Victor Carreão has worked in English Language Teaching in Brazil since 2007, teaching in varied educational contexts. He is a PhD candidate in Linguistics and has a Master’s in this field, as well as a PG in Teaching Methodologies, and degrees in English/Portuguese and Management. He has also worked as a speaking examiner for international exams. Lately he has been researching and presenting about the connections between language, society, social justice and education in different conferences. Email: vcarreao@yahoo.com.br

 

Introduction

Back in January, 2021, International House World Organisation (IHWO), International House London and Macmillan English promoted the 2021 Simon Greenall Award, whose beautiful objective was to promote projects that bring people together through learning English. Besides being the president of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL), from 1997 to 1999, and receiving the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2013 for services to English language teaching, Simon Greenall's outstanding work has helped different communities around the world to get connected through the English language. He sadly left us in 2018, but his legacy remains strongly alive in the English Language Teaching (ELT) community across the world.

In these hard pandemic times, in which miscommunication has been driving people apart, English's role as a global language has the power to bring people together, and IHWO, International House London and Macmillan Education initiative is memorable for exploring this connection. Beautiful projects that use English to bring people together have been presented to the world because of last year’s award. Among them, Sirhajwan Idek and Nurazilah Othman's ‘Dau Dau’ project, in Malaysia, which was the winner of the 2021’s edition, and Ozgu Ozturk's project, in Turkey, ‘English brings together - helping students with learning disabilities’, which was one of the runner up projects. In this article, I’d like to focus a little bit on the motivation, theory and development of the other runner up project: ‘World Englishes and memories’, which was my proposal for the 2021 Simon Greenall Award.

 

The motivation and theory behind the project

When we talk about language, we are also (indirectly) talking about linguistics. One of the greatest linguists of all times was J.R.R. Tolkien, mostly known for being the writer of the book ‘The lord of the rings’. Back in 2019, a movie entitled ‘Tolkien’ was released and it showed the writer’s young years prior to writing his famous novels. In one particular scene, when Tolkien meets his advisor, Professor Joseph Wright, at the Oxford University, the following insight is shared: ‘Language is meaning. History. Layer upon layer upon layer’.

We get a clear view of this statement when we think about the History of the English Language, whether if we are talking about old events, such as when the Normans came to England, or more recent ones, such as Shakespeare and his plays. When this idea is expanded, it is easy for one to understand the different historical processes that gave birth to different English varieties around the world – especially during colonization times. If we take a deep look into all English-speaking nations, or even those where English is a main language of instruction or an official language for administrative businesses, we will get to see that different communities within them also present their own linguistic features.

The linguists Uriel Weinreich, Marvin Herzog and William Labov researched how languages vary and change throughout time - being Labov mostly known for his outstanding contributions for Sociolinguistics research methodology. For them, language would change according to ‘stimuli and restraints from both the society and the structure of a language’ (Weinreich, Labov and Herzog, 2006, p. 124). In this sense, society would directly affect how language variation takes place. Such a connection is studied by Sociolinguistics, whose major task 'is to show that such variation or diversity is not in fact 'free', but it correlated with systematic social differences. In this and in still larger ways, linguistic diversity is precisely the subject matter of sociolinguistics’ (Bright, 1966, p. 11).

Language contact, prestige and stigma, urban mobility and even access to education and media can make a single sound, word or sentence structure (linguistic variables) to be produced in different ways (variants). Labov (1966, p. 15) describes a linguistic variable as ‘a class of variants which are ordered along a continuous dimension and whose position is determined by an independent linguistic or extra-linguistic variable’ – and, by ‘extra-linguistic’, Labov means the dynamics of society.

Maurizzio Gnerre (1985), in his book “Language, Writing and Power”, says that a linguistic variety is ‘worth’ what its speakers are ‘worth’ in society, that is, it is a reflection of the power and authority they have in economic and social relations.  It occurred to me then that I have seen many sociolinguistic studies about Portuguese and English in grad school, but I cannot recall seeing any of them applied to ELT. It is not as if linguistic variation is not portrayed in ELT materials or classes. Websites such as the ‘International dialects of English Archive’ (IDEA) and ‘One stop English’ show different English varieties and different accents from non-native speakers around the world. Materials such as the ‘Global’ course book also highlight non-native speech in it. But still, it is not hard to see students poorly evaluating their English pronunciation in the classroom due to idealized pronunciation models – usually referred to as a general ‘native-speaker model’.  

According to Davies (2017, p. 187), the 'idealized native speaker' is the one whose language “is a potent marker of status and class”. Sociolinguistics can shed some light on this issue. To illustrate this, in a quick search online, it is easy to come across memes making fun of how hard it is for non-native speakers to pronounce the ‘th-sound’ (in words such as ‘brother’ or ‘thanks’). We have an example in the image below:

Source: https://starecat.com/cat-when-your-english-teacher-explains-how-to-pronounce-th-weird-face/

It is also interesting that any quick search on Google for ‘how do I pronounce the ‘th-sound’ in English?’ will get a list of links pointing the interdental variant [θ, ð] as the only ‘correct’ pronunciation. When we turn to Sociolinguistics for answers, we get interesting perspectives: Kerswill (2003, p. 11-13) shows us that there is a spread of [f] for /θ/ and [v] for /ð/ in the United Kingdom in low-status urban varieties; the same can be seen in the pronunciation of working class inhabitants of New York City (Labov, 1972), whose realization of the 'th-sound' was recorded by Labov (1972) as the interdental [θ, ð], dental [t, d] and affricate [tʃ, dʒ] variants. On the other hand, the high class New Yorkers interviewed by Labov had a high percentage of their ‘th-sound’ occurrences registered as the interdental [θ, ð]. Looking back at our Google search for the ‘correct th-sound’, why would any variant that is produced by native speakers be considered ‘wrong’? Why would only the variant commonly realized by high class speakers be the ‘correct’ one? How would that affect English learners’ motivation around the world if their pronunciation cannot mimic the prestige varieties of English?

With that in mind, my project proposal aimed on showing different English varieties around the world in a podcast series - a format that could be used by students and teachers in the classrooms. It would also allow people from different communities to show a little bit about their lives and their stories, which are the layers that sediment language – as Tolkien’s advisor, Professor Joseph Wright, beautifully stated. The ‘World Englishes and Memories’ project is aimed to be a series of podcasts that would show a little bit of the routine of people in different English speaking communities around the world. It would also portray linguistic diversity in a way to show students and teachers the importance of bringing linguistic variation into ELT. In a nutshell, this is how the idea was born, but it took some time and the support of amazing people to help shape it into action.

 

Getting the project up and running

After ‘World Englishes and Memories’ was selected as one of the runners up, I had the amazing opportunity of receiving mentoring from Lindsay Clandfield, the renowned ELT author, teacher trainer and international speaker. Lindsay showed me, among many other things, how podcasts should be structured and the importance of its format for it to reach its intended audience and goals. Lindsay’s teachings have also helped me planning lessons for my current students. They were pure gold and I could not be happier for this opportunity. I have also received support from Adrian Underhill and Jill Florent, who kindly helped me with some suggestions and advice through our exchange of emails. I hope I could apply their teaching wisely to this project.

I have always admired some very interesting podcasts and websites that focus on cultural diversity. BBC’s ‘6 minute English’ and the non-profit ‘The No Project’ are examples from where I got some motivation to think about something that would, in a way or another, put linguistic diversity in the spotlight in a compact format while fostering Social Justice. Without further ado, here is the project’s structure:

• A podcast series with each episode ranging from 5 to 6 minutes;
• Interviewees from different nations and communities around the world (both English speaking and non-English speaking);
• Interviewees will answer questions related to the following topics: (i) what is your daily breakfast like?; (ii) how do you commute to school or work every day?; (iii) what is a typical day in your neighborhood like?; (iv) how did you learn English?; (v) if you could choose one favorite word or expression in English, what would it be and why?; and (vi) why is English important to you?;
• A website will be used for hosting these audio files and their transcriptions;
• From these transcriptions, ideas for lesson planning, with details from the interviewees’ communities will be available for students and teachers around the world.

It goes without saying that the project is non-profit as well. With a solid foundation, it is possible to engage people around the world and get to know a little bit more about many world English varieties and their speakers’ memories.

 

Looking forward to the future

Sometimes, we may listen to a podcast or watch a short video on YouTube and think ‘those are really simple and easy things to do’, but most of the times that is not the case. I hope I could share some insights on the background that exists behind the creation of a project in this article, and also share some insights on my proposal and the sociolinguistic theory that sustains its core. As next steps for the project, the recordings shall start taking place. Social media and the internet will make it easier for me to gather different short stories in audio format from different places. The main challenge ahead is the website creation in a way that it is friendly and engaging for other fellow teachers and English language learners. A thrilling path, least to say.

In an interview for the EFL Magazine (Wade, 2016), Simon Greenall said that ‘as English language teachers, at least for the next few years, we can do far more than politicians, diplomats or soldiers to enhance everyone’s lives on this planet’. Maybe listening a little bit to people’s voice around the world, knowing that them carry the memories and history of their communities, is a way to raise awareness on a range of social (and even environmental) issues that we, as educators, can help tackling.

I would like to finish this article by thanking all of you who have stuck with me through its reading. I also would like to thank Hania Kryszewska, who kindly supported me by publishing this article and by helping spreading some of the ideas I presented here through the HLT Magazine. If any of you would like to participate in World Englishes and Memories in any way, please, send me an email. I am very fond of knowing new people and learning more about their stories and about the world.

 

References

Bright, W. (1966). Introduction: dimensions of sociolinguistics. In: Bright, W. (ed.)

Sociolinguistics. Proceedings of the 1964 UCLA Conference. The Hague: Mouton, pp. 11-15.

Davies, A. (2017). Commentary on the native speaker status in pronunciation research. In Isaacs T. & Trofimovich P. (Eds.), Second Language Pronunciation Assessment: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (pp. 185-192). Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters & Channel View Publications.

Gnerre, M. (1985). Linguagem, escrita e poder. São Paulo: Martins Fontes.

Kerswill, P. (2003). Dialect levelling and geographical diffusion in British English. In: D. Britain and J. Cheshire (eds.) Social dialectology. In honour of Peter Trudgill. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 223-243.

Labov, W. (1966). The Linguistic Variable as a Structural Unit. Washington Linguistics Review, v. 3, pp. 04-22.

Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Wade, P. (2016). Phil Wade interviews: Simon Greenall. EFL Magazine, set. 16, 2016. Available on: https://eflmagazine.com/phil-wade-interviews-simon-greenall/. Accessed on jan. 16, 2022.

Weinreich, U.; Labov, W.; Herzog, M. (2006). Fundamentos empíricos para uma teoria da mudança linguística. Translated by Marcos Bagno. São Paulo: Parábola, 2006 [1968].

 

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