Liberating Education and World Englishes

Robert de Beaugrande

Paper Presented to the Language and Literacy Commission

at the 10th World Congress of Comparative Education in Cape Town

1. ‘Banking education’ applied to language

Paulo Freire’s (1970) well-known opposition between banking education (‘educação bancária’) and liberating education (‘educação libertadora’) was originally conceived for the methods of ‘teaching’ the content of schooling. In banking education, the learners numbly recite ‘four times four is sixteen, Belém is the capital of Pará’, whereby spoken or written ‘word’ gets ‘transformed’ ‘into an alienated and alienating verbosity, more sound than significance’. ‘Human beings are seen as entities for adaptation and adjustment’; and ‘reality’ is described as ‘suspended, static, compartmentalized, and well-behaved’. In that ambiance,

the educator’s task, not open to dispute, is to fill the learners with those contents that are cut out of reality and disconnected from the totality in which they were engendered and which lent them significance […] This vision […] minimizes or annuls the creative powers of learners and stimulated their ingenuity rather than their critical thinking. (Freire 1970: 65ff, my translation)69

Why should ‘banking education’ persist even when its inefficiencies and inadequacies have become patently obvious? The main reason is sinister but simple. It most effectively fulfils the mandate imposed upon the schools by ‘modern society’: to apply uniformity of method in order to generate inequality of outcome (Ogbu 1974; Aronowitz and Giroux 1983; Apple 1986). Banking education projects a world of timelessly ‘true facts’ so that all of the learners’ contributions to educational discourse can be strictly and mechanically classified as ‘right answers’ and ‘wrong answers’. The brunt of the responsibility for educational problems and failures thus gets taken away not just from the whole society but also from the individual teacher, whose job has been correctly and unimpeachably performed when the ‘facts’ have been ‘taught’, and gets placed upon each individual learner who fails to reproduce the ‘facts’ correctly. To retain Freire’s metaphor, banking education recognises two currencies: the valid money of ‘true facts’ and the counterfeit money of ‘false facts’. So the learners who circulate ‘false facts’ are not merely like the poor, who just have no money, but like criminals who are passing funny money; and the irrational moralising obsession with stigmatising ‘wrong answers’ may seem more understandable in this light.

The key role of ‘right and wrong answers’ exerts an ominous pressure upon the discourse of education in subject areas where a ‘correct performance’ consists of reproducing the terms, definitions, and explanations of a teacher or textbook. This tactic offsets or conceals the degree to which the concepts and content are themselves not well-defined, even among the authorities, and projects upon the subject matter a convenient but unwarranted certainty and rigidity. Reproducing the definition of a concept in the exact words can be eagerly taken as proof of having ‘understood’ and ‘learned’ the concept, whereas a giving definition by paraphrase may be uneasily regarded as a sign of fuzzy or undisciplined learning. So the opposition between ‘right and wrong answers’ gets extended from what the learners say over to how they say it. In this manner, banking education does indeed ‘minimize or annul the creative powers of learners’ (Freire), who are discouraged from creative and self-reliant integration or elaboration of their knowledge lest they stray from the ‘correct’ ways of reciting it.

I should like to examine one crucial factor in banking education, namely, its particularly ominous pressure upon language education. To borrow Freire’s words again, a language too gets treated as an entity that is ‘suspended, static, compartmentalised, and well-behaved’; and the items for lessons in grammar, vocabulary, and so on ‘get disconnected from the totality in which they were engendered and which lent them significance’ — both from the language as a total system and from the total field of real-life discourse. So the rigid opposition between ‘right and wrong answers’ gets extended once again, this time to ‘correct and incorrect English’ (or whatever other language is the medium of the discourse). Performances are judged by how close they come to sounding like a presumed native speaker, whether or not the learners know or care what they are talking about; and ‘the word’ does indeed get ‘transformed’ ‘into an alienated and alienating verbosity, more sound than significance’ (Freire).

To illustrate my point, we can examine this sample of school discourse reported by Sinclair and Brazil (1982: 45). They observed a consistent pattern of discourse moves based upon the triad of Initiation by the teacher (shown as T), Response by a learner (shown as L), and Follow-up by the teacher.

[1] Initiation T Give me a sentence using an animal’s name as food, please.

Response L1 We shall have a beef for supper tonight.

Follow-up T Good. That’s almost right, but ‘beef’ is uncountable so it’s ‘we shall have beef’, not ‘we shall have a beef’.

Initiation Try again, someone else.

Bid L2 Sir

Nomination T Yes Freddie

Response L2 We shall have a plate of sheep for supper tonight.

Follow-up T No, we don’t eat ‘sheep’, we eat ‘mutton’ or ‘lamb’.

Initiation Say it correctly.

Response L2 We shall have a plate of mutton for supper tonight.

Follow-up T Good. We shall have mutton for supper. Don’t use ‘a plate’ when there’s more than one of you.

We can immediately grant Sinclair and Brazil’s point that the discourse of schooling is highly structured and clearly disparate from discourses outside the schools. And the disparity between school discourse and the normal discourse of learners is a major but rarely acknowledged cause of problems and failures (Heath 1982; Philips 1983). The task posed by the teacher in sample [1] is purely formalist: to drill a weak lexical principle of English whereby the ‘animal’s name as food’ is, in certain special cases only, not the animal’s ordinary name. This strangely artificial task gets haphazardly overlaid with the task of sorting out count nouns (like ‘a plate’) from mass nouns (like ‘beef’).

Discourse like sample [1] can be justly characterised as blocked communication in three senses, all typical what Freire called the ‘banking approach’. First, the content of the discourse is irrelevant to the lived experience of the learners; nobody cares at all for what ‘food’ the learners like to eat and why, or for what their menu might be for ‘tonight’. Second, the learners are being deliberately put at risk of demonstrating their ignorance so that the teacher’s superior knowledge can be displayed. Third, the ‘meta-linguistic’ knowledge about English food names, mass nouns, and so on is not being communicated to the learners, who are merely told you must say this and must not say that, and left to infer why, e.g., why on earth ‘more than one of you’ cannot have ‘a plate of mutton’ if you can stomach the stuff.

But it would be woefully mistaken to blame this blockage either on any one English teacher or on the community of English teachers. We have been saddled with a ‘banking’ conception of education which may seem almost workable in some subject areas, such as mathematics and geography, but is horribly unworkable for a language. The compulsion to produce tabulations of ‘right and wrong answers’ has prevented us from appreciating a fact that would leap out at us if we looked at substantive samples of real discourse in English: most of the choices a fluent speaker or a writer makes are not dictated by ‘correctness’, but are decided by what seems functional and appropriate for the context, style, and prosody (Beaugrande in preparation).

Banking education has accordingly thrust us into a quixotic crusade for a rigid ‘correctness’ that is largely inapplicable to real-life communication. Adding insult to this massive injury, society faces denounces us for the failure of the crusade whenever some self-promoting politician or journalist sounds the alarm of a ‘literacy crisis’. These alarms are coupled with demands whose message is, in effect, that banking education must redouble its crusade for ‘standard English’ and ‘correct grammar’. This situation can never improve if, as I claim, the banking approach to language education is itself the major source and cause of the crisis.

To appreciate this causality, we can take note of one typical alarm about the ‘plight of the American language’ published in the Saturday Review of 4 December 1973 (quoted from Stafford 1974: 91ff). There, we are admonished that ‘the condition of the real language is critical’; ‘it may already be in the terminal wards, soon to kick the bucket’. ‘Besides the neologisms that are splashed all over the body of the American language like the daubings of a chimpanzee turned loose with finger paints, the poor thing has had its parts of speech broken to smithereens’. ‘Verbs are used as nouns and nouns are used as verbs’ (as in ‘this course is structured for students interested in the construct of existentialism’). Special venom was vented upon the adverb ‘hopefully’ (‘a nice, shiny, new boo-boo’) and the Conjunction ‘like’ (a ‘disgrace’).

The users of such language were in their turn branded ‘pranksters’, ‘tinkers with tin ears’, and ‘blackguards’. The alarmist called for ‘a new kind of censorship’, to be reinforced with physical punishments. Ad writers would be ‘put into stocks for a month and fed mutton soup’ (not sheep soup?); school children would have ‘their backsides tanned and their mouths washed out with brown soap’. Unaccountably, their teachers would be only ‘cashiered’, and not, as we might have anticipated, publicly spat upon and then flogged.

We could hardly find a more revealing display of abject ignorance about real English and real usage, e.g., about the highly productive tendencies for using verbs as nouns, and nouns as verbs. Insofar as there really is any ‘literacy crisis’, it can be attributed to two major factors. The first factor, displayed by alarmist discourse, is a general inability to explain how real language works, and a compensatory proclivity to fall back upon traditional prescriptive and prescriptive advice and upon inconsistent or purely arbitrary ‘rules’ about such weighty concerns as ‘dangling modifiers’ and ‘split infinitives’. The second and closely related factor is a general anxiety shared by teachers and learners as well as by policy-makers and alarmists, about whether anyone’s usage or ‘grammar’ might at any moment be ‘incorrect’. Naturally, people can be readily convinced that the language is in a real ‘crisis’, but this is a crisis wherein the general ignorance of the whole society about language gets blamed upon the most innocent and defenceless group, namely the would-be learners.

These two factors assumed their ‘crisis’ proportions in places like the US when the broadening of educational policies from the 1960s onward triggered a massive diversification of English varieties among the learner population. We were abruptly confronted with the consequences of the vagueness and obscurity of traditional school discourse about ‘English’ and ‘grammar’, which had only worked at all as long as the learners’ language varieties were fairly proximate to school discourse. We were in effect being expected to induct this diverse population into one ‘standard’ variety of educational or academic English that would constitute the ‘right answers’ on written examinations anywhere in the curriculum. But most of us had never been trained for the task; we knew too little about these diverse varieties to judge their distinctiveness in respect to the ‘Standard English’; and neither we nor the official experts in areas like ‘linguistics’ and ‘grammar’ had any notion of how people might actually transform their own language variety into a different one. Worse yet, many of us did not even grasp that we were indeed encountering alternative varieties, each with its own functional system; we had assumed all along that we were encountering only a random and undifferentiated mass of ‘errors’ and ‘wrong language’.

This long-standing assumption fatally doomed the well-meaning programmes in so-called ‘remedial English’ (a term which itself connotes dysfunction or disease). Our new population of learners could hardly help but feel thoroughly alienated by the continual and unfair confrontation with the absolute ‘wrongness’ of their home varieties. Even those learners who did undertake the enormous task of transforming their own language varieties discovered that we could provide little operational guidance. We didn’t know either where they were coming from nor how they could get where they wanted to go; we only knew where they were supposed to end up. They were to end with up a command of ‘Standard English’, which they were somehow to absorb by being regaled with examples in our textbooks and anthologies; and we couldn’t explain in operational terms how ‘Standard English’ works either. Nor did we appreciate the perils our learners would a face if they did transform the language only to find themselves now sharply alienated from their home cultures (Fordham 1988; Gates 1992).

2. ‘Liberating education’ applied to language

The foregoing section has outlined my account of how ‘banking education’ (Freire’s ‘educação bancária’) had led almost inevitably into a self-propelling atmosphere of ‘crisis’. Now we can consider how Freire’s concept of liberating education (‘educação libertadora’) might be applied to the language curriculum. As a first step, we could shift our orientation and goals away from ‘correctness’ over to effective communication. Our confrontational role in setting tricky and tedious tasks like ‘give me a sentence using an animal’s name as food!’ and then parading the learners ignorance by picking at faults, real or imaginary, in their performance, would yield to a co-operative role as communicative consultants for presenting strategies that build upon the learners’ current competence.

This step will entail some challenging requirements, but these are at least easy to define. Language educators must be supplied with realistic assessments of the languages, language varieties, and language variations which our learners at various ages or in various regions bring with them into the educational setting. These assessments must then be carefully compared and contrasted with the target language and language variety of the long-range instructional process. In this way, we shall finally have a workable view of where we are starting from and where we are going, and not just (as in the ‘banking’ approach), a view of where we want to end up.

The most vital resources for these requirements would be substantive corpora of authentic data of three types: (1) the ‘Standard English’ we wish to make accessible; (2) the local variety or varieties of English which our learners might encounter outside the schools; and (3) the English of typical learner groups at various stages. These corpora should be made available for user-friendly browsing by teachers and learners as well as by policy-makers or others concerned with language education, in order to provide hands-on experience in exploring the realities of language and language learning.

To make this browsing genuinely productive, we shall require user-friendly modes of discourse about the grammar and lexicon of real English, wherein the various participants can discuss and negotiate how to describe the data. In my own key experiences and in those reported by others in similar work (e.g. Sinclair 1991), real data are more specific, more interesting, and more memorable than the artificial examples we so often find in textbooks or invent in the classroom. Even fluent native speakers of English cannot trust their intuitions, precisely because, as I have said, most of the choices in real discourse are decided by what is functional and appropriate to the context, style, and prosody. You can’t be reliably sure of what you would say until the occasion comes when you do say it. Besides, you need to consider also what other people would say, and there intuition is even less helpful.

In the time and space allotted here, I can only offer some brief illustrations. For our first requirement, corpora of ‘Standard English’, I shall present some data I drew from the Bank of English at Birmingham University in July of 1994, when the corpus contained approximately 200 million words of authentic text and discourse. Suppose you wanted to tell your learners of English which verbs tend to get used after the expression ‘couldn’t help’ (or ‘could not help’), which serves to explain or justify some action or event. Which verbs would you offer?

Suppose now I told you that almost half of the corpus data (totalling 515 uses) displayed just four verbs — could you name any of them? Here they are: ‘feeling’ (68 uses), ‘noticing’ (58), ‘thinking’ (59), and ‘wondering’ (49). These data I myself could not have predicted, but I might ‘retro-dict’ them by noting that these verbs represent actions which could well seem to elude conscious control and to lead into emotions, perceptions, and thoughts a speaker of English might feel self-conscious about and want to justify

Moreover, these same verbs could also provide analogies for most of the other verbs I found, even when these seem unpredictable or novel. The top-ranked verb ‘feeling’ could stand in analogy to ‘crying, laughing/chuckling, smiling/grinning, blushing, fearing, liking, loving, marvelling, sympathising, wincing, worrying’, plus ‘being touched, struck, moved, charmed, impressed, jealous, emotionally involved, fascinated, carried away, swept along, amused, puzzled, nervous, frightened, surprised, shocked, offended’. Emotions seem to make an English speaker particularly self-conscious whether they be pleasant or unpleasant, witness the list of items I found together with the verb ‘feel’: ‘enthusiasm, passion, thrill, pleased, impressed, vindicated’, as contrasted with ‘envy, guilty, ashamed, sorry, miffed, apprehensive, alarmed’.

The less frequent verb ‘noticing’ could provide an analogy for ‘seeing, looking at, glance, hearing, overhearing, remembering, being consciously aware’. The verb ‘thinking’ could be analogous to ‘reflect, imagining, considering, knowing’, and could subsume the frequent ‘wondering’, where uncertainty rather than emotion would make people self-conscious.

A more detailed report on these and similar data will appear elsewhere. Here I would only summarise several points. Such data give us a far more precise and reliable picture of real usage than can be attained by any other means. The data can readily be described and discussed in user-friendly discourse about ‘verbs of feeling’, ‘verbs of thinking’, and so on, without the staid battery of diagrams and trees that have arisen from trying to make ‘English grammar’ look more formal and rigorous than it is.

The data also indicate that real usage does not justify the tidy split between ‘grammar’ and ‘vocabulary’ we find in so many textbooks and lesson plans. Grammatical patterns and vocabulary items tend to be chosen together, such as ‘could + not + help + verb of emotion in the present participle with ‑ing’; and ‘could + not + help + but verb of thinking in the infinitive’. Conventional teaching methods present the ‘grammar’ in modes that are too global and general, leading learners to over-generalise the rules and produce solecisms; and present the ‘vocabulary’ in modes that are too local and specific, giving the impression of a miscellaneous list of unconnected items. Data like those I have sketched suggest that the vocabulary of English forms a network of items organised according to what typically goes with what.

For our second requirement, corpora of the varieties of English, we are at present much less well equipped, but projects like the International Corpus of English are beginning to lend considerable substance to the term ‘World Englishes’ (cf. Kachru 1992). For far too long, our profession has been trading upon terms like ‘British English’ or ‘American English’, or just plain ‘Standard English’ as if each term designated one uniform and precisely defined language variety which we (of course) fluently command. We like to ignore or forget the true state of affairs in Britain or America: a diffuse bundle of varieties and variations, some judged more ‘Standard’ and others much less so. We have not been nearly so keen to trade upon terms like ‘Hong Kong English’ or ‘Botswana English’, and I would be surprised to hear the term ‘Standard’ applied to these post-colonial varieties at all.

I shall offer some illustrations from ‘South African English’, although it constitutes a special case for which the issues of ‘standards’ and ‘standardisation’ have been discussed for some time (see now the fine overview in Smit 1996). I have seen descriptions indicating the presence of three varieties with names that range from the tactlessness of ‘Conservative, Respectable, Extreme’ to the relative neutrality of ‘Cultivated, General, and Broad’ (Mesthrie 1992). Though I am not too familiar with the region, I would surmise, on the basis of my reading, that three may be a radical underestimate of the actual linguistic diversity within South African English.

The recent dramatic upswing in the demand for English in South Africa presents a grand opportunity but also a great danger. The removal of apartheid naturally means that South African society will become more unrestrainedly competitive, and the signs are already unmistakable. And, for the reasons I have expounded in section 1, a highly competitive society favours the ‘banking’ approach to education as a motor for offering uniform opportunities to all while generating and justifying social inequalities. So if language education in South Africa were left to run its own course, an intense ‘banking’ approach to English-language education could be predicted, which could only be flagrantly ineffective and alienating in a society with a past history of acute social and regional diversification.

Freire’s very term ‘banking education’ takes on penetrating overtones in a society where the command of certain varieties of English translates into larger deposits in literal banks. In a public debate at the ‘English Teachers Connect’ Conference at Wits University in July 1997, we heard Andrew Foley declaiming that English is, among other grand things, the language of commerce and business; and he might have added, in tune with B.B. McCallen (1989) from the marvellously named ‘London Economist Intelligence Unit’, that the teaching of English is a ‘market for a world commodity’. Foley also cited statistics about the huge percentages of parents who want to their children to learn English, and the smaller but still dominant percentages of parents who want to their children to be taught in English. These percentages tell us less about English than about the natural desire of parents for their children to have access to better jobs by means of ‘better’ English. But neither the apostles of Standard English like Foley nor these parents seem to appreciate the mechanics of a post-modern capitalism where information and communication have become independent commodities. If the children of all those parents who wish it did acquire ‘better English’, then having it would not mean better jobs; just look at the unemployed or underemployed masses of speakers of ‘Standard English’ in the US today. So, questions about varieties of English in South Africa are also questions about the prospects for the new democracy.

Over the last year, I have been examining data from the Corpus of South African English (CSAE) established at the University of Port Elizabeth under the supervision of Chris Jeffrey and Linda Williams. Some of the contrasts against British English are not hard to notice. One is the enormously popular marker ‘hey’, which the Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk et al. 1985: 853) mentions for British English only once as a ‘call for attention’; the same work mentions ‘eh’ as an ‘impolite request for repetition’.

So conventional British grammar-books seem to regard ‘hey’ as a marginal or even superfluous item. But the 86 occurrences of ‘hey’ we found in the South African corpus data impressively indicated its status it as a multi-functional communicative marker. The data do occasionally show it being used to ‘call for attention’ [2] or to ‘request a repetition’ [3], but these uses were uncommon. (The speakers are indicated by S plus a number or else by an initial; / marks a short pause and // marks a long pause.) Much more common was to encourage a confirmation, sometimes casual as in [4], and sometimes urgent, as [5]. Notice some other items with a similar function, such as ‘I suppose’ in [4], ‘no?’ in [5], and ‘don't you think?’ in [6].

[2] S4: the curtains won’t look so lekker S3: / hey Loki [a black cat] / are you going to take a flying leap onto Sandy s head ?

[3] S2: Tracy are the lights of your car still on? S5: hey? S2: are your lights still on? S3: there’s a glow out there

[4] It’s in town / just off North End I suppose hey

[5] but you’ve voted hey? you’ve voted before? // nineteen fifty-five or something? no? //

[6] H: there’s a lot of work hey? don’t you think? S: ja our building experiments

The data also turned up uses in a protest, e.g. [7], and in warnings about dangers, whether remote [8] or imminent [9].

[7] just wandering up the pavement there S1: hey but we don’t have a pavement / ja / ja S2: no I mean I mean the Main road

[8] you know have to oil those passages H: it’s very toxic hey / those paint fumes

[9] do the presentation? J: I’ll bring it / don’t ask me too many questions hey // don’t start all that ’cause I’ll biff you one

I also found ‘hey’ as a signal of emotions indicated by other means as well, such as ‘oh my word’ in [10] (which also shows one use of the warning ‘hey’) and ‘phew’ in [11].

[10] I’m making that // public statement ... H: oh my word hey // that’s that’s / no that’s a real / J: this is being recorded hey

[11] all morning sorting out the lines S: oof A: that's something of a problem hey // phew J: they sort out the lines / they spend hours there

Although I could not document this with my corpus data, I suspect ‘hey’ can also have a solidarity function for putting people at ease and avoiding social formality, as in the ‘thanks hey’ you often hear from people in customer service, as compared to the stuffy ‘thank you sir’.

My data also showed some interesting examples of ‘hey’ used when you are quoting what you or other people might say to get attention [12] or express emotion [13], or perhaps to do both at once [14].

[12] but there would be a generosity of spirit that says hey look there were some mistakes made here

[13] the people in Delta were saying hey this is terrible when a BA a BA graduate has got to spray cars

[14] trying to say well who am I or what am I you know / saying that hey I’m still suffering from a standard nine syndrome / [laugh]

Another noticeable speciality of South African English (also in the English of Botswana) is the universal tag question ‘is it?’ In British English, again according to the Comprehensive Grammar of Quirk et al. (1985: 810), the subject of a tag question must be a pronoun that either repeats the subject of the preceding statement or refers to the same thing; and must agree in number, person, and gender, as in [15] and [16]

[15] the boat hasn’t left, has it?

[16] Joan recognised you, didn’t she?

But in South African English, you can hear the non-agreeing tags ‘is it?’ or ‘isn’t it?’ no matter what the subject of the previous statement might be, nor with much regard for the tense of the verb. I had first noticed these usages in written sources representing causal speech, as in Alex La Guma’s Time of the Butcherbird [17-18] and Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People [19].

[17] Things are going to be awright, isn’t it? (Time 53)

[18] we like the good life, isn’t it? (Time 54)

[19] You don’t like I must keep the keys. Isn’t it. (July 69)

The corpus data, though not plentiful, indicated some decisively communicative functions. The non-agreeing tag was the negative ‘isn’t it? when used either by the same speaker to seek to confirmation [20] or by another speaker to give confirmation [21]. The non-agreeing tag was usually the positive ‘is it? when used by another speaker to indicate that you are interested or impressed, as in [22-24], or that you are doubtful and about to disagree, as in [25-26].

[20] H: David's doing history isn’t it?

[21] S1: Beethoven Symphonies // and we played them the other day and they sound so terrible when you get used to a CD / S2: isn’t it?

[22] S4: It’ll be in Johannesburg // S3: is it ? ah

[23] S1: he’s got a place at Onderstepoort S2: is it?

[24] S3: it was such a mess that we had to have the whole car resprayed S2: is it?

[25] S: she is a fat cat // S2: is it? // she’s not fat

[26] S1: she studied art at the Slade S2: is it? / no she’s not going to do art she’s doing English / at Oxford

I found just one use of this ‘is it’ with ‘hey’, apparently for being deeply impressed:

[27] S1: she’s permanent staff but she works like a blighter //S2: Is it hey? really? She uh did she find a job easily after her uh the course?

Frequencies in corpus data ore notoriously dodgy to interpret, but I was struck by finding only six clear uses of the non-agreeing ‘is it?’ tag and two of ‘isn’t it?’ as compared to 87 uses of ‘hey’. Quite possibly, the tag is fairly rare because ‘hey’ serves some of the same functions, especially for seeking confirmation.

Now, seen from the viewpoint of British English, the non-agreeing tag ‘is it?’ would simply be an isolated and insignificant ‘error’. The grammar of Standard English actually does have a non-agreeing ‘is it’ which is not in a tag question and which can relate to nouns with a different number [28-31], gender [32], or person [33]. Here are some examples from the CSAE:

[28] if you cared to think back to over the days that you've been here in this department which is what / it’s many years now isn't it?

[29] I said to him is it the kids or is it the teachers you enjoy? so he said well everything

[30] is it just you and your husband in the house? /

[31] what is it is it dolls and uh uh uh toys little trains and all these things I bought?

[32] how old is it is it a boy? I: He’s in standard seven / ja

[33] to listen to the way he speaks and what he speaks about // J: uh // is it me? G: mm

It would be functionally inappropriate to describe this pattern in conventional grammatical terms, with the ‘it’ being a pronoun referring to the same thing as some nearby noun. Rather the ‘it’ has the communicative function of designating something like ‘the issue or the people or things involved in what we’re talking about’. So we are talking about how long ‘you’ve been here’ [28], or about something you ‘enjoy’ [29] or bought’ [31], and the ‘it’ is the best and most general pronoun for referring to that still undetermined something.

I submit that the universal ‘is it?’ tag-question in South African English is precisely an extension of this same communicative function to another pattern, as we see most clearly in data like [28], where you have ‘it’ as the subject both of the statement and of the tag question. What may be called an ‘error’ from a narrowly technical and British view of Grammar is in fact more appropriate to this broad communicative function than the technically ‘correct’ versions like these:

[21a] they sound so terrible when you get used to a CD / S2: don’t they?

[26a ] S1: she studied art at the Slade S2: did she?

[27a ] she works like a blighter / S2: does she?

In effect, South African English is being consistent within English Grammar from a perspective than is applied by British English. But we can recognise this consistency only by looking at the communicative functions in authentic data.

For our third and final requirement, corpora of learner English, we are just at the beginning (cf. Granger 1996; Milton and Freeman 1996). We cannot overcome ‘banking education’ and its poor results until we understand the conditions under which learners of English approach the task. The most determining factor is surely the learners’ home language or language variety, but this point has gotten confused in several ways. Behaviourist pedagogy and its ‘audio-lingual method’ have mistakenly assumed that if the native language is simply excluded from the learning situation, its influence can be discounted. Contrastive linguistics has mistakenly assumed that the formal distinctions in the grammar account for all the influence. Both views failed to consider the communicative functions whereby the patterns of the native language and the foreign language are much more than mere ‘bits of behaviour’ or ‘grammatical forms’. Textbook publishers have in turn profited from all the confusion to market materials which ignore the learners’ native language and thus can be sold world-wide (cf. Phillipson 1992; Pennycook 1994).

The ‘banking’ approach has put so much stress upon ‘errors’ that language teachers have been coerced into an absurd routine. To keep the errors down right from the start, we sacrifice lifelike communication. The learners’ performance gets drastically restricted to reciting mere handfuls of inane invented sentences or dialogues. I recall one dialogue in a beginning Spanish textbook supposedly between an adolescent and a priest, where, after the exchange of greetings, the boy inquires ‘what are the names of the days of the week?’ (My own comment that the boy couldn’t think of any other safe subject for talking to a priest was not appreciated by the devoutly Catholic teacher.)

The alternative for a ‘liberating’ approach would be to emphasise communication throughout the learning process and accept and build upon approximations. At any one stage, the target variety would not be the far-off final stage of ‘Standard English’ but the strategic approximation that can be safely managed at that stage. We shall need teaching materials that sustain a designed sequence of strategic approximations such that (a) all learners can participate at each stage; and (b) the transition from one stage to the next will not leave any significant portion of learners behind (Beaugrande 1997).

I can only outline some of the problems in the space available here, using sample of Botswana learners’ English kindly provided by my colleague Prof. Alec Pongweni from his college courses in phonetics and grammar. We need to distinguish consistently between fundamental errors, such as displaced word-order in [34] and [35] versus marginal errors such as solecisms in [36-38].

[34] This can be represented as follows such.

[35] Each a very word is attached by a line called brunch.[branch]

[36] the lips close to discourage air

[37] When the nasal cavity is closed, the lips constitute the final office [orifice?] of the mouth cavity

[38] vocal cords are apart so air is not abrupted

A separate issue are the oddities in reasoning or logic, like these:

[39] the lip spread is reduced to a minimum requirement

[40] the lower lip bites the upper teeth

[41] a clock has two faces, clockwise and anticlockwise

At least some of these evidently arise from the learners not commanding a reliable meta-language for describing language, and relying instead on spontaneous explanations, which can be strikingly imaginative, e.g. regarding the use of the auxiliary verb ‘do’ [42], a semantic contradiction [43], the difference between positive and negative entailments [44], and metaphor [45].

[41] when we are having such cases it is time when our ‘do’ comes in to rescue us

[42] A man who is married cannot be a bachelor or a spinister. ‘My unmarried sister is married to a bachelor’. This sentence may nullify a marriage.

[43] (a) ‘The needle is too short’. This means that the needle is too short that it cannot be tried, and the needle is below the reach of an average thickness of the cloth. (b) ‘The needle is not long enough’. The expression is that the needle is long but one has to struggle in order to make the needle function the duty.

[44] ‘His typewriter has bad intensions’: The expression is metaphorical. The sentence may be interpreted to mean that the typewriter has bad attitude of making mistakes.

Such problems might be most effectively reduced if our learners could browse strategically designed corpora of English usage. Also, we might seek to make the ways we teach these issues to future English teachers rather less academic in both our terms and our content.

At all events, we are still far from having comparative assessments of how communicative functions are described in pairs of languages like English and Setswana. Providing them will demand intense labour, but I believe it is crucial to the success of the entire enterprise of teaching English ‘as a world commodity’. I would strongly advocate such comparative studies for MA dissertations and PhD theses.

3. Chances for change

Do we have realistic chances for change from a ‘banking’ approach over toward a ‘liberating’ approach to language education ‘in a changing world’ (Halliday 1994)? If, as Freire has already shown us, the banking approach serves the interests of social and economic domination, our attempts to transform it might meet with powerful resistance, as Freire also predicted:

So they react almost instinctively against any attempt toward an education that stimulates authentic thinking, which would not allow itself to be entangled in partial visions of reality but would always seek out the connections from point to point, or from problem to problem

The programme advocated here would do just that by reconnecting our English to the realities of authentic usage, and by highlighting the connections among the respective points of grammar and vocabulary. Moreover, the command of ‘Standard English’ — whichever of its many meanings that term might invoke (cf. Milroy and Milroy 1985) — has long had a special role in Africa as a key to power and privilege (Ngég« 1986). The burning question today is what will happen if we try to transform the role of English into a tool of democratic empowerment instead of a tool of authoritarian disempowerment — a ‘foreign anguish’ (Marlene Nourbese Philip, quoted in Owomoyela 1996: 9; compare Philip 1989), a ‘language of obstruction’ (Aberra 1997) and a medium to perpetuate ‘the poverty of nations’ (Manley 1991). We can expect to encounter resistance from speakers whose claim to status and employment rests solely on their command of so-called ‘Standard English’, and who may be secretly pleased at the meagre successes of conventional teaching. They may have taken over the neo-colonialist attitude of ‘deep-seated mistrust of the African who presumes to speak English too well’, which Kachru (1986: 133) has diagnosed in the lucubrations of one Clifford Prator (1968: 471), supposedly a luminary of EFL: ‘a proud speaker of RP’ ‘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’. Of course, such people will not advocate ineffective English teaching; they will simply raise strident alarms over any genuinely liberating changes, especially ones for working with strategic approximations instead of pouncing on every last ‘error’.

Still, the most serious victims of the banking approach are also those who are best positioned to make a change: the English teachers themselves. They can have no loyalty to a banking approach that has effectively prevented them from performing the jobs successfully and saddled them with lifelong frustration. If they can be supplied with the resources I have proposed for browsing real English and understanding language varieties and variations, they will see for themselves the most cogent motives for change and the means as well. At that point, the world of English teaching may finally enter the international centre-stage for a ‘liberating’ approach to education.

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