Chapter 2

Language

Introduction
We produce and process language so efficiently that we hardly notice it. However, in order to teach
English to speakers of other languages, we need an understanding of the idea of language in general
and of English in particular. This chapter attempts to provide this understanding by answering the fol-
lowing questions:

1. What is language?
2. How are languages organized?
3. What is special about English?

What is language?
The section on language in general is divided into how we think about language, that is, theories of
language, and how language is organized.

Theories of language
Our ideas of language and our theories of language are important when we address many of the issues
that language teachers face, such as

They know the grammar rule, but they can’t seem to use it
I’ve said this a hundred times, but they don’t listen.
Should I always use authentic texts in my reading class?

A common-sense view is that language is a physical object. The words on the page you are reading
at the moment seem to be objects in the same way that a pen or a table are physical objects. If I give
some students copies of a list of articles and books I want them to read in a handout, it feels as if I am
giving them information. This physical view of language fits in with Saussure’s (1974) conceptualization
of signs, or words, as consisting of a signifier and signified. So the word ‘page’ consists of the signifier,
the four letters p-a-g-e or, for spoken language, the acoustic image (Joseph, 2004, p. 59) of these
letters and the signified, for example page of a book (Harris, 1996, p. 6).
14 Teaching and Learning the English Language

However, from the viewpoint of language learners, problems arise. How do learners recognize letters
in written language? The recognition of the letter ‘O’ seems similar to the recognition of a table as a flat
surface with some legs. How do readers know that a particular set of marks is the letter ‘O’? They look
for the circles or ovals. But identifying the letter ‘O’ requires more than this. The ‘O’ in ‘LION’ is often the
same as the ‘O’ in ‘100’ but is not the same symbol (Smith, 1994). The two instances of ‘O’ are physically
identical but linguistically different. More strikingly, the letter ‘A’ can be written in various ways which
have little physically in common: ‘a’, ‘A’, ‘a’. Readers who are not familiar with the Roman alphabet
might think ‘a’ was a kind of ‘O’ rather than a kind of ‘A’. To recognize an ‘A’, you need to know the range
of things that count as an ‘A’. When learners encounter what seems to be a new language, it is not just
that they do not know what the letters or phonemes of that language are. They do not know what parts
of what they are seeing or hearing need their attention.
Letters are physical objects, but whether they are language does not depend just on what kind of
physical objects they are. For something to be language, we need a physical object, but we also need
users of that language who can make sense of it. Language is an interaction between users and a
physical object.
What is on the page in front of you are not letters, words and paragraphs but marks on paper. You
need to bring information about the writing system of English and your knowledge of how people
write about topics such as language to make these marks on paper into language. The letters, words
and texts are the result of the interaction between the information in your head and the physical
object.
Language users draw on their knowledge of what they wish to communicate and their knowledge of
the language they want to use to produce a range of physical objects such as ink on paper, pixels on a
screen or sound waves moving through the air. Language users who wish to make sense of these
physical objects draw on their knowledge of language and their knowledge of the world to create a new
instance of language. Without the language users, the physical object is not language. A lion is a lion
whether or not someone is around, but the word ‘lion’ is only a word when someone uses it in speech
or writing. Language is both physical and psychological.
However, language is more than knowledge in the brain. People produce the sounds or marks on
paper in the hope that this will somehow enable communication. The knowledge that makes this
possible must be shared, and so language is social as well as physical and psychological. While two
people create something new every time, they listen to what the other has said or written, they can only
communicate because they have ‘a common set of signs’ (Harris, 1996, p. 6). Language is ‘a socially
shared, psychologically real system of signs’ (Matsuda & Friedrich, 2011, p. 59).
At the start of this section, I identified three issues that relate to the nature of language. The first was
where learners know a grammatical rule, that is, they understand at least a part of the psychological
element of language but are not able to produce language using the rule. What they lack is the social
element. Their knowledge is useless until it results in the production of something other people can
recognize as language. What they need is probably not more knowledge but more practice. See also
Chapter 9: Grammar.
Similarly, when teachers complain that their learners do not listen, they sometimes forget that what
the learners are creating is a more or less complete version of the teacher’s message when they listen.
Language 15

The extent to which learners’ version of the teacher's message coincides with what the teacher intended
to convey will depend partly on the knowledge that the learners have. For many beginners, the sound
that comes out of their teacher’s mouth is just noise. See Chapter 15: Listening.
The final issue was to do with the use of authentic texts in reading classes. What is authentic for one
group of language users is not authentic for a different group. I am trying to learn Chinese and can say
some words in Chinese but can read almost no characters. If my Chinese teacher gave me an article
taken from a Chinese newspaper, it would not be authentic for me because I do not have enough
knowledge of Chinese to reconstruct the text in a way that would correspond to what the author wrote.
See Chapter 13: Reading.

Activity 2.1. What is a language?

Which of these samples are language? How do you know?
ſ╖╞╝╦╔╔┤
Hij gaf me een boek
‘oH vam Hol
他给了我一本书
彼は私に本を与えました。

How are languages organized?

It is not possible to teach all of a language at once. Teachers need to find a way of breaking it down into
component parts that can be used as the basis of a course or a lesson. This section describes some
ways in which language can be divided up, and two of these structure most of the rest of this book.
The first approach attempts to describe the ability to communicate, the second is based on the
stages one needs to go through in the process by which one gets from the physical trace of language,
or expression, to meaning or vice versa. Finally, we examine a very common way of dividing up language
into the skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening.

Communicative competence
Linguists working within the transformational generative tradition associated with Chomsky make ‘a
fundamental distinction between the competence (the speaker-hearer’s knowledge of his language)
and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations)’ (Chomsky, 1969, p. 4).
The language users’ core knowledge for these linguists are the grammar and the phonology/
phonetics because these parts of language seem to have rules, and these rules can be used to
understand how language is produced. This view led to the idea that linguistic competence meant
knowing the grammar and phonology of the language being studied. This was an influential view, and
many language courses have focussed on these elements and particularly on grammar.
However, several linguists offer wider views of what learners need to know. The three most important
models are those presented by Hymes, Canale and Swain, and Bachman.
16 Teaching and Learning the English Language

Figure 2.1 Hymes’s model of communicative competence.

Hymes identified four aspects of communicative competence. See Figure 2.1. This is a useful way
of describing what underlies an act of communication and highlights what learners need to know. The
ideas of easy/difficult or common/rare provide useful guides for organizing a course book, and ideas of
politeness are important for language learners. However, it is difficult to see how this translates into what
might be taught in the classroom beyond a grammatical syllabus.
A second attempt was made by Canale and Swain (1980, pp. 29–31 et passim). They identified three
elements:

1 Grammatical competence: knowledge of lexical items and of rules of morphology, syntax, sentence
grammar, semantics and phonology.
2 Sociolinguistic competence:

a. socio-cultural rules of use (what makes language appropriate for a particular context)

b. rules of discourse (how language is organized above the sentence).

3 Strategic competence: strategies used to deal with breakdowns in communication.

This model has been influential in two main ways. The first is to do with teaching the socio-cultural
rules of use or the functions (Wilkins, 1976). Many course books for elementary learners start with
a unit which covers the function of introduction, and this allows the course book writers to include
different grammatical patterns in the same unit. If we were being strictly grammatical, ‘How are
you’? is grammatically different from ‘Hello’ even though they are both ways of greeting people. The
functional view of language is still influential, and you may well have functional units or parts of units
in the course books you use, but, despite Wilkins’s efforts, it is hard to use this as the sole basis for an
English syllabus. Swan (1985a and 1985b) has argued that this is because grammar is more useful
Language 17

for learners who want to create new language than functions, because functions are less systematic
and less generative than grammatical knowledge. Functions are still important in language learning,
and there is some further discussion of them in the section on speech act theory in Chapter 12:
Pragmatics.
The other contribution of Canale and Swain’s notion of communicative competence is
communication or compensatory strategies. Many textbooks now include elements on what learners
should do if they do not understand something or what they should do if they do not know the exact
word for what they want to say. Approaches involving strategies are still being used in language
learning and teaching, and we will cover some aspects of these in the chapters on skill-based
teaching.
Bachman (1990, p. 87 et seq.) replaces the term communicative competence with the phrase
communicative language ability. This is made up of language competence which is then realized
through strategic competence (Bachman & Palmer, 1996, p. 63), and this in turn is divided into
organizational competence and pragmatic competence. See Figure 2.2.
Organizational competence covers the formal structures of language and comprises grammatical
competence, equivalent to Hymes’s linguistic competence and Canale and Swain’s grammatical
competence, and textual competence, paralleling Canale and Swain’s rules of discourse.
Pragmatic competence covers the ways in which language is used to express meaning. The first
part of this, illocutionary competence (Bachman, 1990, p. 90) or functional knowledge (Bachman &
Palmer, 1996, p. 69), covers how an utterance such as ‘it’s very hot’ may be a description of the
temperature (ideational meaning), a request to turn on the air conditioning (the manipulative meaning),
an illustration of the contraction ‘it’s’ (heuristic) or engaging listeners in a story at a journey across a
desert (imaginative). The other element in pragmatic competence involves sociolinguistic knowledge,
which covers awareness of how languages vary geographically (dialect) or by differences between the
discourse domain (e.g. the registers of science and law), naturalness and cultural references. See
Figure 2.2.
These areas of language competence are then used to produce language when language users
draw on their strategic competence. This process has three elements: assessment (working out
what is needed), planning (working out how to do what is needed) and execution (doing what is
needed).
These versions of communicative competence have been important in the way that they have made
it clear what learners need to know in order to use language effectively. You will also hear echoes of
these ideas in the chapter on pragmatics (e.g. politeness) and discourse (e.g. register). However, the
models are difficult to apply directly to the classroom. How, for example, would you teach a series of
lessons on frequency or sociolinguistic competence? The development of the models also illustrates
some problems with the division between competence and performance. The models can be seen as
re-conceptualizing the notions of knowledge, related to competence, and skill, related to performance,
as complementary ways of viewing language. Every instance of language use represents both
knowledge and skill.
In the next section, we examine the notion of knowledge using the idea of language levels, and the
final section of the chapter looks at the four skills.
18 Teaching and Learning the English Language

Figure 2.2 Bachman’s language competence.

Language levels
When babies start to communicate, they use a sound like ‘ma’ or a gesture to mean something, such as
mother, and the meaning relates directly to the expression. There is a direct link between the meaning
and the expression, and when adults hear the sound, they go straight from the expression to the
meaning.
However, adult languages have three levels (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004, p. 24), and this enables
users of English to combine three phonemes /k/, /æ/ and /t/ to produce ‘tack‘, ‘cat’ and ‘act’ and to
know that they cannot say */ktæ/ (the asterisk indicates that something is not possible in a particular
language). For written language, the situation is similar. The three letters ‘c’, ‘a’ and ‘t’ can be combined
to produce a range of words. Instead of having a range of sounds each of which expresses one
meaning, the two levels mean that the twenty-six letters we use in English can express half a million or
so words. See Figure 2.3.
This feature of language is variously called duality of expression (Hockett, 1960, pp. 91–92) or
‘stratification of the content plane’ (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004, p. 25). Halliday and Matthiessen see
the development of this division as a very important part of human evolution. This division of language
‘turned homo . . . into homo sapiens’ (2004, p. 25).
Language 19

Figure 2.3 Language levels.

When we understand a spoken message, we take the physical object, the phonetic substance or
expression, and make it into phonemes. Phonetic description covers things like the position of the tongue
when you make a sound and is not related to a particular language. Phonemic description is about the
sounds in a particular language and how they relate to each other. One example of this is tone, which is
phonemic in Chinese but not in English. For example, the Putonghua or Chinese word for ‘Mother’ is
written ‘mā’ in pinyin Romanization with the line above ‘ā’ indicating first tone, and horse is written ‘mǎ’, with
the ‘ǎ’ indicating third tone. Speakers of Putonghua will hear these as two different words. Most native
speakers of English will hear one sound repeated twice because in English tone is not phonemic. More
importantly, they will continue to fail to distinguish between mother and horse in Chinese until they learn,
first, that tones are important in distinguishing meaning and, second, to differentiate the tones.
Phonetics and phonology are distinct aspects of the study of language, but for language teaching
purposes, they are closely related and are often treated under the heading of pronunciation. This
includes both speaking with an acceptable accent and understanding the way other people speak. This
is covered in Chapter 7: Pronunciation.
Understanding a written message means going from the physical substance of marks on paper to
letters. This parallels the process with spoken language, so we recognize the range of items such as ‘g’
and ‘ ’ as being instances of the same letter. This is covered in Chapter 8: Spelling.
The description of the next level, meaning and form, has led to two debates. The first is signalled by
the two labels of lexis and grammar or lexico-grammar. Lexis means vocabulary and grammar is how
we order those words. The division between grammar and vocabulary is used widely in language
teaching. The alternative view, often associated with Halliday (1961), is that meaning is a continuum
with general meanings expressed through grammar and more specific meanings expressed through
vocabulary. The difference between ‘learner’ and ‘learners’ is a fairly delicate distinction and so is
grammatical. The difference between ‘learner’ and ‘teacher’ is greater and so this is vocabulary or lexis.
We can see the continuum view in arguments about whether the difference between ‘put on’ (e.g. put
20 Teaching and Learning the English Language

on your clothes) and ‘put off’ (e.g. put off a meeting) is a lexical or grammatical difference and in the
way that some language teaching materials focus on topics like collocation and formulaic language.
However, at the moment, grammatical descriptions are not able to cover vocabulary, and so I treat
grammar and vocabulary in separate chapters. This is also in line with the division in many linguistic
theories, for example Chomsky (2000), and the fact that we have two main kinds of reference books for
language, dictionaries and grammars.

Activity 2.2. Grammar and vocabulary or lexico-grammar

Would you treat the difference between these pairs of items as part of grammar, part of vocabulary or
something else?
Go, went.
Go, come.
Throw at someone/throw to someone.
Take up/take off.
Happy, happier.
Happy, unhappy.
Happy, not happy.
As happy as Larry/As happy as you.

The other debate at the level of form relates to what kind of units we are using. In everyday use, we link
meaning most closely with words and, for many linguists, the largest meaningful unit of language is
the sentence. However, ‘it is people who make meanings, not words or structures’ (Prodromou, 2008,
p. xvi), and people use units larger than the word or sentence to communicate. Halliday sees the most
important unit of meaning as not the word or the sentence but the spoken or written text. When we talk
about communication, it is easier to talk about texts rather than words or grammar. So, a conversation
is a text. A letter applying for a job is a text.
Patterns in language operate over units larger than the sentence. (See Chapter 11: Discourse).
Starting a conversation follows conventions about how groups of sentences are used. In Hausa, a
language spoken in West Africa, it is common to ask someone if they are tired when you meet, and
many conversations in South China start with one person asking another if they have eaten. For people
who use many varieties of English, a comment about the weather is a useful way of starting a
conversation. The illocutionary force or function of a comment about tiredness, food or the weather
varies between cultures (Bachman, 1990; Bachman & Palmer, 1996).
Similarly, written texts are structured. Many academic texts have introductions, and textbooks
typically have pages of context and indexes. If you are going to use a language effectively, it is not
enough to be able to form grammatical sentences. You also need to know about these kinds of text
structures. Language learners need to be able to produce and understand texts, so we need to think of
grammar and vocabulary as a means to this end.
At the moment, it is difficult to identify a particular way of teaching texts in the same way as we can
talk about ways of teaching grammar or vocabulary. One of the most widely used ways of describing
Language 21

texts is genre analysis, where groups of texts are treated as forming one category or genre if they serve
the same function or purpose. See Chapter 11: Discourse, and the section on genre in Chapter 14. A
very closely related, and possibly identical, concept is that of the communicative task. The term ‘task' is
used with a variety of meanings in TESOL, and most of these meanings are primarily to do with what
happens in the classroom.

a task is taken to be an activity in which meaning is primary, there is some sort of relationship to the
real world, task completion has some priority, and the assessment of task performance is in terms of
task outcome. (Skehan, 1996, p. 38)

However, the kind of task I am talking about here is a communicative or target task. Long says ‘Tasks
are the things people will tell you they do if you ask them and they are not applied linguists’ (Long, 1985,
p. 89). If you want to decide what to teach, you first need to identify learners' needs ‘in terms of target
tasks, the real world things people do [using language] in everyday life’ (Long & Norris, 2000, p. 599)
(italics in original), such as buying a train ticket or applying for a job. Thinking about language use in
terms of tasks is very useful as a way of making sure that we remember that language is a means of
communication. However, as with genres, our descriptions of language in terms of tasks are limited.
The notion of the communicative task is closely linked to the idea of task-based teaching. While this
approach to teaching is more influenced by the notion of tasks in the classroom than of communicative
tasks, Long’s ideas have had an impact. See Chapter 4: Teaching. See table 2.1.

Language skills
We can also divide language up in terms of whether (a) we are working with spoken and written
language and (b) we are working with productive or receptive skills. Reading is a receptive skill used
with written texts, speaking is an active skill used with spoken texts. A range of terms are used instead
of receptive and productive. So some people use the terms active and passive. The term 'passive'
is not a good one because it suggests that reading and writing do not require the language user to
do anything, but reading and listening are quite demanding. 'Receptive' suggests more activity than
'passive', and perhaps a word like 'interpretive' is closer to what happens when someone reads or
writes.
While the skills based approach has the virtue of simplicity, it can lead to teaching where speaking
is treated as unconnected with listening. However, the skill-based approach is very useful in language
teaching as long as the division between skills is seen as a convenience for teaching rather than a claim
that the skills are independent. For these reasons, I have used skills and levels to structure much of this
book. See Table 2.2.

Table 2.1 Levels of language and organization of the book

Expression and substance Form and meaning

Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12

Pronunciation Spelling Grammar Vocabulary Discourse Pragmatics
22 Teaching and Learning the English Language

Table 2.2 Language skills and organization of the book

Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16

Reading Writing Listening Speaking

Activity 2.3. Organizing a language textbook

Choose an English language textbook you know well. How does it divide up the language? To what
extent does it make use of functions, levels (pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, tasks) or skills (read-
ing, writing, listening and speaking)?

What is special about English?

Language as interaction and the divisions of language by levels and by skills apply to all linguistic
communication, and as language teachers, this leads very soon to discussion of particular languages.
Teachers of Chinese, Arabic, Spanish or English are likely to have classes that focus on grammar/
vocabulary or reading and writing. However, the concept of what a language is sometimes a little fuzzy.
This fuzziness is reflected in the term translanguaging (Conteh, 2018), and we will discuss this fuzziness
before coming back to English.

Translanguaging
Language users ‘are not confined to using languages separately unless there are work-related or
institutional reasons to do so. In most home and social communication, they move fluidly across
languages, styles, registers and genres – that is, they translanguage – as they attempt to make
meaning’ (Simpson, 2020, p. 42).
Languages are created by the institutional context in which they are used. With the fall of the Roman
Empire, different geographical areas of the empire started using combinations of Latin and other
languages. They were translanguaging. For some, the language varieties they were using were
institutionalized into languages such as French, Italian or Romanian. The saying associated with Max
Weinreich that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy expresses this idea. Translanguaging
has a role to play in the learning of institutional languages, so this topic appears in the next chapter,
Chapter 3: Learning.

English as an international language

English has a lot of institutional support, but, unlike many other languages, it is a language that is
used internationally, and the majority of speakers of English do not speak it as a first language. As
Widdowson puts it, ‘English is different: it appears practically everywhere because it seems assumed
to have “a global relevance that other languages do not have”’ (2000, p. 193). If you are teaching a
Language 23

language to speakers of other languages, you need to decide which variety you should be teaching,
and the fact that English is spoken so widely makes this more complicated than for many languages.
The reasons for English being so widespread are mainly to do with the fact that the English-speaking
United Kingdom was succeeded as one of the dominant powers in the world by another Anglophone
country, the United States. This has resulted in there being different native speaker varieties of English
associated particularly with what is often called ‘the inner circle’ of English (Kachru, 1983), that is
Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, the UK and the United States but usually
excludes other native speakers of English from, say, the West Indies. The multiplicity of native speaker
varieties means that many teachers of English have to decide which varieties they wish to focus on or
how to deal with the varieties that are included in their teaching material.
However, the number of native speakers is not what makes English different. Estimates of the
number of people who speak English as a first language vary between about 330 million (Lewis, 2009)
and 400 million (Gnutzman, 2000, p. 357), while Mandarin Chinese or Putonghua has about 1.2 billion
speakers.
The main reason for the different status of English is to do with L2 speakers, but estimates here vary
even more than they do for first language speakers. Graddol (2006, p. 62) quotes a figure of 510 million
speakers of English as a first or second language, which suggests under two hundred million speakers
of English as a second or foreign language. Crystal (2010, p. 370) puts the figure at 1.2 billion, and
Graddol suggests that by 2020 there will be two billion learners (2006, p. 14) which could generate the
same number of speakers (Graddol, 2006, p. 96) of English. ‘English has become not only an
international lingua franca, but the first world language in human history’ (Gnutzman, 2000, p. 357).
L2 speakers of English are often grouped into two categories: those who speak English as a second
language (ESL), the outer circle (Kachru, 1983), and those who speak English as a foreign language
(EFL), the expanding circle (Kachru, 1983). People who learn English in a country where English has no
official status, such as Japan or China, are said to speak English as a foreign language. People who
learn English in a country where English has some official status, such as Nigeria or Singapore, are said
to speak ESL.
However, this classification is too simplistic for teaching purposes because ESL learners do not form
one coherent group. In the United States, migrants learning English have very different needs than, say,
someone learning English in India. This has led to a proliferation of acronyms. In the UK people talk
about English as an additional language (EAL) for non-native speakers of English at school and English
to speakers of other languages (ESOL) at college. In the United States, teachers talk of English language
learners (ELLs). Learners who plan to settle in a country where English is a native language may wish
to learn the standard language in that country, but they will also need to learn more local varieties.
Someone who settles in Leeds will need to be able to cope with Yorkshire English.
Outer circle countries like Nigeria often have a standard English which is distinct from native speaker
varieties, and in many situations two Nigerians might communicate in English even though they both
have other languages in common. These varieties are primarily used for communication within a country
or region and often have distinctive features of vocabulary and grammar. In West African English,
people may say ‘two breads’ rather than ‘two loaves of bread’ or read works of literature which include
sentences such as ‘I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age’ (Tutuola, 1961, p.
24 Teaching and Learning the English Language

4). If you are learning English in Nigeria or Ghana, West African English, and the cultures associated
with that variety, are likely to be more useful than, say, a native speaker variety such as Australian
English.
The situation with learners of English as a foreign language is more complex because of the range
of reasons for which such learners may need to use English. If they are going to use English primarily
with L1 speakers of English, then a variety of English as a native language (ENL) will probably be
appropriate. So, a Mexican who is learning English to do business with people from the United States
should probably learn a variety of American English. Similarly, a speaker from Côte d'Ivoire who wants
to trade with Ghanaians might wish to learn a Ghanaian or West African kind of English. However, many
learners will wish to use English to communicate with others from the expanding circle. The situation
where two non-native speakers of English use English to communicate with each other is very common.
‘About 80% of verbal exchanges in which English is used a second or foreign language do not involve
native speakers of English’ (Gnutzman, 2000, p. 357). In these circumstances, English is being used as
a lingua franca and, for many people, this is the variety of English that they need to learn.

A lingua franca is a contact language used among people who do not shared a first language,
and is commonly understood to mean a second (or subsequent) language of its speakers.
(Jenkins, 2007: 1)

There is disagreement about whether English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) includes interactions with L1
speakers of English. Prodromou says that ELF is ‘the use of English as an international context as a
lingua franca between people with a different L1 but excluding L1 speakers of English’ (2008, p. xviii),
and he uses the term English as an International Language (EIL) to cover interactions between both
L1 and L2 speakers of English. In contrast, Jenkins (2007) argues that ELF includes interactions which
include L1 speakers of English because so many interactions involve both L1 and L2 speakers of
English, 20 per cent according to Gnutzman (2000, p. 357).
Some people have tried to come up with descriptions of the phonology, lexis and grammar of ELF.
For example, Jenkins suggests that the difference between unvoiced and voiced versions of ‘th’, as
in ‘three’ and ‘that’ respectively, is not part of the ELF ‘core’. There are also claims that ELF uses
fewer idioms than ENL or ESL varieties. However, Jenkins argues that these features should not be
used as models for teaching but are simply examples of the ways that ELF interactions happen. What
is important is that ELF should not rely on ENL norms (Jenkins, 2007, p. 25) because ‘relying on
native speaker norms (or near-native speaker norms) does not necessarily guarantee that the
communication will be successful’ (Gnutzman, 2000, p. 358). Different users will have different
varieties of English.

For instance, if a Chilean, an Indian, and an American attended a business meeting in Hong Kong,
each participant might use a variety of English that they were most fluent in – for example, Chilean
English, Indian English, and American English respectively. (Matsuda & Friedrich, 2011, p. 333)

A better approach is to focus not on the knowledge of the different language levels of those who speak
ELF but on the way they use English in an ELF interaction. ‘What is distinctive about ELF lies in the
Language 25

communicative strategies that its speakers use rather than in the conformity to any changed set of
language norms’ (Seidlhofer, 2005, p. 38).
Probably the most important strategy is that of accommodation. Users of language need to adjust
the way they produce and understand language to try to ensure that they communicate effectively. Here
is an example of two speakers in an ELF interaction. They are talking about some pictures that Jean’s
friend has sent to her, and which both Jean and Karen are looking at.

JEAN: They have pictures of them you know in Kathmandu, in Tibet, like
KAREN: (laughing)
ANNA: They sent pictures on the internet.
JEAN: It’s nice but it’s a bit
ANNA: . . . too much eh? [speaking at the same time]
JEAN: . . . cheesy [speaking at the same time]
KAREN: Yeah
ANNA: Yeah
KAREN: Yeah a bit too much I think (laughing)
JEAN: So blue flower, we say fleur bleue [blue flower in French]
ANNA: Why? To say that it’s cheesy?
JEAN: Fleur, yeah, fleur bleue means you know when you have these pictures with little angels of . . ..
KAREN: Ahh. Yeah
ANNA: Yeah
JEAN: Fleur bleue
KAREN: Kitsch- kitschig [the German for kitschy a word that English has borrowed from German].
JEAN: Kitschig yeah (laughter).
Source: Adapted from Cogo & Dewey (2006, p. 67).

Here, Karen accommodates the way that Jean uses the term ‘fleur blue’ to explain ‘cheesy' in a way
that is closer to Jean’s L1, and in return, Jean accepts and repeats Karen’s use of the German word
‘kitshig’.
The focus on interactional needs is the key element here. As teachers, we need to be helping
learners develop the skills they need to communicate in the way they need, and this will depend
not only on the varieties of English that the parties to the communication can use but also the
relative status of those involved. When you are being interviewed for a job, you will probably use
language in a way that is acceptable to the person who is interviewing you. Choices of whether to
teach one or more kinds of ENL, a second language variety, the set of communication strategies
associated with ELF (Seidlhofer & Widdowson, 2009, pp. 37–38) or some combination of these will
depend on what learners need and where we are not able to say what they will need, the varieties
that we think will be most useful to them. A closely related idea is an approach that trains learners
to be ‘diplomats’, able to view different cultures from a perspective of informed understanding
(Corbett, 2003, p. 3).
26 Teaching and Learning the English Language

Activity 2.4. Varieties of English

Consider a group of English language learners you have worked with. What were their reasons for
learning English? If you speak a first language other than English, this could relate to your own reasons
for learning English. How would these reasons relate to the variety or varieties of English that they were
taught?

Summary
This chapter has examined ideas about language in general and English in particular. I have argued
that language is complex. Language is simultaneously physical, psychological and sociological, and
language teachers need to think about all three elements in their teaching. Again, language is both
knowledge (phonology, orthography, lexico-grammar and communicative tasks) and skill (reading,
writing, speaking and listening). I have also discussed the ways in which English is different from most
languages because it is widely used as a lingua franca and argued that this has implications for what
kinds of English students of English need to learn.

Further reading
My favourite book on language is Crystal (2019). The description of the elements of language is a fea-
ture in many current textbooks, but its rationale is not widely discussed. This chapter was influenced by
Halliday’s work (e.g. Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014). The literature on ELF is growing. A good starting
point is Jenkins’s (2007) or Seidlhofer’s (2011) and MacKenzie’s (2014) looks at the implications for
teaching. Graddol’s (2006) is well-informed and thought-provoking. At the time of writing, it was avail-
able for free download.