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Chapter 2

World Englishes and Asian Englishes: A survey of the field Kingsley Bolton

2.1

Introduction

This chapter sets out to provide a survey of key issues relating to the study of English as an international language in the Asian context with particular reference to world Englishes (“WE”), and English in the Asian region. This includes a discussion of various perspectives on English worldwide, an examination of current debates on world Englishes, a discussion of the dynamics of Asian Englishes, and a consideration of questions relating to language education in the region.

2.2

From International English to World Englishes

Over the last three decades or so, the term “world Englishes” (WE) has been widely used to refer to localised forms of English found throughout the world, particularly in the Caribbean, parts of Africa, and many societies in Asia. Prior to the 1980s, discussions of English worldwide typically employed a normative lexicon that rested on the distinction between “native speaker” and “non-native speaker”, resulting in such categories of description as English as a Native Language (ENL), English as a Second Language (ESL), English as a Foreign Language (EFL), and English as an International Language (EIL). In fact, current debates about the status, functions, and features of varieties of English around the world date back to the mid-1960s, and, most famously, to the work of Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens, who at that time were given to assert that:

K. Bolton (*) Department of English, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, People’s Republic of China e-mail: [email protected] A. Kirkpatrick and R. Sussex (eds.), English as an International Language in Asia: Implications for Language Education, Multilingual Education 1, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4578-0_2, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012

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K. Bolton English is no longer the possession of the British, or even the British and the Americans, but an international language which increasing numbers of people adopt for at least some of their purposes. […] In West Africa, in the West Indies, and in Pakistan and India […] it is no longer accepted by the majority that the English of England, with RP as its accent, are the only possible models of English to be set before the young […] this one language, English, exists in an increasingly large number of different varieties. (Halliday et al. 1964, p. 293)

Some 12 years later, Larry Smith described English as “an international auxiliary language”, and then arguing that it was “time to stop calling it a foreign language or second language”, suggesting instead the term “EIAL” (English as an International Auxiliary Language) which, he asserted, “more accurately reflects the present state of English language usage around the globe” (Smith 1976, p. 39). Since then, from the early 1980s onwards, the work of Braj Kachru, Larry Smith and many other scholars has contributed to a major paradigm shift in English studies. Over this period, there has been a growing recognition of “Englishes” in the plural, as in “varieties of English”, “international Englishes”, “new Englishes”, “English languages” and “world Englishes”. Of all these designations, arguably the most popular term currently in the literature is that of “world Englishes” (WE), and the last three decades have seen the rise of this area as a site for scholarly research and publication, with three major academic journals—English Today, English World-Wide, and World Englishes—specialising in such studies, as well as numerous book-length studies dealing with research in this area. Interest in the diverse forms and functions of so-called “new Englishes” throughout the world has been paralleled by a related interest in new literatures in English, particularly from writers originally from former British colonies, such as V. S. Naipaul (from Trinidad), Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka), Timothy Mo (Hong Kong), Ben Okri and Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), Arundhati Roy (India), Salman Rushdie (India), and Derek Walcott (Saint Lucia). The term “world Englishes” may be understood as having both a narrower and a wider application. The narrow application of the term refers to schools of thought closely associated with the approach to the study of English worldwide pioneered by Professor Braj B. Kachru and a group of closely-related scholars. The wider application of the concept subsumes many different approaches to the study of English worldwide (including varieties-based studies) ranging from the Celtic Englishes of Britain, through diverse varieties in the USA, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa to English in Europe and Asia, as well as the study of discourse and genre in those contexts where English is regarded as a second or foreign language. Elsewhere, I have pointed out that research on world Englishes in the widest sense includes at least a dozen distinct approaches including those of English studies, corpus linguistics, the sociology of language, features-based and dialectological studies, pidgin and creole research, “Kachruvian” linguistics, lexicographical approaches, popular accounts, critical linguistics, and futurological approaches (Bolton 2004, 2006). To this list, we might now add current work on English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), a recently-emergent approach to English as an international language, which is now proving particularly popular in Europe (Bolton 2011). These approaches are illustrated in Table 2.1 below.

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2 World Englishes and Asian Englishes: A survey of the field Table 2.1 Approaches to world Englishes Approach Focus

Timeline

English studies

1960s–present

English corpus linguistics The sociology of language “Features-based” approaches Kachruvian studies

Pidgin and creole studies

Applied linguistics Lexicography

Popularisers Critical linguistics

Linguistic futurology English as a Lingua Franca

The analysis of varieties of English from a synchronic and historical perspective, against a tradition of English Studies (Anglistik), dating from the late nineteenth century, e.g. the work of Otto Jespersen, Daniel Jones, and Henry Sweet. The accurate and detailed linguistic descriptions of world Englishes from a features perspective. Research on English in relation to such issues as language maintenance/shift, and ethnolinguistic identity. The description of English through dialectological and variationist methodologies. Situated against the long tradition of British and European dialectology. The promotion of a pluricentric approach to world Englishes, highlighting both the “sociolinguistic realities” and “bilingual creativity” of Outer Circle (and Expanding Circle) societies. The description and analysis of “mixed” languages and the dynamics of linguistic hybridisation (beginning with the early work of Hugo Schuchardt 1842–1927). The exploration of the implications of world Englishes for language learning and teaching. The codification of vocabularies of English worldwide, linked to particular post-colonial societies and issues of linguistic autonomy. The publication of books on English worldwide aimed at a mass reading public. The expression of resistance to the linguistic imperialism and cultural hegemony of English, in tandem with resistance to Anglo-American political power. The discussion of future scenarios for the spread of English and English language teaching worldwide. An approach to international English focusing on those contexts, e.g. universities and international businesses, where English is used as a common language by speakers of many different nationalities.

1990–present 1960s–present 1980s–present

1980s–present

1930s–present

1960s–present 1980s–present

1980s–1990s 1990s–present

1997–present Late 1990s– present

As early as the 1960s, the English studies approach was associated with such scholars as Randolph Quirk and others active at the Survey of English Usage at University College London, including David Crystal and Sidney Greenbaum. The work of such UK-based scholars was complemented by the research and publications of a number of German scholars including Manfred Görlach and Edgar Schneider, as well as that of work in corpus linguistics, which again is closely associated with an English studies approach, as in the work of Greenbaum (1996), Nelson et al. (2002), and others.

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Sociolinguistic approaches to world Englishes have included (i) “the sociology of language” (Fishman et al. 1996); (ii) the “linguistic features” (and dialectological) approach (Trudgill and Hannah 1982, etc.); (iii) pidgin and creole studies; and (iv) “socially-realistic” studies of world Englishes (B. B. Kachru 1992). The use of the term “world Englishes” to refer to a distinct approach to this subject is most closely associated with the work of Braj Kachru. Indeed, the origin of the term “world Englishes” can be located in the two conferences on English as a world language that took place in 1978, one in April at the East-West Center in Hawaii, and the second in June-July at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Braj Kachru and Larry Smith played a major role in both conferences. Throughout the 1980s, other conferences were organised through the auspices of such organisations as IATEFL, TESOL, the Georgetown University Round Table, and the East-West Center, so that by the mid-1980s “world Englishes” had emerged as a distinct area of study. A key theoretical and methodological tenet of the Kachruvian perspective was that the earlier three-fold distinction between ENL, ESL, and EFL was ideologically loaded and intellectually flawed, and instead adopted an approach that categorised varieties of English in terms of a three-fold distinction between the Inner Circle (UK, US, Australia, etc.), Outer Circle (Nigeria, India, Philippines, etc.), and Expanding Circle (Brazil, Germany, China, etc.). By the mid-1980s, a number of popular works intended for a general reading audience began to appear, including publications by Crystal (1997, 2004). Critical approaches were particularly stimulated by Phillipson’s landmark Linguistic imperialism (1992), which encouraged a strong interest in the politics of English, and has also informed the work of a generation of other critical scholars. The futurology perspective is best represented in research reports from Graddol (1997, 2006). Recent summaries of approaches to world Englishes include Bolton (2004, 2006), Y. Kachru and Nelson (2006), and Y. Kachru and Smith (2008). From the late 1990s, linguists began to look at the increasing use of English within the Expanding Circle context of Europe, where English was quickly spreading as the common language of international university education and international business. It is in this context that English as an international language begins to be redefined as English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). Foundational work in this area includes Seidlhofer (2001), Jenkins (2007), and Mauranen and Ranta (2009).

2.3

Current Debates on World Englishes

Since the 1980s, a pluricentric and pluralistic approach to the Englishes or English languages of the world has become so well-established that this now constitutes something of an orthodoxy in contemporary English language studies and sociolinguistics. So much so, perhaps, that various linguists have begun to question or at least problematise various aspects of the world Englishes approach to English language studies and applied linguistics.

2 World Englishes and Asian Englishes: A survey of the field

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One continuing source of debate in this area comes from scholars committed to the analysis of “linguistic imperialism”, an area of discussion of key concern to many concerned with the continuing spread of English, and its potential as a “killer language” threatening cultural and linguistic diversity. The founding document in this arena, Robert Phillipson’s (1992) Linguistic imperialism, was a landmark publication, which subsequently politicised the debate on world Englishes and related issues. At the centre of Phillipson’s theoretical approach to “linguistic imperialism” are a series of arguments about the political relations between the “core English-speaking countries” (Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and the “periphery-English countries” where English either has the status of a second language (e.g. Nigeria, India, Singapore), or is a foreign and “international link language” (e.g. Scandinavia, Japan) (1992, p. 17). The nature of this relationship, Phillipson argues, is one of structural and systemic inequality, in which the political and economic hegemony of western Anglophone powers is established or maintained over scores of developing nations, particularly those formerly colonies of European powers, contributing to a form of “English linguistic imperialism”, where “the dominance of English is asserted and maintained by the establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between English and other languages” (1992, p. 47, original emphasis). Phillipson’s voice in the early 1990s was original and persuasive and has subsequently influenced the work of many others, including, to some extent, such applied linguists as Canagarajah (1999), Pennycook (1994, 2001), and many others. While Phillipson’s perspective was uncritical of the world Englishes approach at first, his attitude seems to have changed somewhat in recent years. By 2009, Phillipson was maintaining that “global English” was a “capitalist neoimperial language that serves the interests of the corporate world and the governments that it influences”, and was asserting that, in this context, “[t]here are serious theoretical and empirical weaknesses in the way world Englishes are classified and analyzed” (Phillipson 2009, p. 132, pp. 164–5). In the same year, in an interview, Phillipson further commented that “[m]ost work on World Englishes in the Kachruvian sense is purely descriptive, and an over-simplification of the complexity of the sociolinguistics of English in multilingual settings” (Phillipson 2010). Comments in similar vein have also been voiced by Pennycook (2001), charging that the world Englishes paradigm has been politically naïve in its application (see also Bolton 2005). Other criticisms of the WE approach have been penned by such linguists as Bruthiaux (2003) and Saraceni (2010). The criticisms of both these authors have largely focused on the “circles of English” model of the Kachruvian approach, with Bruthiaux describing this as “largely monolithic and standardized”, and also questioning the validity of the Expanding Circle concept, as “it is not always clear whether the concept is meant to cover countries, country-based varieties, speakers, or non- (or barely-) speaking learners” (Bruthiaux 2003, p. 167). In Saraceni’s recent 2010 book on Relocating English, a similar set of criticisms is voiced, with the author arguing that the world Englishes approach inadvertently replicates “a theoretically flawed and ideologically Eurocentric conceptualisation of language”

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not least through the use of the term “Inner Circle” to refer to societies such as the UK, US, etc. where English has historically been the dominant language (Saraceni 2010, p. 81). Ultimately, Saraceni argues that: This entity that we call English, like all other forms of language, has no ancestral home. […] The relocation of English is realised not so much by authorising a plurality of new Englishes, but by treating English as a language that can carry and share the weight of a plurality of experiences, worldviews and inner thoughts with a multitude of groups and individuals who are willing to take part in the sharing. (Saraceni 2010, p. 143)

In my own view, in defence of the WE paradigm, I would argue that both Bruthiaux’s and Saraceni’s perspectives can be accommodated by world Englishes, through its typically inclusive approach to English worldwide. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, it is the inclusivity and pluralism of the world Englishes perspective that many of us in this field find most attractive. A typical straw man in discussions in this area is that of a WE approach wedded inextricably to the “three circles” or to a narrow “features-based” approach to geographical varieties, but a fairly simple examination of scholarship in this field demonstrates that this is far from the case (Bolton and Davis 2006). In fact, an examination of the content of the World Englishes journal in the 20 years from 1985 to 2005 shows that only a minority of articles focus predominantly on linguistic features (9.4%) or areal studies (11.4%), with most space in the journal given over to a wide variety of topics ranging from discourse analysis to the sociology of language, from applied linguistics to contact linguistics, from critical linguistics to bilingual creativity, and much else. Here, I would argue that the WE approach if anything is dynamic, and is willing to change and develop in pace with the changing sociolinguistic realities of the field, and to accommodate and benefit from new perspectives in scholarship. Indeed I would see this as a crucial element of the ethos of world Englishes, as I have discussed elsewhere (Bolton 2005). In the next section, I proceed to address the relevance of the world Englishes approach to the Asian region, and issues related to Asian Englishes.

2.4

English Across Asia

The contemporary importance of English throughout the Asian region, coupled with the emergence and recognition of distinct varieties of Asian Englishes, has played an important part in the global story of English in recent years. The numbers of people having at least some knowledge of the language have grown remarkably over the last 40 years in the Asian region, which for our purposes here may be defined as including the countries of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. It is in these regions that we find not only the greatest concentration of “Outer Circle” English-using societies, but also a number of the most populous English-learning and English-knowing nations in the world. A basic distinction in the world Englishes approach is the dichotomy between “Outer Circle” English-using societies where English is a second language with


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important intranational uses, and “Expanding Circle” countries, where the language has traditionally had the status of a foreign or international language. The major Outer Circle Asian societies thus include such South Asian nations as Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka; Southeast Asian societies such as Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore; as well as Hong Kong in East Asia. Historically, all the Outer Circle Asian societies are former colonies of Anglophone colonial powers. These are typically former British colonies, as in the case of Brunei, Hong Kong, greater India, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Singapore, most of whom achieved independence between 1947 and 1963, although it was not until 1997 that China regained sovereignty over Hong Kong. The one US colony in Asia was the Philippines, which was under Spanish colonial rule from c. 1565 until 1898, followed by American control until 1946. In most of the Outer Circle societies, English has been retained for important internal purposes after independence, and in most Outer Circle countries there is a de jure recognition of English in domains such as government, law, and education. English is typically widely used throughout the mass media, as in Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore, which all have a lively daily press, and, to varying extents, a local English literary tradition in fiction, poetry, and other genres of creative writing. In addition to print media, such societies often have English-language radio and television channels on offer, as in Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines. Such societies are also characterised by the functional differentiation of indigenous languages and English, coupled with a high frequency of codeswitching and code-mixing in informal and intimate domains. The map in Fig. 2.1 illustrates the distinction between Outer Circle and Expanding Circle societies. The statistics of English worldwide is an inexact science (Chap. 9 by Pennycook, this volume), and this is also true of Asia, where the rapid spread of English through education systems has been quite remarkable in recent years. In some societies, e.g. Hong Kong and Singapore, census and survey figures may be available, but in many other parts of the region estimates of English speakers may vary greatly, as is the case for India, where estimates of the English-knowing population have diverged enormously in recent years. As Crystal has noted, in the 1980s, estimates of the percentage of English speakers hovered around 3%, but today, according to at least one national survey, around 33% of people claim to be able to hold a basic conversation in the language, which would indicate a total number of English speakers at around 350 million. India thus has the largest English-speaking population in the world (Crystal 2004). Other linguists would calculate a somewhat smaller proportion of English speakers in the country, suggesting an estimate of some 15%, although again, this could only be regarded as a rough “guesstimate”, given the difficulties in collecting accurate data (Graddol, personal communication). However, even if we take the lower estimate, this would still result in a figure of 175 million English speakers in India. Another emergent English-knowing – or English-learning – society in Asia is China. In 1957, at a time when Russian was the major foreign language in schools, there were fewer than 1,000 secondary-school English teachers, but by 2000 this figure had risen to 500,000 (Adamson 2004). By 2003, the overall estimate for

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Fig. 2.1 Outer circle and Expanding circle societies in South, Southeast, and East Asia

English teachers at all levels was around one million, while the total of those learning/knowing English was thought to be around 250 million (McArthur 2003). The current story of English in China is one of astonishing proportions, demographically, statistically and sociolinguistically (Bolton 2003). Based on survey information and related estimates, other societies with relatively sizable English-speaking populations include Singapore (with around 50% of the population claiming to know English), the Philippines (48%), Hong Kong (45%), Brunei (39%), and Malaysia (32%). However, yet again it has to be emphasised these are broad and somewhat inexact estimates only (Bolton 2008). Whatever the shortcomings of such statistics, however, these numbers do highlight the astonishing spread of English over recent decades, particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century, following the independence of British and US colonies in the region. Today, it has been calculated that more than 800 million people in South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia may have some knowledge of the English language (Bolton 2008). As in many other parts of the world, the spread of English across Asia has been shaped by a number of related economic and social factors, including demographics, economic change, and educational trends (Graddol 2006). At the level of population, many Asian societies have very large populations, including China with 1.3 billion people, India with 1 billion, Indonesia with 238 million,


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Pakistan 159 million, and Bangladesh 141 million. Population growth is set to rise in the near future, with India expected to reach 1.6 billion by 2050, compared with 1.4 billion for China and 308 million for Indonesia (Al Tamimi 2006). When it comes to economic change and development, both China and India have been major success stories over the last decade or so, with both societies now achieving high rates of economic growth, in the region of 8–10% per year. However, while some Asian societies, including Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and South Korea, have achieved remarkable economic success, other societies in the region remain desperately poor, including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, and Pakistan. Despite this, in the richer societies of the region there has been massive social change in recent decades, with the spread of English in Asia linked to the emergence and growth of sizable middle classes throughout a number of Asian countries. In India it is estimated that income levels will rise by 300% over the next 20 years, lifting 291 million Indians out of poverty, “to create a 583 million-strong middle-class population by 2025” (Asia Times, June 1, 2007). Similarly, in China, a recent study from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimated the middle class to comprise 19% of the population in 2003, which accounts for some 247 million people. It is estimated that “300 million, or 40% of the Chinese population [would] be in the middle class by 2020” (PBS, January 11, 2006). It is almost certain that this new Asian middle class will wish its children to speak English. Within Asian school systems, children are now beginning to learn English from the lowest forms of primary school onwards. In 2001, English was made compulsory in all Chinese primary schools, and a number of Indian states have established similar systems. In Asia, as in other parts of the world, the trend is that children are learning English at an ever earlier age. According to Graddol, the result of this will be that in Asian schools English will no longer be a “foreign language”, but instead will become a “near universal basic skill” (2006, p. 72). However, while such a scenario may hold good for the richer Asian societies, it remains to be seen whether English can be a boon to the poorer countries of the region. There may be links between economic prosperity, the growth of the Asian middle classes and the spread of English, but the extent to which the Asian disadvantaged and poor might gain access to English, or benefit from English education, at present remains unclear, to say the least.

2.5

Asian Englishes

One of the major contributions of scholarship in world Englishes over the last 30 years has been to highlight the existence and vitality of localised forms of English throughout the Asian region. Today it has become almost commonplace to refer to Indian English, Malaysian English, Philippine English, Singapore English, and Hong Kong English, as distinct varieties of the language. At a linguistic level, the study of individual varieties of English typically involves a description of distinctive features at the levels of phonology, vocabulary, and grammar, and much work in this

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field has been concerned with establishing a solid descriptive framework for this task. A related, and complementary, task has been to study and describe the “sociolinguistic realities” underpinning distinct varieties, in terms of their sociolinguistic histories, as well as a description of the status and functions of English within Outer Circle Asian communities, not least in relation to local hierarchies of language. The most detailed studies of Asian Englishes have focused on such postcolonial societies as India, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines, thus contributing over the past three decades to a sizable body of description, although very recent work has also included Hong Kong and varieties of Chinese English. At a linguistic level, much of the descriptive work here has been concerned to identify and to highlight the distinctive features of individual varieties in terms of phonology (accent), lexis (vocabulary) and grammar (morphology and syntax). This has recently been aided by the availability of comparable Asian English corpora through the International Corpus of English project (Greenbaum & Nelson, 1996). The outcome of this research has been the increasingly-detailed description of the accents, word stock and grammars of individual Asian Englishes, in terms of both substrate as well as developmental features (Kortmann and Schneider 2004; Burridge and Kortmann 2008, etc.). In addition to linguistic features which are held to be distinctive for (if not unique to) particular Outer Circle societies, most visibly at the level of vocabulary, there are also patterns of “structural nativisation” that are found across a number of Outer Circle Asian societies. At the level of phonology, these include the lack of distinction between long and short vowels, the realisation of diphthongs as monophthongs, a reduction of vowel contrasts, consonant-cluster reduction, and the use of syllabletimed stress and intonation (Schneider 2007). At the level of grammar, features that appear in a number of Asian varieties include the lack of plural marking; omission of third-person singular -s; use of invariant question tags (isn’t it); the weakening of the count/mass distinction with nouns (as in equipments, furnitures, etc.); and inverted word order in indirect questions. Linguistically-oriented research on Asian Englishes thus has an excellent potential to extend our understanding of a range of linguistic processes associated with language contact, multilingualism and secondlanguage acquisition. In addition, the potential for continuing research on English across Asia is considerable, given the multiple sociolinguistic roles for the language across the region. In addition to studies of English in individual Outer Circle Asian societies, such as those mentioned above, there are interesting issues concerning the status, functions and features of English across a swathe of lesser-researched (Expanding Circle) societies, including Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, etc. There are also pan-Asian issues relating to the use English in such domains as education, the media, literature and popular culture that cut across the region. It was largely in response to the need for detailed research on such issues that I founded the book series Asian Englishes Today, which thus far has published five books on English in particular Asian societies (Bolton 2002 on Hong Kong; Stanlaw 2004 on Japan; Adamson 2004 on China; Bolton and Bautista 2008 on the Philippines; and Lim et al. 2010 on Singapore), two volumes dealing with Asian Englishes from a wider sociolinguistic perspective (B. Kachru 2004, Y. Kachru and Nelson 2006), as well as a recent volume on English as an Asian lingua franca (Kirkpatrick 2010).


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Such publications, it should be emphasised, are not simply, nor largely, concerned with the description of linguistic features as such, but cover a wide range of topics, including educational practices, current debates, language policies, creative literature and much else. Given the growing importance of English in Asia, and the significance of a host of issues relating to language policies, language education, linguistic contact, and much else, it seems certain that such questions will continue to provide a rich field for research and publications for many years to come.

2.6

English and Language Education Across Asia

Notwithstanding the remarkable spread of English across Asia, and the related development of localised varieties of Asian Englishes in recent years, it would be misleading to regard this as an unqualified success story. Unfortunately, the perceived currency of English as a language of modernisation and economic advancement has been so attractive to governments and educational authorities that the language has often been promoted in an unthinking and potentially harmful fashion. Recent examples of this, in Outer Circle societies, can be found in both Malaysia and the Philippines, where in the early 2000s, for different reasons, both governments decided to push for an increased emphasis on English in the national school curricula. In the case of Malaysia, this led in 2002 to the decision of the Mahathir government to argue that English should be the sole medium of instruction for mathematics and science instruction in secondary schools. This decision was dramatically reversed under a new government in 2009, on the grounds that the new system was greatly disadvantaging children from lower socio-economic and rural backgrounds (Kirkpatrick 2010, p. 27; Chap. 4 by Gill, this volume). In the case of the Philippines, the burgeoning success story of the call centre industry and BPO (“business process outsourcing”) enterprises encouraged the previous government under President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to call for the promotion of Englishmedium education to the potential detriment of bilingual education. Under the new government of Benigno Acquino, this policy is now being re-evaluated, and the government is currently experimenting with a new system of multilingual education, which has been designed to recognise the importance of the many regional vernaculars and the national language, Filipino. In India, similarly, there are immense problems relating to the use of English as an official language of education at many levels of education, in this enormously diverse and populous nation (Graddol 2010). In Hong Kong, by contrast, since 1997, the official policy of the government has been to place increased emphasis on Chinese-medium education. This policy has met with a good deal of opposition from parents and schools, and, it is often claimed, is now leading to palpable problems at the tertiary level, where thousands of students are now arriving in the territory’s largely English-medium universities with an inadequate command of the necessary skills in the language. Related problems also exist in a number of Expanding Circle societies in the region, and both China and South Korea are currently experiencing an English “craze” that, in both

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societies, has tended to occlude or undermine other educational and curricular concerns. Indeed, across the whole region, there is concern that the over-emphasis on English in the school curriculum will inevitably lead to an undervaluing of local and regional languages. As Kirkpatrick (2010) has pointed out, this concern is particularly relevant to the ten societies who are now members of the ASEAN economic and political association, which includes Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Despite the fact that these countries are culturally and linguistically diverse, and home to some one thousand languages, the language policies of virtually all these societies have become skewed towards the promotion of national languages domestically plus English. The ASEAN Charter which was ratified in 2009 declared that “the working language of ASEAN shall be English”, by definition according no similar status to any other of the languages of the region. This decision, it may be noted, is in distinct contrast to the language policy of the European Union, which recognises twenty-three official working languages (Kirkpatrick 2010, p. 7). The challenge for language educators, as Kirkpatrick explains, is to balance the perceived need and demand for English in such Asian societies against the needs of education systems in multilingual societies, where the sociolinguistic realities contribute to highly complex contexts of education, where an unreflective push for English may be an important factor in undermining more considered approaches to providing genuine bilingual, or multilingual, education.

2.7

Conclusion

This chapter has attempted to survey a range of issues relating to English across Asia and as well as approaches to Asian Englishes as localised varieties of English. Although the current emphasis on the importance of English in Asian education systems may be explained by reference to a number of historical, economic and educational factors linked to Asian modernity and the upward aspirations of the growing Asian middle class, it is salutary to consider that educationally and linguistically the promotion of English comes at a certain cost. The challenge for language education in the region is to consider critically how English is best taught and best used for pedagogical purposes, within complex multilingual education systems, an issue requiring sensitivity to local issues and the specific sociolinguistic contexts of diverse societies in the Asian region.

References Adamson, B. 2004. China’s English: A history of English in Chinese education. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Al Tamimi, J. 2006. Too many old, too many young. Daniel Pearl Foundation, December 3, 2006. http://www.danielpearl.org /news_ and _ press/articles/too_many.html. Accessed June 2011.


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