I can begin with a quick answer to the question set by this conference – Yes, there should be standards of English for English language teacher education; but the major point I wish to make in this presentation is that these standards must be carefully qualified on political as well as linguistic grounds. A great deal has already been said by others about the linguistic grounds. I will speak mainly about the political; and the major factor in this is that any connection which might be made between linguistic standards and speakerhood – i.e. whether one is a ‘native speaker’ or ‘non-native speaker’ – would immediately fall into the trap of native-speakerist discrimination.
1. The trajectories of native-speakerism
To explain what I mean by this, I must first of all define what I believe to be a deeply pervasive ideology within the English language teaching profession – that of native-speakerism. Elsewhere I have defined this as an established belief that ‘native-speaker’ teachers represent a ‘Western culture’ from which spring the ideals both of the English language and of English language teaching methodology (Holliday Reference Holliday2005: 6). Notice that I place ‘native speaker’ and ‘Western culture’ in inverted commas, to denote that these are as used within the ideology – and, in this case, based on prejudice rather than on science. I have found it useful to speak of our profession in ideological terms in this way because it indicates a set of ideas which can be subscribed to in varying degrees by different people. While native-speakerism originates in the English speaking West, it is subscribed to by English language educators everywhere; and at the same time not all English language teachers from the English speaking West would accept the ideology, even though professional biographies may make it hard for them to entirely escape it. Native-speakerism is therefore a more flexible concept that BANA (British, Australasian, North American) versus TESEP (tertiary, secondary, primary education) (Holliday Reference Holliday1994), which are labels for educational cultures which are located in geographical places.
As with all ideologies, in native-speakerism there is a surface sense, where the subscribers project the beliefs of the ideology as matters of fact, and a hidden sense, which is usually revealed as prejudicial by those who critique the ideology. I shall deal with the surface first, because it will strike a strong chord of familiarity, and show that all of us here, to a greater or lesser extent, are indeed taken in by its ‘truths’. The two senses are also trajectories of the ideology, in that they take us to particular places in our everyday practice, on the one hand, and undeniable concerns, on the other. I find this notion of surface versus hidden a useful mechanism for sorting out aspects of complex reality (a bit like deep and surface structures in Chomskyan linguistics, deep and surface action and formal and informal orders in Holliday Reference Holliday1994, citing Coleman). We need, however, to remember that these are just artificial devices for sorting things out, and that ‘reality’, whatever that is, is always going to be far more complex.
1.1 Surface and safe
In the surface sense there is a popular discourse within which ‘native speaker’ and ‘non-native speaker’ take on the appearance of neutral categories. They are used easily and unthinkingly by everyone, even though we know that they are not based on easy, objective criteria. This sort of simplification suits the technologized discourses of professions because it helps people to feel certain about what they are talking about, and professionals do not like to think that they are being ideological. This sense of certainty is in turn connected with the idea of a language model attached to nation and national culture – a very convenient concept in a profession which needs to feel certain about who the teachers and students are in terms of which countries they come from. This tendency toward a belief in neutrality is present in Davies’ (2006) first criterion for being a ‘native speaker’ – having acquired the L1 in childhood, and therefore having been exposed to the full benefit of the language and all its socializing cultural baggage. Davies (2006: 435) recognizes that this idea is problematic and excluding. Indeed, its prescriptiveness goes against the ‘liberalism’ that English-speaking Western English language teaching likes to subscribe to. It is also acknowledged that the criterion could relate to any type of cultural group, in that ‘everyone is a native speaker of his/her own unique code’ (ibid. 432, citing Chomsky). However, despite these notes of caution, the established impression that speakerhood relates to birth within a particular country is maintained and therefore associated with ideological neutrality. It is interesting here that when Davies turns to issues of diversity (again satisfying the liberal traditional), he does not seem to relate this to the notion of speakerhood – perhaps too dangerously close to ‘human rights’ issues – but remains within the well-trodden area of national varieties of English. And here he raises the problem of how language learners can get in touch with good models in countries where new varieties are not the majority experience. Again, the professional preoccupation with the instrumentality of how to teach who in which national setting comes into play.
1.2 Hidden and dangerous
The hidden results of native-speakerism reveal things that we don't like to think about – sometimes known, but sometimes unspoken – the things which Davies seems to stay safely clear of. The first is discrimination against ‘non-native speakers’ by employers and ‘customers’. In many scenarios ‘non-native speaker’ teachers need to compete with less well qualified ‘native speakers’. I have touched on this in Holliday (2005: 13), mainly based on the testimony of a Greek language school owner who talks about how better qualified Greek teachers have to compete for jobs with less qualified ‘native speakers’. More recently Shao (Reference Shao2005) tells us about the difficulties faced by Chinese teachers in China, even when the Chinese teachers have US nationality. This is a particular issue expressed by the North-America-based but widely supported NNEST (Non-Native English Speakers of TESOL) Caucus; and what this movement makes very clear to us is that ‘non-native speaker’ teachers are no longer confined to their own countries (also Petrić 2006), and therefore no longer necessarily subscribe to the traditional role of knowing the ‘context and culture’ of their students. They are out in the world expecting to do all the things that ‘native speaker’ teachers do. The discrimination against them is known but often overlooked because of the greater preoccupation in many parts of our profession with the short term business side of satisfying customer demand. I have heard influential employers in Britain say that while they would abolish the discriminatory differentiation between ‘native speakers’ and ‘non-native speakers’ tomorrow, they can't because their ‘customers demand it’. I am not at all sure that this is a valid excuse. It certainly would not hold if we were to make the excuse that employers should hold on to the idea that certain occupations should be carried out by women or black people because their customers demand it. We all have a responsibility to educate our customers.
My association between the popular desire for ‘native speaker’ teachers and sexism and racism is founded on a more sinister aspect of anti ‘non-native speaker’ discrimination which has remained so hidden that it has not as a rule found their way into the literature until recently – the connection with ‘ethnicity’ and ‘race’. As Shao (op. cit.) testifies, even the knowledge that a Chinese person is really American, if she or he doesn't look right it doesn't matter if the birth criterion for being a ‘native speaker’ is fulfilled. More examples of this racist prejudice are reported in this account of what it takes to ‘pass’ as a ‘native speaker’ in the NNEST Caucus Newsletter:
Ulla Connor, who is White, and Xiaoming Li, who is Chinese . . . both face common challenges in acquiring the native speaker voice. Connor succeeds in achieving this identity. Li doesn't. She revises her trajectory of progression and chooses to develop a hybrid voice, positioned between Chinese and American. I posit that . . . Connor's Finnish identity provides her with possibilities of passing, while Li's Chinese identity encounters more difficulties. . . . More specifically . . . the invisible and normative nature of Whiteness is associated with the notion of NS and . . . the NNS construct is combined with ‘colouredness’ or ‘Asianness’. (Kubota et al. Reference Kubota, Bashir-Ali, Canagarajah, Kamhi-Stein, Lee and Shin2005, citing Connor, and Li)
In my own experience I have seen Northern Europeans get the ‘native speaker’ jobs because they look right.
It becomes clear that language competence, regardless of where it was acquired, is not the only criterion for acceptance as an English language teacher. Indeed, what becomes apparent is that ‘non-native speaker’ can be a label for the non-‘white’ Other. This is evidenced by Shuck's (2002) interviews with 52 students about their experiences with their first year writing course, showing how easily they categorize their fellow students along binary ‘native–non-native speaker’ lines within what she terms a ‘language ideology’:
A number of striking patterns emerged, particularly in the talk of white, mostly monolingual interviewees. First, their discussions posited two, mutually exclusive categories – native speaker and nonnative speaker. These categories seemed to entail other binary pairs as well, such as American vs. international student, white vs. nonwhites, and even more overtly hierarchically related pairs such as ‘ahead’ vs. ‘behind’, and ‘know what's going on’ vs. ‘don't know what's going on’. (Shuck Reference Shuck2002: 2, also cited in Holliday Reference Holliday2005: 32)
A further example of racism being at least part of the equation is the two Pakistani British sisters, Aliya and Mona, who were informants in my 2005 book. According to Davies’ (op. cit.) first criterion of birth they are not technically ‘non-native speakers’, but ‘native speakers’ because of their early childhood and education in Britain. However, Aliya explains:
‘Many would not classify me as a “native speaker of English” . . . because, firstly, I lived in the UK for only seven years and then lived in a third neutral country (UAE, which is not my country of descent) for 16 years before studying and working in Pakistan for seven years. Second, I think it's more than language; it's a little more racial – the colour of the skin that matters.’ (e-mail interview, Holliday Reference Holliday2005: 34)
She asserts that ‘labelling speakers as “non-native” silently robs them of the rights to speak in the language they may know best’ (e-mail interview, Holliday Reference Holliday2005: 6).
Bangladeshi Kamal (Reference Kamal2006) is another case which indicates the nature of the prejudices in operation here. She explains how she was born and brought up in Kuwait, and with primary and secondary education in an American international school in Kuwait, followed by university in the USA. One wonders whether her US-implanted English medium education in a non-English mother-tongue country would satisfy Davies’ childhood criterion, and whether or not this primary socialization needed instead to take place within the environment of a whole country. Whatever the answer may be, she explains how, on the phone, she ‘passes’ easily as a ‘native speaker’; but when she presents herself physically for job interviews, and shows her Bangladeshi passport, in a country where she will always be expatriate, it is a different story.
Braine (1999: xv, citing Claire Kramsch) sums up the predicaments many people find themselves in when he suggests that ‘native speakership is neither a privilege of birth nor of education, but of “acceptance by the group that created the distinction”’; and Jenkins (2000: 11) similarly reminds us that ‘it is not possible to label someone as a “foreigner” or a “non-native” and believe that he or she has equal rights to the language’.
The final aspect of the hidden consequences of native-speakerism is the notion that the ‘non-native speaker’, whether student or teacher, is somehow in need of cultural change. This emerges from the cultural chauvinistic, or culturist, belief that ‘non-native speakers’ are lacking in critical thinking, autonomy, the ability to plan and manage, individuality and so on necessary to do the job of successfully carrying an English-speaking Western vision of English across the world, which is the basic thesis of Holliday (Reference Holliday2005). This seems a far-fetched idea in what Kubota (2002: 84) terms ‘this nice field called TESOL’. It is, however, verified by research carried out by Kumaravadivelu's study of a range of literature which employs ‘stubborn persistence of cultural stereotypes in the TESOL profession’, which he considers to be a basis of a racist society (2003: 715), and Nayar's (2002) analysis of the discourse of the popular TESL-L (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages Electronic List) discussion group, as well as my own survey of applied linguistics texts (Holliday Reference Holliday2005: 20, also citing Alistair Pennycook). It is also a well-known phenomenon in critical applied linguistics, as characterized by Pennycook's extrapolation of the archetypal colonial narrative about a supremely able and autonomous Robinson Crusoe who needs to civilize and name the tribal Man Friday (1998: 10–16, also cited in Holliday Reference Holliday2005: 19), and in the Orientalist theory of Edward Said, where the West imagines a depraved East (Said Reference Said1978, also Kabbani Reference Kabbani1988). The subsequently imagined uplifting effect of English is not that far removed from the belief, which seems to be current in current US foreign policy, in the uplifting effect of spreading ‘American values’, albeit by means of military action.
In Holliday (Reference Holliday2005) I trace this in English language teaching to the culturally corrective nature of behaviourist audiolingualism, where teaching English involves changing cultural behaviour; and to Anderson's (2003) ethnography of a British language school where the staging, elicitation and monitoring of lessons in a so-called learner-centred methodology resembles the deeply controlling scrutiny of the Panopticon. This deep prejudice about the ‘non-native speaker’ Other also resonates with Latour's (2006) view of modernism, which characterizes ‘them’ as ‘prisoners inside the narrow confines of their cultures’.
2. The English as a lingua franca case
Undoing anti ‘non-native speaker’ prejudice is a stated aim of the English as a lingua franca movement (Seidlhofer Reference Seidlhofer, Miller and Thompson2002), which is the second area I wish to look at in this discussion of the politics underlying the issue of linguistic standards in English language teacher education. This is relevant on two accounts. First, the English as a lingua franca idea claims that standards do not have to conform to the ‘native speaker’ model because there is a reduced code which is sufficient for the purposes of communication between ‘non-native speakers’ in international settings. The claimed inclusivity and ‘tolerance for diversity’ (Seidlhofer Reference Seidlhofer, Rubdy and Saraceni2006: 44) of the movement is based on establishing the possibility of an international English which is ‘negotiated and developed by ELF speakers themselves rather than imposed from “above” by native speakers’ (Jenkins Reference Jenkins, Rudby and Saraceni2006: 36), and will ‘present a counterweight to hegemonic Anglo-American dominated English’ (ibid. 38, citing Robert Phillipson).
However, despite the claim that English as a lingua franca research is doing no more than describing an existing linguistic phenomenon (Seidlhofer Reference Seidlhofer, Rubdy and Saraceni2006: 45), some people perceive this claim in itself to be a ‘Centre’ plot to disenfranchize the ‘non-native speaker’ Other by imposing an inferior linguistic model which is suitable for the ‘Periphery’. This is clearly a complex set of politics (Holliday Reference Holliday2005: 9). An example of this can be seen in this comment by Kuo, a Taiwanese teacher:
‘Although I did feel comfortable to be told that I did not have to be native-speaker like, I would definitely feel upset if I could not reach my own expectation in pronunciation. . . . I just wanted to draw attention to the psychological part, the feeling, how people feel about themselves in terms of speaking. . . . If we take Jenkins's view and tell them to stay where they are – you don't need to twist your tongue this way and that and it's perfectly all right to keep your accent – at some point, we would terribly upset the learners because they might want to. . . . It's been clear that I'm a language learner from the periphery and – listen to this – I prefer to speak for myself !’ (e-mail interview, Holliday Reference Holliday2005: 9)
3. Centre and periphery
This Centre–Periphery conflict is, I feel, complex. I have been reluctant to use these terms in the past because I have been unhappy with what I have perceived to be regional, West versus the rest overgeneralization – in fact a bit like the reason why I have outgrown the BANA–TESEP distinction referred to earlier. However, I think I am right in saying, after having discussed this matter in some detail with Kuo, that she is not driven to invoke a Periphery position until she is confronted by what she perceives to be an imposition of an English as a lingua franca decree. Her particular use leads me to think that Centre and Periphery are psychological concepts which represent ideas which are meaningful to the people who use them. The same might be said about ‘the West’, not as a geographical place, but as a concept of affluent power. I feel that this point also resonates with the way in which anti-‘non-native speaker’ discrimination activists continue to use ‘native speaker’ and ‘non-native speaker’ because they feel that not to would be to paper over real conflicts and lead to a liberal ‘blindness’ to inequality (Holliday Reference Holliday2005: 7, citing e-mail interview with Kubota). This makes me think again about the demand I made earlier that these terms should be abolished. Indeed, while ‘native speaker’ and ‘non-native speaker’ are alive, we remember and continue to address the prejudices inherent in them. This is of course a very different reason for keeping them than the ‘customer-centred’ reason cited earlier. ‘Non-native speaker’ can thus be invoked to label discrimination. Kuo invokes the notion of Periphery when she feels cornered.
What I feel is evident in these conflicts is that there is a permanently uneven relationship within the international world of English language teaching which derives from the differences of race and power connected with a history of imperialism. It is also evident that the Centre cannot speak for the Periphery. There are long-standing problems encountered when well-meaning Centre educators try to tamper with the professional lives of others. I have written elsewhere about the problem with Centre notions of stakeholder-centredness and appropriate methodology (Holliday Reference Holliday2005); and I feel there are direct connections to be made in this regard with US foreign policy in Iraq, where the Centre tried to impose its own brand of ‘democracy’ on places it does not understand. I find the following extract from Edward Said very useful in making this connection:
But there is a difference between knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and knowledge that is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation. There is, after all, a profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of coexistence and enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control. (Said Reference Said2003)
Whereas he is talking about US foreign policy, ‘self affirmation’ can equally relate to the intrusive activity of governments, and professions like English language teaching, for the purpose of strengthening their own positions.
In fact, the Centre cannot know what it is like to be Periphery: one has to live the Periphery condition to understand it. Maley relates this issue of who has the right to occupy ‘the higher moral ground’ specifically to the English as a lingua franca movement, which he perceives as setting out to ‘emancipate the repressed learning masses from the stifling coils of “Standard English”’ (2006: 5). It is simply not a simple matter to ‘fix’ the issues of the Periphery in ways which are meaningful to everyone, despite well-meaning intentions, and to think otherwise is naïve, modernist simplicity.
The English as a lingua franca movement may therefore be inadvertently falling into this same political trap. How this may look to the Periphery is that there is an establishment of a bland international code which in some aspect claims a reduction in linguistic difficulty and cultural rootedness, and which would appear undesirable to a group of people for whom it is largely designed, who are at the same time suffering from prejudiced perceptions of their linguistic and cultural ability.
4. De-Centred factors
Taking the politics of speakerhood and English as a lingua franca into account, and following Kumaravadivelu (Reference Kumaravadivelu2007), any suggestions about language standards need to be convincingly de-Centred, and must allow those who consider themselves Periphery to take Centre-stage.
Of course it is difficult for me, as a Centre academic, to make any suggestions here; but my reading and the advice of my e-mail informants in my 2005 book reveal several lines of thought. There is an expressed need for all teachers to address the prejudices inherent in native-speakerism. Teachers outside the English-speaking West need themselves to deal with the ‘non-native speaker’ label and assert identity, professional status and employability. Teachers from the English-speaking West need to fight their own prejudices. There is a need for decentralized research which records the realities of home settings, and for de-Centred curriculum content in which students are exposed to the ways in which English relates to their communities. This content might include interaction between English and local languages, the politics of English, translations and literature authored in English by non-native speakers, the representation of native English cultures as ‘one among many’, texts written by English-speaking Western people from diverse ethnic backgrounds which discourage simplistic images of speakerhood, the writings of critical linguists in English and other languages, the de-Centring of textbooks with local teachers own realities, moving away from Western universities and publishers.
I think that, connected with these sorts of de-Centring innovations, we have what some have termed a critical cosmopolitanism. Writers within this movement say that the world is not neatly divided into national categories, but that boundaries are increasingly blurred and negotiable. In one sense this is connected with the advance of globalization and the movement of people; but it may also have always been the case, but not thought of as such because of the importance of national boundaries. Some people argue that a methodological nationalism has dominated social science and created an over simplistic impression of the way in which the world is organized. This stems from a 19th-century vision of European nation states that goes back to the classic functional sociology of Durkheim and ‘blinds’ us to ‘the multi-dimensional process of change’ (Beck & Sznaider Reference Beck and Sznaider2006: 2, also Bhabha Reference Bhabha1994, Crane Reference Crane and Crane1994, Schudson Reference Schudson and Crane1994, Delanty Reference Delanty2006, Grande Reference Grande2006). Rajagopalan (Reference Rajagopalan1999) suggests that the same preoccupation, in applied linguistics, with one-nation-language-culture has blinded us to the realities of ‘speakers’ who are ‘transplanted’ to new environments. And, I would say that it is this preoccupation that is behind the nation-based cultural definitions that underlie the negative othering of ‘non-native speakers’ which I referred to earlier (Holliday Reference Holliday2005: 18).
There is a significant twist in the discussion at this point, however. There is also a cosmopolitan awareness which is promoted by the Centre, which Homi Bhabha expresses in the following way:
This kind of global cosmopolitanism . . . configures the planet as a concentric world of national societies extending to global villages. It is a cosmopolitanism of relative prosperity and privilege founded on ideas of progress. . . . Global cosmopolitans of this ilk [that] frequently inhabit ‘imagined communities’ that consist of silicon valleys and software campuses . . . call centres . . . sweat shops . . . readily celebrates a world of plural cultures and peoples located at the periphery, as long as they produce a healthy profit margin. (Bhabha Reference Bhabha1994: xiv, my emphasis)
Bhabha's warning also resonates with Canagarajah's (1999) concern that we must be careful not to allow the idea of a world with blurred boundaries to paper over the deep inequalities which are also there – rather like Kubota's (2002) warning against simply removing reference to ‘non-native speakers’ and ‘native speakers’.
5. Removing the national factor
It nevertheless seems clear to me that current discussions of English language standards are very much concerned with national categories. I have already noted Davies’ discussion of language diversity, which is restricted to the issues of varieties of English as national languages, and regional variations as subsets of national languages, with the examples of ‘Scottish’ and ‘Austrian’ being ‘subcultures’ of (presumably British) English and (German) German respectively (2006: 437). I argue elsewhere that the concept of subculture belongs to an essentialist view of culture because it presumes an onion-skin locking of the smaller within the larger national or regional entity (Holliday Reference Holliday1999: 238f.). This does not have to be the only way of looking at language. Saraceni (Reference Saraceni2007), in his critique of the standard preoccupations with ‘which English’, ‘one English’ and ‘many Englishes’, seems to suggest a blurring of boundaries between ‘Englishes’, as language change takes on complex global similarities, which has much in common with a cosmopolitanist picture. See also Canagarajah (Reference Canagarajah2006) and his related discussion of ‘postmodern globalization’, and Pennycook (2003). It seems to me that if the notion of one nation, one language, one culture ceased to be the basis for thinking in applied linguistics, then methodological nationalism would also lose much of its basis, as would the concept of ‘native speaker’ itself. What if we consider, for the sake of argument, the possibility of removing the national factor from the equation, and see where this takes us. Linguistic competence would be judged according to the specific domains in which people were competent – against what they could do instead of what they could not.
Though Maley might not go along with this a-national notion, I find his suggestion about the way in which English is often used in international settings useful – where people are:
[U]sing whatever linguistic (and non-linguistic) resources they have to make meanings they can share. They are sublimely unaware of concepts like ‘Standard English’ or EIL/ELF: they are simply engaged in the imperfect, unruly, untidy business of trying to make themselves understood. It is surely preferable to shift our perspective away from English as a codified system (a product: EIL/ELF), to English as a mode of use (a process of communicating)? This would be to transfer attention from the code to the user. (Maley Reference Maley2006: 6, my emphasis)
It seems to me that the messiness described here does not necessarily mean lack of competence. The measure of competence is to do with the user's communicative success, which is never going to be that high, even among so-called ‘native speakers’.
This certainly makes sense within the experience which I have of English for specific purposes, which I used to be involved with many years ago. We used to speak of repertoires rather than codes – which perhaps relate more to small cultures of behaviour rather than large national cultures, or to discoursal fragments rather than national languages – and resonates with the view of cultural complexity expressed as discourses (e.g. Lankshear et al. Reference Lankshear, Gee, Knobel and Searle1997). Thus, rather than being classified as a ‘native speaker’ of English, someone like me would be considered a ‘relatively, though by no means always, competent user’ of something which might be defined along the lines of:
a conglomerate of English middle class, + academic, + institutional, + international, with specialized cultural reference connected with applied linguistics, a particular biography as a past curriculum consultant in the ‘developing world’ and with long-standing social, familial and emotional contacts with the Middle East – and so on.
Place me in a football crowd, a domestic setting with my own extended family, or a professional discussion in English between Indian, Taiwanese and German businessmen, then I would certainly be sometimes out of my depth and not at all ‘competent’. My wife, who is not English, has more English competence connected with her specialist areas of Iranian studies and fine art than I ever could. Notice I also say ‘competent user’ rather than ‘competent speaker’ because I am not at all sure that speech should have any necessary ascendancy over reading and writing. My colleagues in religious studies and history can claim considerable reading and interpretational competence in specialized textual areas of, for example, Hebrew, French and German, perhaps considerably more so than people who are competent middle class (or whatever) speakers of Hebrew, French and German.
I think that we all, as applied linguists, may well know all of this; but professionally we forget it because of the dominant methodological nationalism that we are surrounded by. This different way of looking at things would place concepts like ‘British English’ and ‘British culture’ within the domain of branding, or of aesthetic and commercial appeal. Kuo hints at this when she says that ‘sometimes people will choose to have the original American flavour for its exotic and exciting attraction’ and that some ‘students are fascinated with the exotic flavour of English’ (Holliday Reference Holliday2005: 166, e-mail interview). In these terms, ‘British English’, with an attendant ‘British culture’, as it appears in textbooks, in language classes, and in the pedagogic repertoires of teachers, is not so much a standard language code as a saleable product. Its relationship with other forms of English used in Britain may be comparable with the relationship between the Burberry brand, which also sells well internationally and the complex array of clothing styles in Britain. A competent teacher of this ‘British English’ product would therefore need to have considerable and very specialist competence with its very specific discoursal features in the same way as a Saab car salesperson would have to have specialist knowledge of how to sell that product.
The implication of removing the national factor for people like Aliya, Mona and Kamal would be both liberating and dark. On the positive side, their linguistic competence would be judged according to the specific domains in which they were competent – against what they could do instead of what they could not. On the other hand, the dimensions of the discrimination against them would no longer be concealed beneath a ‘native speaker’ ideal; and they could simply accuse their employers, students and profession of being ‘racist’.
6. Conclusion: the elements of a standard
To conclude, I want to set beside each other the major elements of my discussion and to see where this brings us. First, from near the end of my discussion, is the idea of looking at ‘British English’ as a brand rather than as something that really describes a national language. This resonates with what Kuo (2006: 216) refers to as the self-image and identity of users of English. Here we see the need to aspire to a model which has appeal. This tells us that the standard should be prestigious in that it satisfies the need for high status models. It should be cultured in the sense of being rooted in something Other and external. Though there might not be allegiance with any particular national culture, there needs to be something above and beyond to catch the imagination. Literatures and written traditions are necessary here. The standard should be non-centred in the sense that should not be invented by the Centre to improve the Periphery, and should not therefore imply any form of ‘us’–’them’ relationship. The standard must also be authentic within a cosmopolitan world. It must in itself be cosmopolitan in the sense that it encompasses diversity and complexity, and can be located and meaningful in specific political settings. Removing the element of nation and the ascription inherent in speakerhood, the standard should be professional in the sense that it should relate to what people can do professionally, rather than what they cannot do (as might be implied by the term ‘non-native speaker’). This means that possessing the standard should be earned in the sense that it can be learned and achieved, and not born into with any form of ‘native’ advantage.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank John Norrish and the Quality in TESOL Education committee for giving me the opportunity to deliver this paper, and also to Suresh Canagarajah and anonymous readers for their comments on the text.
Adrian Holliday is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK, where he supervises doctoral research in the critical sociology of language education and intercultural communication. He is author of Doing and writing qualitative research (Sage, 2nd edn. 2007), The struggle to teach English as an international language (Oxford University Press, 2005), Intercultural communication (with Martin Hyde & John Kullman; Routledge, 2004) and Appropriate methodology and social context (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
