By: Rizal Najjara
The recent development of English as an international language has left many tasks for the English Language Teaching practitioners. One of those is that what variant should be taught and how the varieties of English across the globe can be incorporated in teaching and learning process in order to accommodate the learners’ need and curricular goal. Those are basics question that language teachers have to answer since this decision will affect the learning outcomes entirely. Matsuda’s paper is mainly presented to address this issue by seeing the fact that the current English teaching, especially in Japan, is too inner circle oriented. According to her, although the curriculum in Japan specifies that the target model for English learning should be intelligible for international communication, the choice of linguistics samples and the representation of English users and uses indicate a strong inner circle orientation (p. 720). Therefore, she offers suggestions to the curriculum developers and school administrators to deal with the challenge of providing the appropriate English to be presented in the classroom. In response to her paper, I would like to focus on the practicality and applicability of her ideas in the real context of English teaching and learning.
What is wrong with teaching only inner circle Englishes? Matsuda argues that the limited exposure to English varieties in classroom may lead to students’ confusion or resistance when they are confronted with other types of English in the real life (p. 721). As the matter of fact, the students should be exposed to multiple varieties of English. She suggests that the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) initiated by Japanese government to assist foreign language teaching at public school not only recruits the native speakers from inner circle, but also begins recruiting fluent speaker from other parts of the world. This idea is perfect and fruitful for the developed country in expanding circle like Japan.
However, this fails to solve the problem of English teaching in other countries which have relatively low education budget. Schools have already struggled hard to fund their daily operation in these countries, not to mention bringing in foreign teachers. Other solutions provided if face to face interactions are not possible like using internet, and movie clips are also problematic because of the limited access to information, and technology.
Matsuda considers interaction with EIL users as one of the important aspects in incorporating EIL in classroom. In the country like Indonesia, the fact shows that English teachers, as one of the vital components, often do not have sufficient experience in using English in real interaction with both inner and outer circle speakers. They come to class with limited English proficiency that they studied only from their college classrooms. Here, the issue of teacher competency becomes essential. Teaching EIL variety requires an ‘extraordinary’ teacher due to its broad repertoires. EIL is far from being coherent, and concise language variety (Llurda, 2004, p. 315), and still in the process of codification (Taylor, 2006, p. 58).
Incorporating EIL in classroom is an immense challenge in English teaching. Matsuda has successfully tried to map the underlying starting point of the importance of teaching English other than inner circle varieties. Another important endeavor that should be done is creating an established consensus among stakeholders in defining EIL. By doing so, EIL will have, borrowing Taylor term, a well-described model of language use (Taylor, 2006, p. 58).
References:
Llurda, Enric. (2004) Non-native-speaker teachers and English as an International Language. International Journal of Applied Linguistics Vol. 14 (3). Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 314-323
Matsuda, Aya. Incorporating Englishes in Teaching English as an International Language. TESOL Quarterly. 719-729
Taylor, Linda (2006). The changing landscape of English: implication for language assessment. ELT Journal 60 (1). Oxford University Press. 51-60
Inner circle varieties refers to English spoken by the speakers of English in three major English speaking countries, i.e. the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia.