Global English and foreign language teaching – problems and probable solutions
Today we are living in a world where English has become the international language not only of communication but also of business, information technology, science, entertainment, diplomacy. It is spoken as a first language by several nations and it is the third most common native language after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish; English is the official language of many world organizations such as the European Union, the United Nations and the Common Wealth and it is also widely taught around the world as a second language.
International English is the concept of the English language as a global means of communication in numerous dialects, and also the movement towards an international standard for the language. It is also referred to as Global English, World English, Common English, Continental English, General English, Engas (English as associate language), or Globish. Sometimes, these terms refer simply to the array of varieties of English spoken throughout the world.
Global English is a relatively new term because it came into use in the late 1990s. Now it is used alongside with the terms World English, which dates back to just before the Second World War, and international English dating back to around 1980.
But English has not always been of such importance. It began spreading beyond the British Isles when the British Empire started growing. English started spreading all over the world by the many British colonies and it stayed an official language in many of them even after the colonies became separate countries again.
The history of the English language started with the arrival of three Germanic tribes – the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes – thatinvaded Britain during the 5th century AD. These tribes crossed the North Sea where today Denmark and northern Germany are. At that time the inhabitants of Britain spoke a Celtic language. But most Celtic speakers were pushed west and north by the invaders - mainly into what is now Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The Angles came from "Englaland" and their language was called "Englisc" - from which the words "England" and "English" are derived.
The invading Germanic tribes spoke similar languages, which developed into what we now call Old English. Old English did not sound or look like English today. Native English speakers now would have great difficulty understanding Old English. Nevertheless, about half of the most commonly used words in Modern English have Old English roots. The words be, strong and water, for example, derive from Old English. Old English was spoken until around 1100.
In 1066 William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy (part of modern France), invaded and conquered England. The new conquerors (called the Normans) brought with them a kind of French, which became the language of the Royal Court, and the ruling and business classes. For a period there was a kind of linguistic class division, where the lower classes spoke English and the upper classes spoke French. In the 14th century English became dominant in Britain again, but with many French words added. This language is called Middle English. It was the language of the great poet Chaucer (c1340-1400), but it would still be difficult for native English speakers to understand today.
Towards the end of Middle English, a sudden and distinct change in pronunciation (the Great Vowel Shift) started, with vowels being pronounced shorter and shorter. From the 16th century the British had contact with many peoples from around the world.
This, and the Renaissance of Classical learning, meant that many new words and phrases entered the language. The invention of printing also meant that there was now a common language in print. Books became cheaper and more people learned to read. Printing also brought standardization to English. Spelling and grammar became fixed, and the dialect of London, where most publishing houses were, became the standard. In 1604 the first English dictionary was published.
The main difference between Early Modern English and Late Modern English is vocabulary. Late Modern English has many more words, arising from two principal factors: firstly, the Industrial Revolution and technology created a need for new words; secondly, the British Empire at its height covered one quarter of the earth's surface, and the English language adopted foreign words from many countries.
By the beginning of the nineteenthcentury, Britain had become the world’s leading industrialand trading country. By the end of the century, the population ofthe USA (then approaching 100 million) was larger than that ofany of the countries of western Europe, and its economy was themost productive and the fastest growing in the world. British politicalimperialism had sent English around the globe, during thenineteenth century. During the twentieth century, this world presencewas maintained and promoted throughthe economic supremacy of the new American superpower. Economicsreplaced politics as the chief driving force. And the languagebehind the US dollar was English. It became the language where most scientific research was published- although many papers continued to be published in the native language of the scientist as well. Now, to get cataloged internationally, a paper needs to be available in English, whatever the native language of the scientist is.
At the Treaty of Versailles, it became officially one of the two languages of diplomacy when the Treaty was written in both French and English. This act is a major milestone in the globalisation of English.
After 1600, English speakers started to spread around the world for a variety of reasons:exploration, trade, forced and voluntary migrations, and wars.
The Americasand Australiawere the first to become affected by the spread of English.In 1497, John Cabot reached Newfoundland, now part of Canada, backed by theBritish monarch Henry VII. He was trying to find a northern passage to the East Indies.The first permanent, English-speaking settlers — the Jamestown settlers sent by a tradingcompany — did not inhabit North America until 1607, however. Forced migrations, suchas those due to religious persecutions, prison colonies, and later the slave trade, also contributedto the spread of English: British prisoners were sent to the West Indies (Barbados)in the 1620s, to Georgia in the US in the 1730s, and to Australia in the 1780s. When a faminebroke out in Ireland in the 1820s, many people were forced to leave Ireland for otherparts of the world. In addition, due to the Highland Clearances, where many thousandspeople were evicted to enable large-scale sheep farming, many inhabitants of Scotlandhad to move elsewhere. The migrants from Scotland and Ireland often only spoke Gaelic,and were therefore only indirectly related to the spread of English.
Parts of Africaand Asiawere also colonized early on. The most important tradingcompany in the English-speaking world was the British East India Company. It wasestablished in 1600 and had a monopoly on all trade, initially mainly spices, in the EastIndies. Its main interests were in India — including what is now Bangladesh and Pakistan— starting around 1615. The 1670s saw West Africa used for trade and slave trading.Other areas colonized and controlled by the Empire were: South East Asia (Burma,Malaysia, and Singapore among others) in the 1800s, East Africa after 1880, and SouthAfrica by 1902. After its independence from Britain in 1776, the United States of Americaexpanded its territory as well and contributed to the spread of English. With the LouisianaPurchase in 1803, the US nearly doubled its size. The much smaller Gadsden Purchasefollowed in 1853 and in the late 1890s, the US gained control over Hawaii, the Philippines,and Puerto Rico.
After World War II, major decolonization took place: the Philippines became independentin 1946, India and Pakistan in 1947, and Burma and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1948.Nigeria and Kenya gained independence in 1960 and 1963, respectively. However, manyof the newly independent countries retained the English language after independence.Some, such as India and South Africa, did this because of the multitude of languagesspoken and the unifying force of English.According to the Ethnologue data, in addition to English, 427languages are spoken in India. Even though English is spoken by only 5% of the population,it plays an important role in Indian society due to the British domination of India upto its independence in 1947. The Indian constitution is written in English and India haslarge numbers of non-native speakers of English. English is an associate official language,used together with Hindi for resolutions, permits, and contracts. Hindi and English arethe national or official languages, but 22 languages are official ‘scheduled’ languages. Currently, the role of English in India is increasingdue to the outsourcing industries and services.The English spoken in India is distinct and referred to as Indian English. It is verysimilar to Pakistani or Bangladeshi English.
Since South Africa’s first free elections in 1994, eleven languages have been recognizedas official: Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, Afrikaans, English,isiNdebele, isiXhosa, and isiZulu. There are also eight unofficial languages: Fanagalo,Lobedu, Northern Ndenele, Phuti, Sign Language, Khoe, Nama, and San, and there is acommitment to promote and ensure respect for German, Gujarati, Portuguese, Telegu andmany others (Mesthrie 2002). English is often used as a lingua franca, even though it isestimated that only 8% of the population use it at home.
In addition to being a leftover of colonization and being used for linguistic unity, Englishis currently being taught as a second (ESL) or foreign language (EFL) to non-Englishspeakers in the US, East Asia (China, Korea, and Japan), and Europe (especially NorthernEurope). One of the main reasons for this recent dispersal of English has been the cultural,scientific, and economic dominance of the US after World War II and the increased globalizationsince the last decade of the 20th century. A distinction is often made betweenEnglish as a secondlanguage and as a foreign language, although this is increasingly difficult. English as a secondlanguage is used when learning Englishin a country where it is spoken as a native language (such as the US), or has a political orhistorical presence (such as India). English as a foreign language is used when English is taught and learned in acountry where it is not spoken natively (in Korea, for example). This distinction becomesharder to make in diverse, multi-cultural and multi-lingual societies; therefore, the termESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) is sometimes used. It could be thatEnglish is becoming a basic skill that needs to be taught at the primary school level at thesame time as writing, reading, arithmetic, and social studies. That would make it a secondlanguage for most.
Some people might argue that the importance of English is also due to a concertedeffort to maintain it as the world language: heavy monetary investments are being madethrough the British Council, for example, to achieve this.Teaching English (CELTA, i.e. Cambridge Certificate), testing (TOEFL), and publishingmaterials in it are major sources of income. In Graddol (2006), there is an estimateof ₤11.3 billion of direct and indirect income from teaching of English for the UnitedKingdom. British, American, and Australian universitiesare competing to get international students, and European universities (having adoptedEnglish in many of their programs) are starting to compete as well. In the 1990s, manyprestigious universities developed online curricula and degrees aimed at the national andinternational market, but this was not successful and largely abandoned. Instead, thesesame universities have now entered into joint ventures with e.g. Chinese universities andhave established overseas branches.
The estimates of the number of speakers of English vary widely depending on whetherone includes non-native speakers or not. Bailey (1991: vii) estimates that 15% of theworld’s population makes regular use of English. Crystal (2003: 6) estimates that thisnumber has grown to 25%, or 1.5 billion and Graddol (1997) estimates the same 1.5 billionspeakers. Graddol (2006: 95) estimates that, due to China’s decision to make English acompulsory primary school subject, 20 million users of English will be added each year. Itis difficult to confirm these figures because of the lack of agreement on how much Englisha speaker needs to know to be included.
Kachru (1985) formulated the well-known distinction between the inner circle(where English is used in the home: Great Britain, Ireland, US, Canada, Australia, NZ),the outercircle(where English is part of the government/school system: India, Singapore,and 50 other regions), and the expandingcircle(where there is no history of colonizationbut where English is used for communication with other countries: Europe, China, andJapan).
Using Kachru’s model, Crystal (2003) estimates for 2001 that the inner circle has320–380 million speakers, the outer circle 300–500 million and the expanding circle 500million to 1 billion. He thus arrives at the 1.5 billion mentioned earlier.
In the 1980s, Kachru’s model raised awareness of the different Englishes; more recently,however, it has been criticized as no longer reflecting reality. In many countrieswhere English is not spoken natively — such as Norway and the Netherlands — it hasbecome a second language in certain domains, such as business, banking, advertizing, andeducation. Kachru has therefore suggested another model, onewhere the inner circle has 500 million “high proficiency users” and the outer circle showsthe numbers of lower proficiency speakers.Several journals, such as English World-Wide and World Englishes, publish articleson World Englishes and there is a book series with almost 50 titles, e.g. Focus on Canada(Clarke 1993), Focus on South Africa (de Klerk 1996), Indian English: Texts and Interpretation(Mehrotra 1998), and Filipino English and Taglish (Thompson 2003). Dictionariesabound, e.g. the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (Allsop 1996), The New ZealandPocket Oxford Dictionary (Burchfield 1986), the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, theAustralian National Dictionary (Ramson 1988), the Australian Oxford Dictionary (Moore1999), A Dictionary of South African English (Branford 1991), and many others. Thereare also many web-resources, such as the International Corpus of English (ICE), and numerousnewspapers and radio stations online for primary (written and spoken) sources.Try ICE at IDEA International Dialects ofEnglish at or
The USlinguist Braj Kachru has suggested that we think of the spread ofEnglish around the world as three concentric circles, representingdifferent ways in which the language has been acquired and iscurrently used.13 Although not all countries fit neatly into thismodel, it has been widely regarded as a helpful approach.
The inner circle refers to the traditional bases of English, whereit is the primary language: it includes the USA, UK, Ireland,Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
The outer or extended circle involves the earlier phases of thespread of English in non-native settings, where the languagehas become part of a country’s chief institutions, and plays animportant ‘second language’ role in a multilingual setting: itincludes Singapore, India, Malawi and over fifty other territories.
The expanding or extending circle involves those nations whichrecognize the importance of English as an international language,though they do not have a history of colonization bymembers of the inner circle, nor have they given English anyspecial administrative status. It includes China, Japan, Greece,Poland and (as the name of this circle suggests) a steadily increasingnumber of other states. In these areas, English is taughtas a foreign language. (The term ‘expanding’ reflects its originsin the 1980s: today, with English recognized virtually everywhere,a tense change to expanded circle would better reflectthe contemporary scene.)
The labels E1, E2, and E3 used above are adaptations of David
Crystal’s L1, L2, and L3 in English as a Global Language (Cambridge
University Press, 1997) and refer generally to those who speak a particular
tongue as their first, second, or foreign language
When David Crystal calls English a “global language,” he is talkingabout its widespread study and use by nonnative speakers. Whatmakes English a global language is the way it is used: to support internationalcommerce, to unify communities with diverse languages, andto provide a lingua franca, a universal language, much as Latin becamein the Middle Ages and French until the early twentieth century.
English really began enjoying a role as a lingua franca after the Second World Warwhen the military, economic, scientific and technological supremacy of America became obvious. At that time too, American popular culture was beginning to gain world-wide recognition and admiration and a few decades later the American media business managed to achieve a global hegemony on world popular culture. On top of that, after the fall of communism, the US remained the only superpower and American supremacy has remained unchallenged ever since, despite terrorism.
English has in effect become the international language of science and technology, 6commerce and diplomacy, tourism and travel. English is now the first source for neology in most languages. All of this is very positive. And since the world actually needs a lingua franca, English is certainly a good choice. Standard words are short and relatively easy to pronounce; there is very little morphology and since syntax is not too constraining, non-natives get by easily even with a low level of proficiency. Of course difficulties strike back with a vengeance when learners try to reach a higher level: listening comprehension of native English-speakers is difficult, polysyllabic words are hard to pronounce, and high level fluency in writing is an elusive objective for many non-natives. One of the most positive aspects of learning the English language is that it gives an easy and direct access to the various fields of a very rich culture: literature, the arts, the sciences, the humanities, etc. No educated person anywhere can do without knowledge of Anglophone cultural achievements.