Strevens Model of English

3 Key excerpts on "Strevens Model of English"

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  A Guided Reader for Secondary English

  Pedagogy and practice

  • David Stevens(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  7

  Linguistic and cultural contexts

  The essence of language study is, predictably enough, language itself – but this is where the controversy starts. Previous chapters have already served to illustrate this point from a range of perspectives, and in Chapter 7 we look with sharper focus at some views of language in education. The dynamic relationship between such differing (but also in many instances complementary) standpoints should emerge clearly, as should an enhanced appreciation of the practical teaching and learning possibilities of the English classroom.

  Part 1: The workings of language

  Sources

  1.1  Allen, D. (1987) English, Whose English? Sheffield: NAAE.

  1.2  Mittins, B. (1988) English: Not the Naming of Parts. Sheffield: NATE.

  1.3  Myhill, D. (2011) Living Language, Live Debates: Grammar and Standard English, in J. Davison, C. Daly and J. Moss (eds) Debates in English Teaching. London: Routledge.

  1.4  Perera, K. (1987) Understanding Language. Sheffield: NAAE.

  Introduction

  At a time of huge and long-reaching changes in the English curriculum and the practices of its teaching – the mid- to late-1980s – commentators such as David Allen, Bill Mittins and Katharine Perera went to some lengths in their  appeal for sanity in curricular and pedagogical approaches to native language teaching. Today’s English curriculum bears the scars, some more healed than others, from this embattled time – which is why I have included the extracts here. In the face of conservative appeals for legislation to force the ‘education establishment’ to teach traditional values, including a narrow and exclusive vision of grammar and Standard English (the subjects English and history were, arguably, the most contentious and controversial in this context), linguists and teachers called for rather different approaches. Bill Mittins, for instance, entitled his influential booklet, excerpted from here, Not the Naming of Parts

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  Reconceptualizing English for International Business Contexts

  A BELF Approach and its Educational Implications

  • Vildana Dubravac, Elma Dedović-Atilla(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Multilingual Matters

    (Publisher)

  Regarding the American/British English dichotomy, the model clearly portrays American super-dominance (the hub), having the highest demographic weight and the US being globally dominant in military, political and economic terms. British English, however, occupies the place of a standard super-central variety, institutionally supported in the media and foreign language teaching. The point where the model makes a groundbreaking shift is in the perception of non-standard varieties. While there is naturally no non-standard hub influencing all other varieties, there are some super-central non-standard varieties exerting a powerful influence on a number of others, such as African-American vernacular English. The nature of the concept suggests that it is not the sole standard English language that dominates the world, but the whole English language complex. The system makes the perception of the English language complex more inclusive by ‘integrating mediated and performed versions of vernaculars, and it alerts us to complex and sometimes unexpected hierarchies within it, both on the standard and non-standard levels’ (Mair, 2013: 26). Unlike Kachru’s (1988) model, Mair’s model provides for a number of different roles and places that English occupies nowadays. One of them included in the system is ELF. It represents a more novel term that has been coined and introduced in the linguistic arena in order to account for the alterations and features of the use of English in the world today. The feature that differentiates ELF from the traditional notions of English use and procures it a substantial number of advocates and supporters is the fact that it can account for the heterogeneous, non-static and intertwined nature of the use of English in the world. The concept’s proponents do not perceive English users as fitting into a certain Kachruvian circle, but create new phraseology and perceptions shattering the models and transforming them into a completely novel mosaic

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  Introducing Global Englishes

  • Nicola Galloway, Heath Rose(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  levelling inequality, Phillipson (2008, p. 250) staunchly disagrees, saying, ‘Labelling English as a lingua franca, if this is understood as a culturally neutral medium that puts everyone on an equal footing, does not merely entail ideological dangers – it is simply false.’ Shifts are also found at the local level where discussions of Englishes, and individual decisions to engage in code-mixing and code-switching, ‘challenge the ideologies and institutions which undergird the dominance of English’ (Canagarajah, 1999b, p. 42).

  Linguistic imperialism and the World Englishes paradigm

  As will become evident in upcoming chapters, both the World Englishes and ELF research paradigms, which together form the Global Englishes paradigm, seek to challenge the dominance of native English by emphasizing that English is pluricentric. Despite acknowledging its usefulness in helping one to understand the variability in English today, as well as opening up a large field of study, Pennycook (2007) critiques the World Englishes framework, noting that it holds back full exploration of global Englishes due to a rigid political framework that avoids the broader political impact of the global spread of English. Pennycook argues that nationalism is at the core of the World Englishes framework, with its focus on the identification of distinct varieties of English within strict national boundaries. He notes that, ‘By focusing centrally on the development of new national Englishes, the world Englishes approach reproduces the very linguistics it needs to escape’ (Pennycook, 2007, p. 21). He suggests a move away from arguments centring on homogeneity, heterogeneity, imperialism, and nation states, towards a focus on translocal and transcultural flows (points that are discussed in more depth in Chapter 7 ). We examined the problems with World Englishes’ models in Chapter 1 , and agree with Pennycook’s assertions. Several ‘varieties’ do not fit neatly into this framework and it may be seen as being more exclusionary than inclusionary for this reason. Canagarajah (1999b) points out that in Kachru’s attempt to systematically categorise all Englishes, he had left out many hybrid forms of local Englishes because they were unsystematic, and thus the ‘Kachruvian paradigm follows the logic of the prescriptive and elitist tendencies of the center linguists’ (p.180

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