H. G. Widdowson

The Ownership of English

M Given the theme of this convention, Designing Our World, and at a time when territorial disputes and matters of ownership and identity are so prominent in the affairs of the world in general, this is perhaps an appropriate occasion to raise the question of how we stake out our own territory as English teachers in delimiting and designing our world. And to ask who does the designing and on what authority. To start with, who determines the demarcation of the subject itself? We are teaching English and the general assumption is that our purpose is to develop in students a proficiency which approximates as closely as possible to that of native speakers. But who are these native speakers? One answer might be: the English. And why not? A modest proposal surely. England is where the language originated and this is where the English (for the most part) live. The language and the people are bound together by both morphology and history. So they can legitimately lay claim to this linguistic territory. It belongs to them. And they are the custodians. If you want real or proper English, this is where it is to be found, preserved, and listed like a property of the National Trust.

Aspects of language teaching

PART ONE: THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF LANGUAGE TEACHING PART TWO: ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE PART THREE: ASPECTS OF TEACHING

Context, Community, and Authentic Language†

* The TESOL community, like any other, needs the stimulus of innovation to keep it going. Although we as TESOL professionals say that we should not make changes for their own sake, we do make them for the sake of demonstrating that we are still dynamic, and for this purpose even the appearance of change will do. And this is why old ideas keep coming back with the veneer of novelty. But we do not want changes to be too disruptive either. It is preferable for our sense of security that they should be easily assimilated, and one way of managing this is to reduce ideas to simple terms that sound good: comprehensible input, natural learning, authentic language, real English. These become a kind of catchphrase currency whose value is taken for granted without further enquiry. And thus we become slogan prone. There is one slogan in particular that I would like to question. It is often used as a handy shorthand for what communicative language teaching stands for. The slogan is focus on meaning rather than on form. A critical look at this slogan reveals a fundamental conceptual confusion, and a consideration of that confusion leads to issues about context, community, and authentic language that I believe lie at the heart of language pedagogy.

EIL, ESL, EFL: Global Issues and Local Interests

This paper by Henry G. Widdowson was originally presented at a conference in Senegal in December 1995. The author submitted it to WE for consideration for publication with a note saying that ‘I wanted to raise a number of questions for discussion, so the paper is provocative. ... You might indeed want to consider it as a possible contribution to World Englishes, where it might provoke some of the reaction it was originally designed to do’ (January 29, 1996). We believe that this would be an appropriate paper for initiating this new section in WE entitled the Forum. We hope that the readers of WE will find this contribution as provocative as does the author, and that some will share their reactions with us for publication in future issues of WE. The perspective presented in the paper is important since Widdowson is one of the most articulate and knowledgeable members of the profession. The points he makes in this paper have earlier been articulated within various theoretical conceptualizations, with persuasive empirical data from West Africa, Southern Africa, and from South and Southeast Asia. Almost five decades ago, India’s Raja Rao (1938) provides a credo for his creativity which has become almost classic and has extensively been quoted by Asian, African, and Western scholars interested in creativity in English. And now in the 1990s, the voice from a guru of the ELT profession is particularly significant. This voice is indeed a mild indicator of a slow but sure increase in the degree of awareness of the paradigm shift among the professional leadership. Professor Widdowson represents the profession as an educator, as a prolific researcher and as an academic administrator. He is active in two professional organizations of the Inner Circle which are extremely influential: The International Association for Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) and the Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). Editors,

Reply to Fairclough: Discourse and interpretation: conjectures and refutations

Language and Literature 1996 5 (1) 57-69 © Addison Wesley Longman Ltd 1996 0963-9470/96/05106057/

Accommodation and the idiom principle in English as a Lingua Franca

03.50 Norman Fairclough and I disagree about a lot of things. That much is obvious. But let me begin my comments by acknowledging the importance of his contribution to our thinking about language and society. He has brought to our attention a whole range of issues about the dialectical interplay of language and social life, not as matters for detached academic debate but as immediately implicated in practical and political affairs. He has alerted us to how language can be exploited in the manipulation of opinion and the abuse of power. His work is impressive in scope and purpose. It is highly stimulating for those who share his views, highly provocative for those who do not, and is to be valued on both counts.

ELF and the inconvenience of established concepts

Although it is acknowledged that English is now being appropriated as a lingua franca by users all over the world, and being put to effective communicative use without needing to conform to native speaker norms of ‘correctness’, there remains an entrenched reluctance to grant the same kind of legitimacy to this ‘Expanding Circle’ variation that is now generally accorded to ‘Outer Circle’ varieties (Kachru 1985; Seidlhofer and Jenkins 2003). The non-conformity of English as a lingua franca (ELF) still tends to be stigmatized as an aberration. Our purpose in this paper is to argue, and demonstrate, that the very non-conformity of its formal features is symptomatic of processes that characterize any natural use of language.

Handbook of foreign language communication and learning

Abstract The purpose of this article is to put ELF in broader perspective and to speculate on how it raises general epistemological and practical issues in (socio)linguistics and language pedagogy. Such issues have not escaped the notice of ELF researchers, of course, and so this paper will have nothing to offer in the way of revelation. My intention is not to argue for the legitimacy of ELF study as such but to consider its effect as a catalyst for change in established ways of thinking. We can only make sense of the world by imposing our own order on it by devising abstract constructs so as to bring it under conceptual control. This is as true of linguistics and language pedagogy as of everything else: both of them necessarily disconnect the continuum of actual experience to make simplifying distinctions so as to come to terms with reality – distinctions between languages and varieties, for example, between competence and performance, between language learners and users. Making abstract distinctions of one kind or another is a necessary convenience and cannot be avoided, but having made them, we need also to consider how they are related and how far they remain convenient. What ELF research reveals so clearly is the need to review the distinctions that have become conventionally established in the description and the teaching of English.

Object Language and the Language Subject: On the Mediating Role of Applied Linguistics.

This volume focuses on how far the policies, principles and practices of foreign language teaching and learning are, or can be, informed by theoretical considerations and empirical findings from the linguistic disciplines. Part I deals with the nature of foreign language learning in general, while Part II explores issues arising from linguistic, socio-political, cultural and cognitive perspectives. Part III and IV then consider the different factors that have to be taken into account in designing the foreign language subject and the various approaches to pedagogy that have been proposed. Part V finally addresses questions concerning assessment of learner proficiency and the evaluation of courses designed to promote it. Key features: provides a state-of-the-art description of different areas in the context of foreign language communication and learning presents a critical appraisal of the relevance of the field offers solutionsto everyday language-related problems with contributions from renowned experts

ELF and the pragmatics of language variation

As linguistics has extended its scope over the past thirty years from an exclusive concern with knowledge of the abstract code, what Chomsky referred to as Internalized (I) language, to a consideration of the way this knowledge is actualized in Externalized (E) language (Chomsky 1988), so it has inevitably gained in face validity as an area of inquiry relevant to practical life. A linguistics that deals with real, as distinct from ideal, speaker-listeners has a more obvious applicability to the problems real people actually have with language. Nevertheless, one cannot just assume a direct correspondence between the E externalized language the linguist describes and the E experienced language that is a reality for the user. The applicability of linguistic descriptions is a potential that has to be realized, and this is where applied linguistics comes in.