  limitations: the diffidence or even anxiety instilled when language education isolates theory from practice. Despite their important differences, language teachers resemble linguists in that one respect, as when ‘English grammar’ is taught as a formal and abstract subject matter and not as a communicative resource. If some linguists have created the myth that ‘language, like God moves in a mysterious way and outside the range of the common man’s awareness’ (Widdowson 1980: 166), some language teachers have involuntarily conveyed a similar message by implying that a ‘language’ or ‘grammar’ is a delicate mechanism controlled by a vast assemblage of abstruse ‘rules’ which you are expected to follow but which cannot be explained in user-friendly practical terms (Beaugrande 1997a, 1997c, 1998b).

4. Linguistics and literary studies

One of the numerous consequences which the dissociation between theory and practice have entailed for language programmes has been to drive a wholly unjustified wedge between linguistics and literary studies. This wedge apparently arose when linguistics resolved to highlight the static, uniform., and abstract qualities of language, whereas literature and even more poetry naturally highlight the dynamic, diversifiable, and concrete qualities of language.

In terms of the present paper, we could say that those linguists viewed language as a self-contained, indeed self-referential theory setting forth the units, features, and rules and being independent of discursive practices, whereas the Hallidayan view I am advocating, situated much closer to literature and poetry, sees language as an encompassing, world-referential theory continually evolving in and through discursive practices. The main reason why the second view has rarely been attained outside literature and poetry is that the openness and creativity of ordinary language are so effortless, so useful, so natural — and so orderly in ways we have not been trained to notice and cultivate.

Might then linguistics and literary studies finally be harmonised as joint ventures with complementary rather than conflicting views of the same constellation of theory and practice? First, we can briefly contemplate the conventional contrasts that have characterised the two in the past (Table 1).

Whereas the object of linguistics has been the language (e.g. Saussure’s ‘langue’) as an abstract system, the object of literary studies has been the literary text as a concrete artefact. For the linguist, material would be derived from data assembled and collated by means of fieldwork and later, for the generativists, by means of introspection. For the literary scholar, material would come from the canon of literary texts established mainly by tradition, witness the long-standing practice of anthologising meritorious (‘great’) works for educational purposes.

To stress its shift away from historical ‘philology’, modem linguistics programmatically adopted a static or synchronic view of a language in a single current state, as if frozen in time. Literary studies, in contrast, has remained resolutely historical, witness such time-honoured conventions as organising the programme or personnel of literature departments by century or period, and treating contemporary literature only marginally alongside the ‘classics’ of the past.

Linguistics has worked with a construct of the ideal speaker who, as I have quoted in section 3, ‘knows the language perfectly’. Literary studies, in contrast, has been devoted with the real author as a biographical and historical figure, and has expended much effort on documentation, e.g., through official records, personal letters and diaries, contemporary comments, dates and places of publication, and so on.

At the other end of the transaction, linguistics has assumed an ideal hearer who possesses precisely the same knowledge as the ideal speaker and can understand the same set of utterances as the speaker can ‘generate’. Once intuition came into vogue, the linguist has been entitled to stand in for both speaker and hearer, inventing sample sentences and rendering interpretations. In literary studies, however, we notice a long-term vacancy: the role of the reader was usually not addressed as a substantive issue but tacitly occupied by the literary scholar, whether an academic or a professional critic, who purported to be the proper (qualified, discerning, etc.) reader for the literary work. Intriguingly, the traditional move has been to present one’s own reading in the name of the real author, e.g., as what Shakespeare or Milton ‘was saying’, ‘meant’, ‘intended’, etc., and thus to merge author with authority. This stance has unfortunately abridged the openness which is so essential to truly literary experiences, and which must be regained by the language programmes of the future (cf. section 1).

As already signalled by the landmark Saussurian title Cours de linguistique générale, linguistics has sought to formulate the most general principles applying to an entire language, or, better still, to all languages (the ‘universals’). In literary studies, careful attention has been devoted to the special or even unique qualities of the literary work, and the high regard for specific detail can be seen in the common and sadistic exercise or test where students are asked to identify individual poems or passages from plays, novels, etc.

Linguistics has addressed the rules of language encoding the formal patterns which apply to all instances, e.g., the placement of Article before Noun in English. Literary studies has addressed the conventions of genre, based on form (e.g. for the ‘sestina’), theme (e.g. for the ‘revenge tragedy’) and so on.

In programmatic opposition to ‘traditional grammar’ with its prescriptive and proscriptive attitudes, linguistics resolved to be descriptive, recording and characterising a language as it is rather than as it should be. Literary studies has remained evaluative, despite occasional declarations (e.g. by the New Critics) that values tend to obscure or distort our analysis of a work; after all, the mere choice of a literary text for study and interpretation already implicates a favourable value judgement

The chief goal of linguistics has been the description of a whole language as a total system: a characterisation of its phonological, morphological, and grammatical regularities in a compact and perspicuous format. The goal of literary studies has been to a large extent the advocacy of one’s own interpretation of a particular work and, at least implicitly, of the work itself as a shining exemplar meriting such interpretation.

Linguistics has had a reputation for being theory-centred, especially in its more formalist enterprises with their elaborate terms and symbols. These trends have doubtless been encouraged by the search for some ‘deep’ or ‘underlying’ order that language in practice does not manifest. Literary studies, on the other hand, has until recently had a reputation for being practice-centred, based firmly on the activities of reading and interpreting. Compare such standard titles as I.A. Richards’ (1929) Practical Criticism and Cox and Dyson’s (1979) Modern Poetry: Studies in Practical Criticism against Chidi Amuta’s (1989) programmatically balanced title The Theory of African Literature: Implications for Practical Criticism.

5. Bridging the gap: Discourse analysis

In the previous section, we examined some conventional contrasts between linguistics and literary studies which have not favoured direct interaction in past decades. Yet the distance between them has recently been bridged by at least two trends, giving us the spectrum shown in Fig. 5.

Linguistics has acquired a prominent neighbour called discourse analysis, which had been present for a long time but not yet in the mainstream of research. To characterise it briefly, we can once again compile a table for some major distinctions in respect to conventional linguistics (Table 2).

Instead of describing the entire language as an abstract virtual system (repertory of potential choices), the focus of attention is allotted to the text and discourse, where the term ‘discourse’ straightforwardly designates a set of texts directed to each other, especially in conversation; for some theorists (e.g. Foucault) the ‘discourse’ extends across broad social and institutional frameworks. A text or discourse is defined to be actual system (array of choices actually made), as it operates within an interactive event. The current function of a given element in the text-system is determined partly by its function in the abstract system and partly by the current functions of co-occurring elements in that context. In this sense, the language is continually being re-invented - another congenial prospect for authors of literature and poetry.

Whereas general linguistics has usually sought data about the entire language on the most general levels, discourse analysis seeks data on the more specific levels of text types and discourse genres, thus being proximate to such concepts as ‘styles’ and ‘registers’. New and immensely valuable resources are now offered by very large corpora of authentic data, where we can see the transitions between language and discourse and complement our own usage by observing the usage of a large population of speakers and writers (Beaugrande 1996, 1997b, 1998b).

An emphatic turn away from introspection as the main source of data has reinstated fieldwork, which was one of the original main sources of discourse analysis by American linguists like Robert E. Longacre (e.g. 1964, 1970, 1983). We also see a growing commitment to (a) participation, where the investigator joins in the practices of discourse as a social and cognitive agent, albeit one with special focuses and motives; (b) ethnography, which uses systematic techniques, such as interviews; and (c) experimentation, which designs controlled discursive tasks, such as retelling a simple story in one’s own words.

The essentially static or synchronic perspective held in place since Saussure is supplanted by a perspective which is not simply ‘diachronic’ (centred on the history and change of the whole language) but dynamic and procedural, centred on the ongoing discursive practices as they unroll during social interaction. The text is stripped of its apparent obviousness as a written artefact and is examined in terms of how it could be produced and received with relative ease and success despite the undeniable complexities involved. We must assume, for example, that memory storage is not unlimited, but efficiently organised to access and activate the materials needed for the ongoing procedures. Also, the function of a text element must fluctuate according to the stage of the discourse where it occurs and . the contextual factors relevant at that stage.

The ideal speaker and the ideal hearer are displaced by the text producer and the text receiver as social and cognitive agents, i,e., real-life human beings within a cultural setting, who engage in discourse interaction in order to pursue goals and to gain or provide access to knowledge.

The general outlook that sought rules and regularities of the widest possible scope is now being reshaped as a cautiously monitored balance between general and specific. Here, we do not assume too readily that our data represent the whole language, but attempt to determine, by empirical means, how far it may be specific to a text type, a social group, a situational setting, and so on. Nor are specific data considered less valuable, informative, or ‘scientific’, since they materially contribute to mediating between the single text (practice) and the whole language (theory).

The rule of linguistics had increasingly come to be treated as a formal algorithm for creating, describing, or transforming patterns in sentences, much as a mathematical operation or a computer program might perform. The strategy in discourse analysis, in contrast, is an interactive heuristic people use for managing topics and goal s in situations that, at some level of detail, are always novel. Whereas an algorithm is mechanical and guaranteed to yield the ‘correct’ result but applies only within strict limits, a strategy does not always work but is flexible and powerful enough to handle a diversity of contexts and needs (van Dijk and Kintsch 1983).

The descriptive stance linguistics had adopted to dissociate itself from the prescriptive and proscriptive stance of traditional grammars, is revised to be evaluative, but by interactional criteria demonstrably relevant to the success of communicative events rather than by fussy attitudes about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ or ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’. These criteria include efficiency when a text is easy to handle, effectiveness if the text helps toward achieving a goal, and appropriateness if the text suits the occasion.

If the main goal of linguistics has usually been description, then discourse analysis has the further goal of application to discursive practices. Our highest priority would be to enhance the freedom of access to knowledge through discourse, thereby aiding people to grasp both the world they live in and their opportunities to develop themselves in education, career, and personality.

Finally, the theory-centred reputation linguistics had taken on, especially under the aegis of formalism, is now yielding to a dialectic between theory and practice, where the term ‘dialectic’ designates the process of each side mutually determining the other during their co-evolution. This process is observed both in the discourse of a community and in the discourse of the discourse analysts themselves, which should be accessible at least to the community we are talking about. This latter requirement has all too often been neglected.

Taken together, the contrasts summarised in Table 2 are indicators of an integral evolution away from the static, uniform and abstract qualities conventional linguistics has long attributed to ‘langue’, ‘competence’, and so on. Discourse analysis owes its current popularity to the opportunities it offers not just for raising issues and posing problems that linguistics had marginalized, but also for promoting democracy and equality in and through discourse (Beaugrande 1997a, 1997b, 1999).

6. Bridging the gap: Literary theory

 Literary studies has also acquired prominent neighbour, this one called literary theory, which has also been present for a long time but not in the mainstream of research until recently. This term designates a broad range of diverse trends moving away from a concern with the individual text toward a concern with the general conditions of literature or ‘literariness’. This trend increases generality through a movement that complements the trend to lower generality in discourse analysis. Moreover, the two trends manifest some commonalities in the emerging terminologies on the linguistic and literary side: not just ‘text’ and ‘discourse’ themselves but ‘textuality’, ‘intertextuality’ ‘rhetoricity’, ‘fictionality’, and so on, although the uses of these terms may diverge as may the contexts in which they appear.

In terms of their evolution, we might see some further parallels and complementarities between the two. Just as discourse analysis registered some deep problems at the base of linguistics with its premature assertions of static uniformity, literary theory registered some deep problems at the base of literary studies with its premature complacency about the literary text just being there on the page for us to interpret with straightforward routines. As I pointed out back in section 3, some influential linguists like Saussure and Chomsky implied that texts are disorderly, being a mere ‘heterogeneous mass’ rife with ‘fragments and deviant expressions’. Conversely, some influential literary scholars like I.A. Richards and the New Critics implied that texts are so orderly we can close every question or problem about their interpretation. By implication, all texts would eventually have their ultimate closures and final interpretations, and no more would need to be written or published; but nobody seemed to relish that prospect.

In a book-length study of literary theory (Beaugrande 1988), I have suggested some plausible motives for its rapid growth from an abstruse specialisation within a few ‘comparative literature’ programmes into an internationally prominent topic in a great majority of language and literature programmes. One motive might have been an intensifying discomfort with the public disinterest in reading literature, which directly reflects the alienating effects when the teaching of literature closes off the openness and compels students to accept and memorise the ‘correct interpretation’. This motive might indicate why so much of literary theory foregrounds the dynamics and the diversity of literary experiences and assigns unprecedented prominence to ‘the reader’ .

Another motive might have been some energising contacts with other disciplines and methods, including anthropology, semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and feminism, as well as linguistics itself. These contacts have opened up new strategies of reading and interpreting, and have demonstrated conclusively that the same text allows for different configurations of meaning — a precept that authors and literature and poetry had of course known all along.

Again, a table of contrasts might be useful for drawing comparisons, this time between conventional literary studies and literary theory (Table 3).

Admittedly, the Table simplifies more drastically than the others because literary theorists are conspicuously eager to express their individual voices and personal creativity.

The literary text as a written and presumably closed artefact is ‘decentred’ into a event within literary discourse as an open-ended transaction. The term ‘intertextuality’ has gained some currency for the vision of the ‘open’ text as a meeting point or ‘weaving’ of other texts, especially in the trend known as ‘deconstruction’. Such a vision was traditionally either eschewed as detrimental to the reputation of a given work and author or else relegated to ‘influence studies’ of a somewhat antiquarian cast.

Instead of taking the canon at face value as the established and accepted catalogue of works, we now explore the processes of canonisation: how and why certain works or authors were selected, and how and why the canon got revised. We currently encounter ‘loose canons’ (Gates 1992) after a diversity of works has been admitted and the boundaries toward ‘trivial’ and ‘popular’ literature were blurred to explore how they formed part of the groundwork on which ‘high’ literature rested.

The historical orientation, which projected a view of literature in a chronological progression of authors and works, shifts toward a programmatic orientation which views literature in terms of projects for navigating the complexities of literary communication. The orderliness of chronological methods is found to be a liability in disguising trends and currents across diverse time periods, e.g., the one linking German ‘Expressionismus’ of the 20th century with the ‘Barock’ of the 17th. Even the vision of an author influencing another who carne earlier (e.g. Shelley’s Cenci as a tribute to Browning) has had a certain vogue (Bloom 1975): though historically perverse, it helps us to perceive a richer orchestration of voices among similar means toward alternative ends.

The real author was progressively ‘de-centred’ and attention was focused on models of the author and on closely related models of literary production. In some theorising, e.g., by Foucault and some of the Marxists, the author was ‘de-centred’ to the point of being an agent of a society or social class rather than the highly exceptional individual monumentalised in conventional literary studies. In parallel, the merely implied ‘reader’ whose role had been quietly filled by the traditional literary scholar was now displaced by explicit models of the reader, and models of literary reception carne into fashion.

These models are obviously more general than any one author, reader, or literary work, whose special or even unique qualities had been highlighted by conventional literary scholars. But the models took account of the ratios of general to special by expressing such complementarities as expectation versus innovation, with each work partially resembling others and partially differing from them. The specific achievement of one work was thus no longer ascribed in the ‘vitalist’ manner to some ‘miraculous inspiration’, but to a strategic and highly skilled modification of prior systems of shaping and sense-making.

If the conventions of genre had traditionally been stressed, probably to assist the classifying of works and the organising of literary pedagogy, the instability of genre now rose into full view: a work is the valued for not merely conforming to its genre but for modifying it (e.g. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy bending the conventions of the novel) or for cutting across genres (e.g. Joyce’s Ulysses as a polyphonic discourse moving in and out of the genre of the novel). In this outlook, the genre is continually in the process of being constituted and reconstituted and is therefore more a part of the problem of classifying literature than the solution.

Consistent with these shifts, the project of placing a fixed value on the text evolves toward a sensitivity for the transient value of the engagement with the text. Literature and poetry spontaneously raise problems of value, but would risk becoming trivial by resolving them for us, as in the dreary Victorian didactic poetry like that of Isaac Watts or of Wordsworth on his many off days. We may value a work when it meets our expectations or when it innovates, even though neither expectedness or innovation constitutes a value for its own sake. We may appreciate a genre or style without in any way esteeming all of its instances. We may alter our evaluations between different readings of the same work. And so on.

The advocacy of an interpretation and also of the literary work is a less vital goal now than the advocacy of a model of literary communication. The danger now impends of the tired old quarrels over the ‘right’ reading or ‘correct interpretation’ of a work being merely supplanted by equally divisive quarrels over the ‘right’ model of ‘reading’ or ‘the reader’. Such is standard fare in journals like Critical Inquiry, whose professed interest in ‘theoretical’ issues remains superficial and self-indulgent, grimly closed to empirical methods.

I would be happy to think that the practice-centred tendencies of former times are slowly moving toward a dialectic of theory and practice, but the indications are uncertain. Some books in the area of literary theory, such as Fredric Jameson’s Prisonhouse of Language and Geoffrey Hartman’s Saving the Text, barely deal with practical interpreting at all, whilst others, such as Harold Bloom’s Map of Misreading and Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight, demonstrate their practices of interpretation in ways of which the theorists rather blatantly consider beyond the reach of their most of their contemporaries (“carrion-eaters” Bloom calls them). Moreover, books of both these types are often written in such abstruse or overwrought styles that issues of practical application seem dishearteningly remote. To me they seem like skirmishes in a cultural war fought from the top, yet already given up for lost.

Still, like the emergence of discourse analysis, the emergence of literary theory is a hopeful indication that the formerly sparse terrain between linguistics and literary studies and is becoming populated, indeed populous. Language and literature programmes can justly take heart that the old divisions and borders are no longer required by academic standards, but detrimental to them.

7. Future prospects

In this final section, I shall expound ten principles for a language programme of the future. Whether and when such a programme will actually emerge in the future I of course cannot determine, but it will almost certainly not emerge without careful planning and profound reflection.

1. The programme should be genuinely compatible with the modern ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy. These ideals constitute, in effect, the theory of our ‘democratic’ societies; the challenge is how to put them into practice. I emphasise the ratio between theory and practice once again to deflect two predictable objections to the programme proposed below. The objection of utopia argues that such ideals can never be fully achieved in practice except in a utopia, which we cannot presume to attain; so programmes like these are merely unrealistic. But this argument can be deconstructed simply by reversing its premises: just because we never fully realise our ideals or reach utopia, we will always have ample space to render our society more equal and democratic than it is at any moment. Freedom, equality, and democracy will always be work in progress, dynamic evolutions and processes which, by their very definitions, demand the sustained participation from us all.

The objection of revolution argues that significant change of the society implies a revolution with an unpredictable potential for disorder, destruction, and chaos. Historical examples are invoked to play upon deep-lying anxieties: France, Russia, Iran, Ethiopia, with their waves of expropriations, arrests, interments, and all the other human rights abuses. But such examples ring false, because those ‘revolutions’ were all staged against corrupt and tyrannical monarchies, not against democracies. In a democracy, the true thrust of social change is not at all to break down or sweep away the existing order but simply to preserve and defend the democratic ideals and theories, which we have already sworn to uphold, by putting them resolutely into practice.

So too with modem education as a democratic institution. In theory, all learners are given equal opportunities to succeed, assigned the same tasks, and given the same examinations. In practice, the opportunities of many learners are significantly abridged by the differentials between the language varieties and strategies of interaction in their home cultures and those in the conventional school (section 3). Beneath the reassuring outward uniformity of lesson plans, standardised tests, and consistent marking by the teachers lies a troubling, uncharted maze of disparities for which some children are punished although they are not responsible.

A truly democratic language programme must be informed by a clear awareness of these differentials and by a firm resolve to build upon those capacities the learners actually possess. Extensive ethnographic research, such Susan U. Philips’ (1983) model exploration of Communication in the Classroom and Community on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation will be required to overcome the unfamiliarity with alternative cultures and to account for their conditions in our theories and practices.

2. The programme should be broadly inclusive. Looking back to our second scale in Fig. 2, the inclusiveness of the programme should be among its highest priorities. In line with the considerations just aired, the inclusiveness of ‘open admissions’ or even ‘affirmative action’ to bring in formerly excluded groups will not be democratic until our currículum can build upon their capacities instead of trying to teach to the vague and wishful stereotypes at which most commercial textbooks seem to be aimed. We ourselves can use interviews, questionnaires, and written assignments as tools for learning about their home environments, expectations, anxieties, and future plans.

3. The programme should promote creativity and self-reliance. Students should be encouraged to regard the subject matter, such as ‘grammar’ or ‘pragmatics’, as resources for expression and communication rather than as dry academic formalities. One strategic means is to observe these resources being put into creative, self-confident uses in the language of African writers, as I am doing in my ‘friendly grammar of English’ now in preparation.

Students also need a realistic understanding of the consequences of English having many varieties, each one appropriate in certain settings of situations and inappropriate in others. They will gain confidence by appreciating how their own home varieties function in respect to ‘grammar’ and ‘lexicon’, and how ‘standard English’ functions, and how these varieties differ. They can then feel that they are acquiring the ‘standard’ variety in addition to, rather than in place of, their home varieties; and that their home variety is a resource to build upon rather than an embarrassing handicap.

4. The programme should explicitly place language and communication at the centre of the curriculum. The topics and content should be relevant to the concerns of the learners both at the current stage of development and at anticipated future stages. Education in the native language should be a communicative forum for discussing issues and "resolving problems relating both the education itself and to lives, aspirations, and careers. Teachers would act as expert consultants on communicative strategies and not just as detectors of ‘errors’ and ‘bad usage’.

5. The programme should highlight the positive achievements of the learners and show them at their best. This priority follows perspicuously from the others just proposed, but it is still remote from routine educational practices. There, learners are commonly subjected to high-pressure situations of performing abstruse closed-ended tasks under severe time constraints, and of having their performances evaluated only by what they did wrong. These tactics are particular deleterious for language learning, where performances are highly sensitive to stress or anxieties that foment errors even when the learners know the right versions. They are judged at their artificial worst, with all the adventitious errors misunderstood to represent their actual competence.

A language curriculum will achieve far more progress and fairness with sensible open-ended tasks on which creativity and self-reliance are recognised and rewarded. One design I have used with learners of English as a foreign language is to explain to another learner how to do a practical task that will actually be performed. Each performer can then explain it to another learner, and each time the resourcefulness and usefulness of the explanation function as measures of the positive achievement.

6. Standards should be gently phased in at stages where they can realistically be managed. In conventional instruction, a commonplace tactic has been to enforce standards and suppress interference during the early stages by drastically restricting the range of expression to a handful of prefabricated utterances. The result is a seemingly fluent but wholly artificial ‘pseudo-discourse’, which tends to alienate the participants and to dilute their interest and motivation.

The unconventional alternative would be to relax standards and accept interference in earIy stages in order to concentrate on building up native-language fluency through a sequence of successive approximations of the target language designed according to the accredited theoretical principles of ‘situated learning’ (Lave and Wenger 1990). Each approximation would be a ‘mini-system’ strategically designed to operate with current skills and to support progress toward more amplified skills without stress or anxiety. The design would continually take into account the habits, expectations, and practices a learner would probably derive from the native language and enlist them for ‘scaffolding’ in the sense of Jerome Bruner (1983) instead of interference.

Each ‘mini-system’ would make the most of modest lexical and grammatical resources. The familiar standards of native-speaker fluency or formal correctness would not be imposed nor used to evaluate performance in early stages, but would be gradually introduced over an extensive series of stages as they become realistically manageable without stress and overload. Utterances would be rated in terms of what a native speaker would understand and not just what a native speaker would say. And errors would be treated as indications of the learners’ hypotheses about language and not as signals of ‘low aptitude or intelligence’.

Much research is still in progress and much more is demanded in order to provide realistic theory-driven and practice-driven descriptions of the emergence of a language system at various stages of fluency in both natural and pedagogical settings, plus an account of the more effective and efficient means of moving from a less advanced stage to a more advanced one. These descriptions would enable us to connect our theory with our to practice by designing a series of mini-systems that enable genuine communication among all the learners from the earliest stages to the latest.

7. The programme should reconcile tradition with modernity. The familiar antagonisms between traditional and modem have been egregiously destructive in Africa. Whereas ‘traditional communities were subject to powerful centripetal impulses’, ‘modern African nations are subject to powerful centrifugal impulses’ (Owomoyela 1996: 60f, 115):

The weakening of traditional group loyalties has resulted in the emergence of a being whose first obligation is to self [and] who sees himself as the measure of all things. He or she feels privileged over the community and the environment also free to expropriate the wealth of the nation, to pollute of destroy the environment, [and] desires to amass wealth beyond what one could possibly ever need.

Ominous consequences have also ensued for language policy; In a continent preoccupied with closing the developmental gap between itself and the industrialised world, those who identify ‘development’ with European languages can always marshal ‘progressive’ arguments to counter seemingly sentimental and retrogressive campaigns on behalf of indigenous mother-tongues (Owomoyela: 1996: 3). Against these trends, Ngugi (1993: 85), has forcefully argued that ‘the foundation of a truly African sensibility’ calls for ‘a more rigorous and committed study of African languages’. Barolong Seboni (1992: 13), Botswana’s greatest poet, has a pithy epigram in the same direction: ‘If you lose your mother’s tongue, she will never speak to you again’ .

The status of English in Africa has been a continua! topic of debates, some of them dangerous politicised. A democratic language programme for English would roundly concur with the sentiment voiced by Ngugi (1986, 1993) that English should be offered as an additional resource and not a replacement of African languages, much less as a tool for downgrading or even exterminating them according to ‘the false and bloody logic of development theory handed to us by imperialism’ wherein ‘the death of many languages’ is ‘the condition for the life of a few’ (Ngugi 1993: 37).

One vital way to uphold this sentiment would be to design our theories and practices in the English programme with a sensitivity toward the learners’ home languages, much like the sensitivity toward language varieties recommended above. Another would be make use of cultural content from the home languages such as those of story telling, as in the Kamehameha project for teaching reading in Hawaii (Au 1980).

Modernity would be most vital in English for Special Purposes and English for Academic Purposes, where learners must be kept current with the terminologies of the fields and professions. One method I am developing at present is to base course materials in English for Business on the terminology used in business education courses, such as accounting.

8. The programme should also reconcile ornamental with instrumental. The subject areas of literature and poetry, which narrow-minded critics of educational policy dismiss as purely ornamental, become resolutely instrumental when we can put into practice the theory proposed above: literature is a domain of discourse in which alternative realities are derived from human knowledge and experience, and poetry is a domain of discourse where alternative practices are derived from the theory of the language. Creativity is a very general capacity and can be applied to science no less than humanities (Langley, Bradshaw, Simon, and Zytkow 1987).

My definitions would shift our major focus from the more academic concerns, such as the mechanics of versifying and the memorisation of Greek names for the schemes and tropes, over to engaging with these alternatives and reflecting on their enrichments of the potential of language and discourse. One method I have found to yield impressive results is to approach literary works from the standpoint of multiple ‘theories of literature’ in the sense of section 6. The participants are cross-divided into groups in two axes. On one axis, each group selects are particular theory, such as feminism, Marxism, or psychoanalysis, and shares reading of major source, e.g., Simone de Beauvoir, Terry Eagleton, or Norman Holland. On the other axis, each group selects one literary text to be read and interpreted from the standpoint of several theories. The readings are presented to the whole class for discussion. This method plainly demonstrates how literary theories can provide guidelines for practices; and how multiple readings of the same text enrich rather than contradict each other. Some students have even told me that their understanding of their own lives had changed after learning to read literature through these theories.

9. The programme should be at least as multicultural as the environment. In our present world, monoculturalism is frankly an anachronism like a mediaeval ball-and-chain, and, as I have pointed out, is also the hidden agenda of an ominous ‘conservative’ coalition bent upon abrogating academic freedoms. Particularly in such regions as Africa, multiculturalism is the de facto situation everywhere, and education must be animated to acknowledge this.

Multiculturalism is also the leading topic and context of most of the prominent African writers in English, who have rendered great services in so memorably bringing to life old African cultures, as in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Okara’s The Voice, Soyinka’s A Season of Anomy, Ngugi’s The River Between, Ekwensi’s Burning Grass, Ndhala’s Jikinya, Cheney-Coker’s The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunhar, and of course Bessie Head’s documentary of Serowe in The Village of the Rain Wind. Some of these authors have also memorably experimented with modifying English for the purpose, as in Okara’s The Voice with its prophetic premonitions of ‘the shadow-devouring trinity of gold, iron, concrete’ (1970 [orig. 1964]: 87).

The qualifier ‘at least’ is in order at a stage in history where multiculturalism can be confidently expected to increase in the near future. Our programmes should not merely be made current but should plan ahead to accommodate these trends and to encourage our students to think about and write about their home cultures and those of the families and ancestors.

10. Finally, the programme should balance theory with practice. By now, this principle is surely not surprising, and I need not expand upon it further. Still, I will close with a passage that pleasantly surprised me in Nguigi’s Moving the Centre by resonating with my own thinking and viewing practice as the driving force of theory (‘conceptualisation’) and as a confluence of the ‘universal’ and ‘the particular’ (1993: 26):

Practice is both the starting point and the testing ground or our conceptualisation of the world [...] The universal is contained in the particular just as the particular is contained in the universal. [...] the human capacity for languages [...] manifests itself in real concrete languages. [...] Even the limited universality of a single language, say English, is realised through the language as actually spoken.

How could it be otherwise if a language is an open theory of human knowledge and experience always driven on and renewed by our discursive practices and which never reaches the utopia of perfect understanding or total communication but for that very reason, can always move closer?

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