Today was the intro to next week's first session proper, but we hit the ground running nevertheless, and I thought the comments and questions in class today were excellent and thought-provoking - so please keep that up in future classes!
By all means carry out your own investigations on what you raised. Here are some of the points that came up today:
Can a written form of ELF develop? Are there precedents for this? (e.g. dialects in written form? - which writers such as Dickens and D.H. Lawrence have constructed) What might a written ELF look like?
On this, see:
Canagarajah, A.S. 2006. “The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization
Continued.” College Composition and Communication 57 (4): 586–619.
In this article, Canagarajah assumes that multilingualism is the norm in the world, but that writing
instruction has monolinguist assumptions. He proposes a pedagogy of “code-meshing”
where local varieties of English and Standard Written English merge. This article
challenges assumptions about “standard” and about “English.” In a workshop setting,
teachers can propose strategies for teaching language that emerge from Canagarajah’s
assumptions.
Ownership
Language 'ownership' appears to be a critically important concept, but how and when and in which settings is linguistic 'ownership' demonstrated, upheld, debated or challenged?
Are students overly preoccupied with aiming for 'native speaker' targets, or are other (ELF?) models emerging or developing? Where is the evidence for such developments?
And should the dominance of 'native speaker' models and norms remain unchallenged or unquestioned, now that non-natives outnumber native speakers of English by around 3-to-1?
You're welcome to comment on my blog entries - I'd be interested to hear your views or opinions on what we do in class and on the website.
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