Studying and teaching English in a multilingual world: A new Tower of Babel?
(2017) 52nd Linguistics Colloquium — Location: Erlangen (21.September.2017)
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- The use of English as a lingua franca in our multilingual world has been criticized by some people, who see English as a “killer language” (see Graddol 1996: 199), responsible for the death of many local languages and the resulting loss of cultural diversity. Others, however, claim that, far from being a threat to multilingualism, English can be empowering for speakers of other languages (e.g. House 2002). Thanks to Kachru’s (1985) model of the three concentric circles, a pluricentric view of English has also been promoted (see Bolton 2005: 70), which shows that the English language covers many varieties, reflecting different cultural identities. In this presentation, I will take the perspective of second language acquisition and foreign language teaching to argue that, in this domain too, linguistic and cultural diversity can – and should – be taken into account. A norm is often necessary when studying and teaching English, but this norm can be of many different kinds, and adaptable to specific contexts. In the field of Learner Corpus Research (Granger et al. 2015), for example, most studies investigating learner English use a reference corpus as a sort of yardstick against which to evaluate learners’ linguistic behaviour, but this yardstick need not be a unique native variety and, importantly, it should make sense in the context of one’s research. Similarly, the English teacher needs to think carefully about what norm to use in the classroom, and how linguistic diversity and creativity can be maintained nonetheless. More generally, this presentation will show that the worldwide spread of English as a foreign/second language does not necessarily mean the creation of a new Tower of Babel, leading to the use of a single language variety, but may in fact result in a new type of multilingualism and multiculturalism.
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Gilquin, G. (2017). Studying and teaching English in a multilingual world: A new Tower of Babel? 52nd Linguistics Colloquium, Erlangen. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/126264