A journal editor recently suggested that "EFL environment" is not a good way to refer to a country where English is taught as a foreign language. She suggested referring to the "expanding circle" of English referred to by Kachru.
What do you think?
Kachru, B. (1992). The Other Tongue: English across cultures. University of Illinois Press.
Albert Marckwardt was the first to draw the distinction between ESL and EFL. The key is whether, when a student walks outside the school, he/she encounters English in the street and the media as the environmentally encompassing dominant language.
The contrast is clear vis-a-vis the US and Mexico, for example, but becomes somewhat blurred in Ghana or Singapore, though this hardly makes the distinction no longer viable. The whole curriculum and teaching methods are profoundly affected by the difference in the extrascholastic environment. I'm not at all sure what it would mean to a teacher or textbook writer to be told that they should think about the "expanding circle" -- for most this would be meaningless.
Kachru's work is significant in terms of English language teaching and learning, globalisation, global Englishes and 'ownership' of the English language.
"Nearly a billion people around the world speak English, which means that more people speak English as a second language than there are native speakers. In Asia, the number of English-users has surpassed 350 million, equal to the number of people who live in countries where English is the dominant language: the United States, Britain and Canada. More Chinese children now study English -- about 100 million -- than there are Britons." (see attached doc)
Language is inherently political, as is language teaching and learning. Each of the terms used to differentiate these learners/speakers are also political - they say something about power, about status, about standards, about cultural belonging. I'm not sure that 'expanding circle' is helpful as a replacement term for EFL, but the theory behind it is certainly something that should be taught and shared far and wide because it relates to the changing world of the 21st century.
I teach my students the following terminology, and ask them to think about what the implications are of each of these terms and how this might change according to context:
- L1 L2 Mother Tongue, etc
- (T)ESL (Teaching) English as a second (or subsequent) language
- (T)ESOL (Teaching) English to Speakers of Other Languages
- EAL English as an Additional Language (or English as an Academic language)
- (Dialect may also be included in these terms - ESL/D, EAL/D)
- CALD Cuturally and Linguistically Diverse
- LBOTE Language Background Other Than English (or the 'first language' of the location)
And also the differentiating terms of 'native or non-native speakers of English'
A good quality academic journal editor who questions the use of the simplistic but well known and overused term 'EFL', has the rigour and quality of that journal in mind, and I respect that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOsu5yAIPYQ
http://static.globalenglish.com/files/news/GE_newAmericaMedia_07042010.pdf?q=files/news/GE_newAmericaMedia_07042010.pdf
It is certainly true that teaching a language with strong economic and political connections/consequences is a political act. Emphasizing this to a practicing teacher in a classroom can be dysfunctional, however. One of my students almost abandoned the field upon facing the quandary of whether she was thereby enhancing the unwanted political influence of the US and the economic advantage of multinational corporations which were exploiting the resources of her country, or assisting her students to gain an economic and educational advantage and helping advance the economic and cultural advancement of the nation, as she had viewed her professional mission.
Braj Kachru is a long-time friend, and his contributions have greatly enriched our perspective on the world-state of language shift. But language circumstances are always basically local, and the abstract categorization of the language status of nation-states, while intellectually valuable to those of us interested in macro-world perspectives, is of marginal relevance, taken as a label by itself, to teaching issues at the community and classroom level. Generally overlooked in TESOL training in the US are the needs for adapting curriculum content for the specific needs of students to work in particular occupational contexts -- VESL -- vocational English as a second language. This is an example of a domestic context in dominantly English-speaking countries where world-abstractions have little immediate relevance to the classroom teacher, and is unfortunately largely neglected.
Issues regarding the teaching of English to non-English speakers (TENES) or teaching English as a foreign language to other nationalities (TEFLON -- once suggested by a wag as an initialism, because it wouldn't stick) are destined to become moot as Chinese surpasses English by 2030 as the dominant world language (and English eventually comes to be written in Chinese characters). The old saying that "language follows the dollar" will shortly be replaced by "language follows the yuan", and teachers of Chinese will replace teachers of English (as teachers of Russian were replaced by teachers of English following the dissolution of the Soviet Union).
due to globalization, the term EFL has blurred; its distinctive features have become unclear. expanding circle can be an umbrella term covering more.
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