The Routledge Companion to English Language Studies

Janet Maybin, Joan Swann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781134144167
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

The Routledge Companion to English Language Studies is an accessible guide to the major topics, debates and issues in English Language Studies. This authoritative collection includes entries written by well-known language specialists from a diverse range of backgrounds who examine and explain established knowledge and recent developments in the field. Covering a wide range of topics such as globalization, gender and sexuality and food packaging, this volume provides critical overviews of:

• approaches to researching, describing and analyzing English
• the position of English as a global language
• the use of English in texts, practices and discourses
• variation and diversity throughout the English-speaking world.

Fully cross-referenced throughout and featuring useful definitions of key terms and concepts, this is an invaluable guide for teachers wishing to check, consolidate or update their knowledge, and is an ideal resource for all students of English Language Studies.

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INTRODUCTION

JANET MAYBIN AND JOAN SWANN

The Companion to English Language Studies is designed as a resource for those studying English language at undergraduate or postgraduate level. It will also be of interest to those teaching English, and others who wish to check, consolidate or update their knowledge of an area of English Language Studies. The book focuses mainly on contemporary English Language Studies (for more detailed accounts of the history of English, see the suggestions in Further Reading at the end of Part I) and draws on work by language specialists from a range of backgrounds. It takes into account the contemporary position of English in the world and recent developments in the study of the English language and its use, as we explain below.

First, English is affected by its position as a global language, at a point in history when we are witnessing accelerating globalisation, mass movements of peoples and increasing intercultural communication on an unprecedented scale. On the one hand, the number of speakers of English is increasing: it has been estimated that one in four people in the world currently speaks English (Graddol 2006) and that English will be spoken by three billion people, or 40 per cent of the global population, in 2040 (Crystal 2004). On the other hand, it is also the case that the global dominance of English has been challenged by other languages, for instance Mandarin. Furthermore, the dramatic increase in the number of speakers of English predicted by Crystal relates mainly to those who speak English as an additional language rather than to native speakers. English is spoken within multilingual contexts across the globe, and the study of English in such contexts is raising new questions about scholarly concepts and explanations which have been previously accepted within the field.

In addition to addressing the dynamic global role of English, the contents of this volume reflect an important two-way conceptual shift that occurred towards the end of the twentieth century, i.e. the ‘social turn’ in language studies and a parallel ‘turn to discourse’ in the social sciences more generally. These two ‘turns’ both involved an increasing interest among researchers and theorists in the ‘processual’, ‘constitutive’ and ‘ideological’ dimensions of language. Increasingly, language use is seen not simply as reflecting the identities of its speakers, and the cultural contexts in which it is spoken, but as reproducing institutions, identities and cultures. The discursive turn within the social sciences has involved recognition of the significance of discourse, or particular ways of speaking and writing, for the articulation and local management of a range of social processes. References to a ‘postmodern turn’ are also found among researchers who emphasise the fluid and dynamic nature of language, and the highly contextualised nature of language meaning.

Within language studies, a social approach has been evident in the academic area of sociolinguistics from its inception in the 1960s, and in linguistic anthropology for rather longer. But social concerns are now much more salient, even in fields such as grammar. There is increasing interest in English as a means of communication, with all the contingent social and cultural factors which this entails, and an increasing tendency to conceptualise language and literacy as ideological social practice. English language specialists now share with psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and historians areas of interest such as language and identity, power and ideology, and the politics of representation, and they also draw on a shared body of critical theory. The social turn in language studies is evident in the more socially-orientated and contextualised studies discussed in the chapters within Part I of the book, and in social, contextual and critical approaches presented in the chapters within Part II.

The changing global role of English, processes of globalisation and intellectual trends in the academy are all reshaping the nature of English Language Studies, and reinvigorating the ways in which English is conceptualised, described and analysed.

CONTENT AND STRUCTURE

This section sets out the content of the book and explains features designed to help readers find their way around the material.

This volume is divided into two parts: Part I on The fabric of English outlines major approaches to the description and analysis of language, with a particular focus on English. Part II, brings together contributions from a variety of scholars, each addressing contemporary issues or debates within an area of English Language Studies. Across the book as a whole, our aim is to introduce a range of ways in which English may be researched and understood, and to show how different research traditions construct ‘English language’ as an academic subject and an object of enquiry.

PART I THE FABRIC OF ENGLISH

In this first part of the book, authors seek to locate and critically account for different research traditions, different languages of description and analysis, and different linguistic processes that have been the object of description and analysis. The aim is to provide an understanding of a variety of approaches to the study of English/language, and also an awareness of their affordances – what they can offer to the study of English – and their limitations.

Part I begins with a chapter by Caroline Coffin and Kieran O’Halloran on Describing English. The chapter introduces different descriptive levels: the sounds of language, the writing system, word structure and sentence structure, linguistic and pragmatic meaning, that have been drawn on in the analysis of English. Later sections provide a historical account of traditional grammatical descriptions of English, as well as discussing newer approaches – corpus linguistics and systemic functional linguistics (SFL) – that have challenged some traditional descriptive categories. SFL in particular, in its integration of aspects of social context with linguistic analysis, also provides a grammatical example of the social turn in language studies referred to above. Coffin and O’Halloran explore the motivations for different approaches and also address their strengths and limitations.

Traditional grammar has tended to look at linguistic structures at clause level or below, but both corpus linguistics and systemic functional linguistics have also been drawn on to analyse the structure of longer sequences of language. In Chapter 3, on Texts and practices, Ann Hewings and Sarah North continue and develop this focus. The chapter examines a range of approaches to analysing spoken, written and ‘multimodal’ communication, including relatively ‘textual’ approaches that study the formal properties of texts; more ‘contextualised’ approaches that take greater account of the socio-historical contexts in which texts are produced and understood; and ‘critical’ approaches that highlight power as a significant dimension in language use.

Like other languages, English is highly dynamic, changing through time and varying geographically and socially. Variation and change in English have been studied systematically within sociolinguistics, and this is the subject of Chapter 4, From variation to hybridity. In this chapter Rajend Mesthrie and Joan Swann distinguish regional variation, social variation and stylistic variation, in which speakers vary their speaking style in different contexts. The chapter also examines the status and use of English in bi- and multilingual contexts, the development of ‘New Englishes’ in different parts of the world, and the relationship between English and globalisation. It looks at different approaches to the study of variation and change, for instance quantitative approaches that seek to establish general patterns of use and qualitative (and also more contextualised) approaches that pay greater attention to how speakers manage linguistic resources within specific interactions.

While these chapters examine different aspects of the fabric of English, there are also continuities between them. For instance, in describing variation and change in English, Chapter 4 works within the principle of linguistic levels of description discussed in Chapter 2 (in this case the focus is mainly on sound). In exploring how, in interacting with others, speakers draw on the variability of language as a communicative resource, Chapter 4 also comes close to some of the concerns evident in Chapter 3. We deal with ‘interactional sociolinguistics’ and ‘ethnographic approaches’ to the analysis of spoken interaction in both chapters, preferring a small amount of repetition to the unhelpful relegation of these approaches to one chapter or the other.

PART II ISSUES AND DEBATES

Whereas Part I provides a systematic overview of three broad areas in the study and analysis of language, in Part II the authors had a relatively free rein to explore topics that exemplify current issues and debates in English Language Studies. In many cases, these chapters extend ideas about language, or draw on analytical traditions that were introduced in Part I.

The chapters highlight a number of recurring themes in contemporary English Language Studies. First, as we suggested above, English can no longer be treated either as part of a monolingual world, or as an uncontested dominant world language. In a postcolonial global context, English is often studied alongside and in connection with other languages, and its diverse and hybrid forms provide a focus for research in contexts where multilingualism is the norm. Second, there is a particular interest in the ideological dimension of English, for instance in the context of its relationship with other languages, its embedding in social practices and its role in the constitution of individual identities. Third, there is a significant focus on institutional dimensions of English: for instance how English is implicated within sites of struggle and exclusion in habitual institutional practice in courts, workplaces, schools and universities. A fourth theme relates to the creativity inherent in a great deal of language use, as well as the capacity for language play, evident in both ‘serious’ and more ‘frivolous’ contexts (from literary texts to food packaging to online code-switching). In combination, these themes challenge any conception of language that would see this as simply (or even mainly) transactional (i.e. having to do with the communication of ideas). They also confront the unsettled relationship between the social and the individual, or between structure and agency, which continues to preoccupy language researchers as well as those working in other disciplines. A final theme has as its focus the material properties of language, or more accurately English texts, and in particular the way verbal language interacts with other communicative modes. As mentioned in Chapter 3, while studies of English still focus mainly on the verbal, in practice English is encountered in ‘multimodal’ contexts where verbal language works alongside a range of other elements in the creation of meaning (e.g. spoken language alongside posture, gesture and facial expression, voice quality; written language alongside graphic conventions, layout, visual imagery).

The specific coverage of each chapter is outlined briefly below.

In Chapter 5, Alastair Pennycook provides a critical perspective on English and globalisation, extending discussion in Chapter 4. Pennycook argues that contemporary processes of globalisation ‘demand that we rethink what we mean by language, language spread, native speakers or multilingualism’. Pointing to ways in which English is linked to inequitable global relations at the same time as it is being appropriated for local uses, he discusses the contrasting ways in which English has been conceptualised as a global language: as a threat to other languages, a lingua franca and a collection of world Englishes.

The focus of Chapter 6, by Rob Pope, is creativity in language. Contemporary research has identified ‘literary-like’ creativity as a pervasive feature of everyday language – a finding that problematises the distinctiveness of literary language. Pope seeks to develop a working model of creativity which is dynamic and dialogic, involving transformations rather than ‘creation from nothing’, and which can incorporate a dialogue between linguistic creativity and literary creation. He applies these ideas to a reading of examples from poetry and song.

Chapter 7 looks at the use of persuasive language, evident in various contemporary genres from adverts to political discourse. Applying Aristotle’s tripartite division of persuasive rhetoric to the speeches of Brutus and Anthony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Guy Cook then examines the contemporary persuasive genre of food marketing, and its use of ‘the most contemporary media and the most ancient of techniques’. Considering examples of packaging and promotion from both mass-produced and organic products, he analyses their artful mixture of stories, poetry and images (pathos), appeals to scientific evidence (logos) and use of celebrity personalities (ethos).

English is currently used by around a third of world internet-users, within different forms of synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated communication. In Chapter 8, Brenda Danet reviews the distinctive features of ‘computer-mediated English’, stressing its tendency to be informal and playful. While early internet technology favoured the use of English, and it is still the default language in many internet contexts, she points out that code-switching and mixing are common in multilingual contexts, and that linguistic diversity is an increasingly prominent feature of online discourse.

In Chapter 9 Suresh Canagarajah and Selim Ben Said focus on English as a language of education in multilingual contexts. Canagarajah and Ben Said discuss how recent forms of globalisation have challenged Kachru’s (1986) conceptualisation of inner, outer and expanding circles of English speakers, complicating the distinctions between speakers of English as a second or foreign language. They argue that social and technological changes have produced new pedagogical imperatives for teachers, new challenges for educational language policies and the need to redefine the scholarly constructs that explain English language learning.

Continuing the focus on education, in Chapter 10 Richard Andrews looks at English as an academic subject in school, taking developments in England as a case study. Andrews reviews the changing position of ‘English’ as a subject over the past 50 or so years, from the emphasis on expressiveness and personal voice in the 1960s to the early 1980s, through a greater understanding of the processes of written English and of the importance of spoken English in the later part of the twentieth century, to current tensions between curricular and assessment demands on the one hand, and the interest in rhetoric, multimodality and new technologies in the wider society on the other.

In Chapter 11, Celia Roberts discusses institutional discourse, taking a broadly critical discursive approach that examines the ways in which institutions are created and maintained through talk and texts, and their uses within shared habitual practices which are also sites of struggle and exclusion. Drawing on research from a range ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I The fabric of English
• Part II Issues and debates
• Bibliography