New
Developments Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign Language:
Taking
Democracy Seriously
Robert de Beaugrande
Paper Presented to the South African Applied
Linguistics Association
Meeting with the Theme
‘Languages and the New Democracy’
University of the North at Sovenga, 7-9 July
1998
A. Taking ‘democracy’
seriously: Freedom or free market?
1. ‘Democracy’ is an enormously popular word;
recent commentators in political science have remarked that virtually every
country in the world of 1990s calls itself a ‘democracy’. Doing so is expected
to lend respectability even to the most authoritarian regimes and to qualify
them for such benefits as free trade, investment by multinational corporations,
and ‘economic aid’ from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in
exchange for ransoming off the choicest sectors of the national economy (Martin
and Schumann, 1997)
2. This popularity poses a grave threat. The
term may be degraded to mere window-dressing for any political system with no
more meaning than a pretentious brand name pasted on a shoddy commodity —what
Julius Nyerere in his speech at Scotland Africa ’97 aptly called ‘pre-packaged
Coca-Cola democracy’. The concept behind the term could no longer be taken
seriously as a significant commitment to human rights and equality. And in
fact, even in the oldest and supposedly most stable and thorough democracies in
Europe and North America, human rights and human equality have been under a
sustained and withering attack as wealthy coalitions in one country after
another have secured the election of right-wing governments whose mandate is
manifestly to roll back all the social progress and social welfare achieved in this
century. There, ‘democracy’, and ‘equality’ too, means abandoning whole
societies to the mechanisms of the ‘free market’ in its most ruthless 19th-century
incarnations whose greatest apostle and apologist was Herbert Spencer, the
author of the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’. In the social Darwinism of
Spencer and his troops of followers, society can only harm itself by favouring
social policies and programmes concerned with job security, labour unions,
workers’ benefits, retirement pensions, welfare, unemployment compensation, or
any consideration for women and minorities in the job market. All that merely
encourages ‘unfitness’ that does not deserve to survive; the Spencerians
evidently imagined that the jobless and the homeless immediately die off in
fulfilment of their social duty.
3. South Africans would do well to heed these
global trends, lest your own ‘new democracy’ merely be made the occasion for
getting swallowed up by the same global ‘free market’. Already, the public
media are bristling with terms like ‘privatisation’, ‘rationalisation’,
‘foreign investment’ and ‘offshore banking’ — off which all mean, in plain
language, laying off workers and slashing or shutting down all institutions and
enterprises that do not turn quick high profits, which promptly get funneled
out of the country to evade paying taxes. Inevitably, the Rand steadily loses
it value. And as the tax base and the currency rates melt away, so do the hopes
for better homes, better schools, and better health care.
4. Just how anti-democratic these forces really
are can be seen in their continual efforts to block the ambitious democratic
reforms of the Mandela government, even whilst they deviously claim to be the
very champions of democratic principle. One data sample will have to suffice
here, this one calculated to derail the government’s programme for providing
decent housing to the millions of African citizens still languishing in the
slums of ‘townships’ and ‘locations’ created by apartheid. To block such
competition, the private housing industry and its backers are portraying the
programme as an exercise in ‘prescriptive bureaucratic control’ and ‘state
intervention’ that violates the principles of a ‘democratic society’, ‘wastes
money’, and ignores the lessons of ‘history’.
[1] Should consumers be protected from the financial
risk of structural defects? If so, how should the consumer protection be paid
for? The controversy reflects a deeper conflict of approaches: prescriptive
bureaucratic control versus free competition in a democratic society. History
demonstrates that delivery and standards can best be enhanced through competitive
economic activity; the goal of state intervention should be to enable
markets to work and not to prescribe to and exercise control over
entrepreneurs and consumers. The council and these authorities are attempting
to do what the poor can do better (that is, build houses); in the
process we are wasting money which could be better spent on things the
poor cannot do, namely production of infrastructure and housing support.
Instead of the prescriptive building code, the level of building
standards should be negotiated between suppliers and consumers and
specified in a contract. To enable this we need maximum flexibility […]
depending on the source of the end user’s finances. […] Over-regulated
markets will tend to become cost-ineffective, unproductive and slow on output
[and will] stifle the initiative which drives development. […]
At present, the most rapid delivery of housing is happening through the ‘self-help’
efforts of homeless householders [sic!] themselves, as they erect informal
structures and convert these into a home, with hundreds and thousands of
units arising in a mosaic of seeming unplanned yet inherently rational urban
form. The typical SA informal settlement is a useful example of
appropriate usage of resources. [and] addresses many priorities of the
urban poor. […] Kimberly and Johannesburg were once informal sheet iron
settlements and are now sophisticated urban environments.
(Johannesburg Business Day,
16.9.1997)
The report solemnly warns the nation against the dire dangers of
‘over-regulated markets’ ‘becoming cost-ineffective, unproductive and slow on
output’ — in plain language, yielding lower private profits for the housing
industry. So the government is told to stand aside, whilst private ‘suppliers’
upgrade the ‘housing’ already ‘delivered’ ‘through the self-help efforts of
homeless householders’, and under ‘contracts’ whereby the ‘suppliers’ can
(freely) ‘negotiate’ to squeeze every last Rand out of each ‘end user’s
finances’ and can (freely) insert abstrusely worded disclaimers of legal
responsibility for ‘structural defects’ if the roof should fall in and kill the
occupants.
5. The discourse itself actually anticipates the
‘conversion’ in the devious ways it describes a ‘township’, where, as Steve
Biko (1978, p. 109) has famously remarked, it is ‘a miracle for anyone to live
up to adulthood’. The draughty overcrowded hovels are called ‘informal
structures’, already well on theit way to being ‘converted into homes’. The
slum districts are in turn called ‘informal settlements’ constituting a ‘mosaic
of seeming unplanned yet inherently rational urban form’, ‘exemplifying
appropriate usage of resources’, and ‘addressing many priorities of the urban
poor’. If you doubt that ‘informal sheet iron settlements’ will get
transformed into ‘sophisticated urban
environments’, you just recall the history of ‘Kimberly and Johannesburg’ and
conveniently forget whose low-paid labour in the mines transformed them, and
how many of the homes of those same labourers are still ‘informal sheet iron
settlements’ a century later.
6. Discourse like sample [1] amply demonstrates
the real dangers to the new ‘democratic society’ lie not in ‘prescriptive
building codes’ or ‘over-regulated markets’ but from the unmistakable
intent of the ‘free marketeers’ to monopolise the new ‘freedom’ to secure the
private profits of the few against the social and economic well-being of the
many. No one who has seen the new Constitution of South Africa can doubt that
‘democracy’ has triumphed in theory. The agenda now is the
enormous labours of taking it seriously
in practice.
B. ‘Democracy’ in education:
Uniformity or equality?
7. My reasons for opening a
paper on language education with a brief look at the current context of
‘democracy’ and the global ‘free market’ may become plainer when I inquire how
that context may have shaped the conventional approaches to education. The
crucial shaping force comes directly from the mandate imposed upon the schools
by a ‘modern society’ which calls itself a ‘democracy’ but does not take the
concept seriously enough. The mandate for education is to apply uniformity of method in order to
generate inequality of outcome (cf.
Ogbu, 1974; Aronowitz and Giroux, 1983; Apple, 1986). This mandate encourages
teaching to operate as a conveyor for an endless list of absolutely ‘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 from society and from the 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 memorise and recite the ‘facts’
correctly.
8. When the division between ‘right and wrong answers’
sustains the whole enterprise, then successful learning is measured by the
ability to reproduce the terms, definitions, and explanations of
a teacher or textbook in the exact
words. The learners are discouraged from creative and self-reliant integration or
elaboration of their knowledge lest they stray from the ‘correct’ ways of
reciting it.
9. Perhaps the most virulently undemocratic
consequences ensue for language education.
The demand for strictly and mechanically classifying ‘right answers’ and ‘wrong
answers’ fosters an approach to language placed upon a conveyor belt as an
endless list of sample utterances or sentences that are either ‘correct’ or
‘incorrect’, ‘grammatical’ or ungrammatical’, and so on. Performances are
judged by how close they come to sounding like a presumed ‘fluent native
speaker’, whether or not the learners know or care what they are talking about.
10. I must again be content with one sample, this one
reported by Sinclair and Brazil (1982, p. 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.
[2] 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).
11. Discourse like sample [2] can be justly
characterised as anti-democratic
communication in three respects. First, the content of the discourse fails
to take seriously the lived experience of the learners; nobody cares what ‘food’ the learners
like to eat and why, or for what their menu might be for ‘tonight’. Second, the
learners not taken seriously as communicative participants; they are being deliberately put at risk of demonstrating their ignorance. Third, the ‘meta-linguistic’
knowledge about English animal names, food names, count nouns (like ‘a plate’),
and mass nouns (like ‘beef’), is not being made comprehensible to the learners,
who are merely told you must say this and must not say that, and left to infer
why.
12. But this
anti-democratic ambiance cannot be blamed either on any one English teacher or
on the community of English teachers. We have been thrust
into a quixotic crusade for a rigid ‘correctness’ that is largely inapplicable
to real-life communication (¶ 27). We are pressured to ignore the most fundamental fact
about real-life 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, 1999).
13. The crusade began to disintegrate most
conspicuously
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 ‘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 ‘incorrect language’.
14. This
unpreparedness doomed the well-meaning programmes in so-called ‘remedial
English’, which struggled to promote ‘democracy’ by imposing linguistic
conformity. ‘Democracy’ was not understood as the arena for respecting the
universal human rights of all individuals, but rather as ranking system wherein
your human rights are meted out exactly in proportion to your success in
conforming with pre-determined standards, linguistic or otherwise. Moreover,
this ‘remediation’ was to be achieved by fresh rehearsals of the same vague and
obscure school discourse that had proven ineffective for these non-traditional
learners all along. The process was simply performed more slowly and
repetitively — like a conveyor belt set at a lower speed, but with
its cargo unchanged.
15. Our new
population of learners could hardly help feeling thoroughly alienated by this
undemocratic 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 —with up a command of ‘Standard English’ somehow absorbed by
being regaled with examples in our textbooks and anthologies. 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).
16. For
English as a foreign language, the situation has been far more problematic and
complex. There, the preoccupation with ‘correctness’ can lead to the outright sacrifice of lifelike communication. The learners’ performance gets
drastically restricted to reciting mere handfuls of inane invented sentences or
dialogues, where the superficial imitation of native speakers does not seem
unduly impractical. But no one should be surprised if the learners consistently
later prove incompetent for real-like
communication in English, if that has not been part of their training.
C. Taking democracy seriously: Prospects for the future
17. I have briefly suggested that the mandate of the
modern ‘democracy’ to justify social and economic inequalities has shaped
undemocratic approaches to education at large and to language education in
particular. What would be needed for a future language programme that takes
‘democracy’ seriously?
18. As a first step, we could shift our orientation
and goals away from ‘correctness’
over to effective communication. The
language curriculum would no longer be an arena primarily devoted to
belabouring the prescriptive and prescriptive mechanics of language and
literature, but an arena primarily devoted to practising effective communicative strategies and resolving
communicative problems as they arise either within the schools or within
the wider community. Our confrontational
role in exposing and correcting the learners’ ‘errors’ would yield to a co-operative role as communicative
consultants for presenting strategies that build upon the learners’ current competence.
19. This step will entail some challenging
requirements, but these are at least straightforward 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.
Further, we shall require assessments of their respective communicative strategies. These assessments must then be
carefully compared and contrasted with the target
language and language variety of the long-range instructional process; ans
of the communicative strategies relevant to academic or professional success.
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 more traditional approaches),
a view of where we want to end up.
20. The most vital resources for meeting 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.
21. 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. I am currently hard at work on a ‘user-friendly
grammar’ of English for this purpose (Beaugrande, 1999). As far as I know, it
is the first grammar-book ever to be illustrated entirely with authentic
samples from the work of African writers in English.
22. In the time and space allotted here, I can once
more only offer some brief illustrations of the three requirements. 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?
23. 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.
24. 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 be the header for
‘Verbs of Emotion’, like ‘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’.
25. Another header for could ‘Verbs of
Noticing’, such as ‘seeing, looking at, glance, hearing, overhearing,
remembering, being consciously aware’. Yet another could be ‘Verbs of
Thinking’, such as ‘reflect, imagining, considering, knowing’, and could
subsume the frequent ‘wondering’, where uncertainty rather than emotion would
make people self-conscious.
26. What are such data telling us about
Standard English? First, they show how real-life
discourse is sustained by a continual process of on-the-spot tuning and
adapting, which is more precise and specific than our usual ‘grammar
lessons’ imply, but also more finely organised than our usual ‘vocabulary
lessons’ imply. In real communication, 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.
27. Second, such data show, as I have predicted
in ¶ 12, that correctness is not
applicable to much of what people say, but rather appropriateness. What you say you ‘couldn’t help’ doing depends in
fine detail on your sense of how social
conduct is expected to operate and of what actions on your part might be judged
inappropriate. And this sense is a major contributor to fluent and idiomatic English, yet can hardly be addressed wherever
the teaching and learning of English are approach in terms of ‘right’ and
‘wrong’.
28.
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). I shall offer some illustrations
from ‘South African English’, without going into the undeniably important
issues of ‘standards’ and ‘standardisation’ (see now Smit, 1996). 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,
for the reasons I have expounded in section A, a highly competitive society
favours approaching education as a motor for offering uniform opportunities to
all whilst generating and justifying social inequalities. So if language
education in South Africa were left to run its own course, the undemocratic
methods outlined in section B would be predictably reinforced and intensified.
29.
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 high percentages of parents who want to their
children to learn English, and the
lower 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 what attracts these people
is not to speak ‘Standard English’ so much as to speak better English than your
competitors, without even noticing, let alone transforming, the inhumanity of
the cut-throat competition that feverish ‘privatisation’ and ‘rationalisation’
naturally foment.
30.
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 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, p. 853) mentions for British
English only once as a ‘call for attention’; the same work mentions ‘eh?’ as an
‘impolite request for repetition’.
31.
So conventional British grammar-books would 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 did occasionally
show it being used to ‘call for attention’ [3] or to ‘request a repetition’
[4], but these uses were infrequent. (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 uses were to encourage a confirmation, sometimes casual as in
[5], and sometimes urgent, as [6]. Notice here some other items with a similar
function, such as ‘I suppose’ in [5], ‘no?’ in [6], and ‘don't you think?’ in
[7]
[3] 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 ?
[4] 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
[5] It’s in town / just off North End I suppose
hey
[6] but you’ve voted hey? you’ve voted before?
// nineteen fifty-five or something? no? //
[7] H: there’s a lot of work hey? don’t you think? S: ja
our building experiments
The data also turned up uses
in the functions of protesting, e.g. [8], and of warning about dangers, whether
remote [9] or imminent [10].
[8] 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
[9] you know have to oil those passages H: it’s very
toxic hey / those paint fumes
[10] 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
[11] (which also showed one use of the warning ‘hey’) and ‘phew’ in [12].
[11] 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
[12] 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 use 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’.
32. My data also displayed
some interesting examples of ‘hey’ used when you are quoting what you or other
people might say to get attention
[13] or express emotion [14], or perhaps to do both at once [15].
[13] but there would be a generosity of spirit that
says hey look there were some mistakes made here
[14] the people in Delta were saying hey this
is terrible when a BA a BA graduate has got to spray cars
[15] 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]
33. Another noticeably special function in South
African English is the universal tag question ‘is it?’ In British English, again
according to the Comprehensive Grammar
of Quirk et al. (1985, p. 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 [16] and [17]
[16] the boat hasn’t left, has it?
[17] 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. 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 [18] or by another speaker to give
confirmation [19]. 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 [20-21], or that you are doubtful and about to disagree, as in [23-24].
[18] H: David's doing history isn’t it?
[19] 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?
[20] S4: It’ll be in Johannesburg // S3: is it?
ah
[21] S1: he’s got a place at Onderstepoort S2: is
it?
[22] S3: it was such a mess that we had to have the
whole car resprayed S2: is it?
[23] S: she is a fat cat // S2: is it? // she’s
not fat
[24] S1: she studied art at the Slade S2: is it? / no she’s not
going to do art she’s doing English / at Oxford
Frequencies in corpus data
are notoriously dodgy to interpret, but I was struck by finding only six clear
uses of the non-agreeing ‘is it?’ tag and just 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 communicative functions, especially for seeking
confirmation.
34.
Now, seen from the viewpoint of British English, the non-agreeing tag ‘is it?’
would simply be an isolated and insignificant ‘error’. But if we look at this
item in the larger system of English Grammar, a different and more interesting
interpretation can be suggested.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 [25-28], gender [29], or person [30]. Here are
some examples from the CSAE:
[25] 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?
[26] I said to him is it the kids or is it
the teachers you enjoy? so he said well everything
[27] is it just you and your husband
in the house? /
[28] what is it is it dolls and uh uh uh toys
little trains and all these things I bought?
[29] how old is it is it a boy? I: He’s in
standard seven / ja
[30] to listen to the way he speaks and what he speaks about // J: uh //
is it me? G: mm
It would be communicatively 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’
[25], or about something you ‘enjoy’ [26] or bought’ [28], and the ‘it’ is the
best and most general pronoun for referring to that still undetermined
something.
35.
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 [25], 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:
[19a] they sound so terrible when you get used to a CD
/ S2: don’t they?
[24a ] S1: she studied art at the Slade S2: did she?
In effect, South African English is being consistent within English
Grammar from a different perspective than is applied by British English. But we
can recognise this consistency only by looking at the communicative functions
in authentic data.
36.
For our third and final requirement, corpora of learner English, we are just
at the beginning (cf. Granger, 1996; Milton and Freeman, 1996). Yet we cannot
achieve democratic approaches to ‘language education’ until we understand the
conditions under which learners of English undertake their tasks. 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).
37.
The key strategy for a democratic environment 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).
38.
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 [31] and [32] versus marginal errors such as solecisms in
[33-35].
[31] This can be represented as follows such.
[32] Each a very word is attached by a line
called brunch.[branch]
[33] the lips close to discourage air
[34] When the nasal cavity is closed, the lips
constitute the final office of the mouth cavity
[35] vocal cords are apart so air is not abrupted
A separate issue are the oddities in reasoning or logic, like these:
[36] the lip spread is reduced to a minimum
requirement
[37] the lower lip bites the upper teeth
[38] 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 having to rely instead on
spontaneous explanations, which can be strikingly imaginative, e.g. regarding
the use of the auxiliary verb ‘do’ [39], a semantic contradiction [40], the
difference between positive and negative entailments [41], and metaphor [42].
[39] when we are having such cases it is time when our
‘do’ comes in to rescue us
[40] 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.
[41] (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.
[42] ‘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 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.
39. 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, or English and
Xhosa. Providing them will demand intense labour, but I believe it they are
crucial for a democratic approach to the teaching of English. I would strongly
advocate such comparative studies for MA dissertations and PhD theses.
D. Chances for change
40.
The subtitle of my paper was chosen quite deliberately. I wished to emphasise
with all due firmness that these proposals cannot be called ‘radical’,
‘revolutionary’, or ‘utopian’ or any of the other dismissive labels in the
familiar and predictable vocabulary of the ‘conservatives’. I merely propose to
take ‘democracy’ seriously and put into practice to the principles of
human rights and human equality we have long claimed to uphold in theory.
41.
Furthermore, I utterly reject the conservatives’ argument that democratic
reforms in public education are ‘too costly’. In a time when ‘privatisation’,
‘rationalisation’, and ‘cost-effectiveness’ are the watchwords of the day, even
conventional education is highly vulnerable because it cannot be — to say it in
fashionable jargon — ‘profit-intensive’. The CSAE data is already returning
such public discourse as this but from a new report: ‘in terms of the
rationalisation programme 6,000 teachers are to lose their jobs in Western Cape
schools this year’. The erosion of the national tax base by ‘foreign
investment’ and ‘offshore banking’ is already starting to be felt (¶ 3).
42.
The plain truth of the matter is that public education generates its returns on
investment in the development of human potential and not in quick and easy
cash. The conservatives who tell the world what public education may or may not
‘costs’ send their own children to private
schools, which are
‘profit-intensive’, and which are already proliferating as the public schools
deteriorate for lack of funding. As the contingent of parents with children in
private schools steadily grows, the contingent of citizens and voters steadily
shrinks who willing to work for better public education.
43.
Reforms in English teaching are especially problematic when everyone is
scrambling for English, and the knowledge of English is a vital factor in the
rigidly hierarchical society the conservatives are seeking to enforce. The
conservatives will be quick to warn the public against innovative approaches
which do not focus on ‘correcting the errors’ and which build upon the language
varieties of learners who would otherwise fail — who, in conservative thinking,
are supposed to fail in the fight for
the ‘survival of the fittest (¶ 2).
44. The real decision, however, lies with those who have been in effect
also serious (though unrecognised) victims of the undemocratic approaches, and
who are also best positioned to make a change: the English teachers themselves.
They can harbour no rational loyalty toward approaches that have effectively
hampered them from performing the jobs successfully and saddled them with lifelong
frustration. If they can be effectively supplied with the resources I have
proposed for browsing real English and understanding language varieties and
variations, they may see for themselves the most cogent motives for change and
the means as well. At that point, the world of English teaching may finally
become of model of how education can indeed take ‘democracy’ seriously.
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