Should Teachers Use an International Standard of English?

“Could you pass me the basilico?”
“Sure, sure, the basilico is at the other end of the table,”
“Yes, I agree, this pasta is so much better with some basilico.”

While at dinner with a group of international students in Malta to study English, I couldn’t resist my instinct to correct their mistake.

“Guys, it’s basil,” I said, only to be met with an awkward silence and blank stares. I was clearly outnumbered and suddenly felt like a know-it-all jerk. Who was I to correct them anyways, just because I was the only native speaker at the table? Even though they weren’t using the correct word, they were communicating their idea perfectly fine and everyone knew that “basilico” referred to the savory, green herb at the center of the table.

Although a small incident in the broader world of English, this dinner conversation represents a pattern happening on a much larger scale. Like at the dinner, non-native English speakers outnumber native speakers four to one. As such, the question of what we should consider correct English has opened the question of whether we should continue to teach English according to traditional American/British standards.

WHAT IS ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA?

As a response, the idea of developing an internationalized standard of English to teach in classrooms (most commonly known as English as a Lingua Franca or English as an International Language) has become a hot topic among English as a foreign language scholars. The concept recognizes that English is now most commonly used as a way for people of different mother tongues to communicate and can still be used successfully for this purpose even if students make logical grammar errors and avoid culturally embedded idioms. For example, Barbara Seidlhofer of the Vienna Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) notes that we still understand what is conceptually being communicated when a student says “he run to store” or “I speaked”. Meanwhile, Luke Prodromou points towards native English speakers culturally loaded idioms as a common, but unnecessary, hurdle for students of other socio-cultural backgrounds (i.e. “she gets on my nerves” or “I was about to leave”).

Recognition of how our students will use English should be the primary influence on how we teach.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR ESL TEACHERS?

Obviously, teaching a flawed English poses problems of accuracy, disregards students’ goals of reaching near-native levels and lowering the standards could create confusion in a real world scenario. But whether we teach our students a different set of grammar rules and leave out the idioms or not, the main point of ELF we can practically apply in the classroom is that our students need to understand the Englishes that are actually spoken around the globe. This means introducing them to a variety of accents, using English to promote awareness of multiculturalism (not just Anglophone culture), and overall equipping our students to interact internationally. Recognition of how our students will use English should be the primary influence on how we teach.

This also requires us as teachers to be multicultural and aware of how our students will practically apply the language. Especially in resource-poor, developing nations “it matters very little who says tomahto and who says tomayto. Knowing the word tomato is achievement enough.” (Bruthiaux, 2010, p. 368). English, more than any other language, has become a passport into a global community. Creating an internationalized standard seems great conceptually, but in practical and immediate terms, ELF allows us to accept and teach towards an incredible diversity of English speakers, thereby giving English learners access to this community.