Doria Ruhl, SDAWP Summer Institute 2024, Conviction Corner Piece
In my 9 years of being a teacher of English for speakers of other languages, both in language schools and adult education contexts, I have heard learners’ wishes and pleads about language: “I want to sound like a native speaker”. “I want to speak English fluently”. “I need more grammar”, or “I need more vocabulary”. While the last two pleads have me imagining searching my pockets for spare infinitives and adjectives, the first two, often said somewhere between frustration and confusion, find me, in turn, somewhere between empathy and advocacy.
I empathize with my students, and I also want to advocate for them abandoning these ideals. Hear me out. What is a native-speaker and what do they sound like? When I ask my students, they tell me it’s someone “who was born here”, whose first language is English, who is from an English-speaking country. I remind them that I wasn’t born here and have only been living here for 10 or so years. I ask them if they think I am able to use English to communicate with others successfully. Yes, the answer, along with a small chuckle, comes. I tell them my husband was born here, in the US, and he often doesn’t sound like our Californian friends: “Youse want some wooder with that hoagie?”, he might ask. I write this sentence on the board "He don’t like that" and ask them what they think. They spot the subject-verb agreement issue right away. I tell them about my father-in-law, a native Philadelphian, who uses this grammatical construction regularly, as it is part of his English. I tell them about my friend, a professor, who growing up in Uganda used English and her L1, Luganda, in concert. She then went to high school and university in England, and finally received her PhD from an American University, and became a US citizen. Despite all this, she probably wouldn’t qualify for a native speaker badge if the powers that be were giving those out. But let’s not give anyone any ideas. I tell them India is an English-speaking country, where, in fact, English is an official language, a designation the US does not have, at least not at a federal level. I have my student’s attention but probably not their conviction. And how can I, when they experience linguistic discrimination first-hand in the real world, in job interviews and social interactions, to name just a couple scenarios.
This ideology of native-speakerism, so prevalent in professional environments and still in some ELT contexts, is deeply entrenched in our perceptions of the English language. To a concerning extent still, native-speakerism is the driving force behind the Inner Circle of Kachru’s Three Circles of English model, and decides who are the ones that have access to the gates standardized English is keeping, and who is permitted to assume English as their own. While Kachru embraces the idea of World Englishes, his 1992 three distinct circles with well-defined borders do not ring true in the linguistic realities of the 21st century. The imperialistic view of the norm-providing circle (The US, the UK, anglophone Canada, Australia etc.) perpetuates “the preservation of a privileged in-group” (Holliday, 2006) and keeps the power of linguistic discrimination alive and well. By naming the outer and expanding circles as norm-developing and norm-depending, we place language into a rigid frame where it does not belong, limiting it to being a mere skinny copy whose forms and functions have been established and set in stone by imposed standards. What these norms disregard is that language is not a set collection of rules that fit neatly into the confines of a dictionary, or a textbook, or a grammatical chart. What socio-economically dominant groups fail to recognize is that language is a living organism that changes and evolves, dictated by such factors as technological innovations, social media and the internet, migration, or borrowing as a result of language to language contact. Language arises from and resides in the need to communicate, as Walt Whitman so poetically put it:
“Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.”
Back in my classroom, my impassioned Widdowson-inspired speech about English belonging to those who use it and make it their own, is being met with interest and nods, though I can see the familiar skepticism in my students’ eyes. I know most of the textbooks and materials they’ve been fed throughout their language acquisition journey fall into an Anglocentric or Americentric category.
“You are proficient in a language to the extent that you make it your possession, bend it to your will, assert yourself through it rather than simply submit to dictates of its form” (Widdowson, 1995).
I wholeheartedly believe this now, but I also do empathize with my students. As a non-native speaker I have felt the need to defend my non-nativeness as an asset to being a good ESL/EAL teacher. I have also been nervous about disclosing where I was from when I had fellow Romanian L1 speakers as students, hoping my accent was ambiguous enough for me to pass as a native-speaker, in the event that the students would feel "cheated" to be taught by another Romanian in California. Those days are long behind me, and nowadays I strive to ensure my students do not hold space for this kind of linguistic imposter syndrome.
In her 2017 Ted Talk, intercultural communication expert Marianna Pascal emphatically states “If we’d listen to every conversation in English on planet Earth right now, we would notice that 96% of those conversations involved non-native English speakers”. ONLY 4% OF CONVERSATIONS IN ENGLISH ARE BETWEEN SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH AS A FIRST LANGUAGE. Read that again. I also agree with Ms. Pascal and tell my learners on a regular basis that English is “not an art to be mastered”, but a tool to be used. Cultivating a descriptive view of language as a meaning-making tool and pushing back against the prescriptive approach of rigid rules that decree how English should be, is of paramount importance in our ELT classrooms. I was once guilty myself of upholding ‘The List”, as Katie Wood Ray calls it, as letter of the law in my teaching. Focused on helping my students pass standardized language proficiency tests like Cambridge or TOEFL - two exams that force both teachers and learners to die on the dichotomy hill of right and wrong of the testing establishment - I was enforcing the “not alloweds” of starting a sentence with a conjunction, or using a double negative, or saying less with a countable noun, or Grammar Gods forbid, saying ungrammatical things like “I’m loving it”. McDonalds can be held responsible for the corruption of language as well as that of nutritious food as far as I was concerned in my first year or two of teaching. I am happy to report I have long since shed the one-dimensional chains of prescriptivism that promote a monolithic view of English. English is not like a planet: a single object with an unambiguous shape and form that has clear boundaries, but a galaxy made up of multiple melding objects, characterized by variability and dynamism, with ambiguous shape and form and fuzzy boundaries (Hall and Wichacksono, Changing Englishes Course, 2024).
Language should be play and creative freedom, but instead our students are indoctrinated with rules and afraid to wander off past the borders of what is "correct". I am sure many of my colleagues will agree, but I fear that other educators have not yet moved past prescriptive rules, which can become dangerous when they also have a wide online reach. This particular teacher who has almost 5 million subscribers on her YouTube channel, English with Ronnie, does not hesitate to criticize the Rolling Stones for using a double negative in their well known lyrics “I can’t get no satisfaction”, which she calls “terrible grammar”. I’m reminded of the '3rd person + don’t' construction and wonder what she’d say about the Beatles and their “She’s got a ticket to ride but she don’t care” lyrics. She even goes as far as declaring that she “hates” the word ain’t and that she will not talk to a person who uses this word again, discouraging students from using it as it “makes them sound very uneducated” and even “stupid”. To all this I say, “you ain’t seen nothing yet”, Ronnie. I play songs with “terrible grammar” in class and encourage my students to listen to music as a great source of language in use. On a serious note, the thought that my students could stumble upon this video and internalize this very harmful rhetoric is a real fear. This reminds me of a quote by Stephen Fry, a master wordsmith:
“There’s no right language or wrong language any more than there are right or wrong clothes. Context, convention, and circumstance are all”.
When fenced in by rules of grammar, conventions of mechanics, and limitations of vocabulary use, learners become inhibited, and linguistic imposter syndrome can thrive within the false perceptions about their language user persona. Students could experience self-doubt even when they’ve used their language skills successfully. They might actively avoid opportunities to use English, for fear of diverting from the rules and making mistakes. They will apologize and over-apologize before, during, and after attempts at language use. They will compare themselves to native speakers and blame themselves for not having become this linguistic unicorn. As an educator who leads with love and care, I try to eliminate these falsehoods by encouraging failure and thanking my students for making mistakes. I will stop them mid-sentence as many times as necessary before they try to apologize - “I’m not sure this is co….” - and repeat like a skipping record about the dangers of such self-talk. I will dispel the myth of the native speaker with all the stories, personal anecdotes, and research in my arsenal. Most importantly, I will give my students opportunities to use the language to talk about themselves, their experiences, their values and beliefs, their diverse funds of knowledge - this is how they make the language their own.
In a recent writing activity, my class of high-intermediate learners used mentor texts to revise and rewrite a journal entry they had written about their favorite place in their home. They successfully went through the process of working with two different mentor texts, reading, observing the language, noticing the writers’ craft, trying these moves on in their own writing, taking the language of the mentor texts and making it their own, allowing themselves to play. The results were pure magic, their languaging breathing new life into the original journal entries - which were already written at levels demonstrating strong skills. Reflections on their work revealed a rather mixed bag of feelings: they liked the activity, (although “it was hard”), they could see how their writing had been enhanced, and yet…the imposter syndrome was fighting to rise up to the surface. Some were kind in their self-evaluations, while others were still focusing on what they did not do: the punctuation they had to ask me about when they looked at a long sentence filled with commas; the spelling errors that they had me correct; that pesky grammatical tense that they needed my help with. They themselves did not allow for too much generous, uncritical reading. They laughed when I called them writers; it was certainly no joke.
Fighting against the causes that perpetuate linguistic imposter syndrome is like fighting Medusa: a multitude of factors coming at you from all sides, and they are powerful and relentless. From native-speakerism and linguistic prescriptivism, to placing Standard English on a pedestal guarding the gates of access to institutions, opportunities, and communities, it is hardly any wonder that our learners are backed into the corner of linguistic subservience. It is high time we guided them out of those corners, allowed them to access the power that they already possess, and encouraged them to see themselves as language users rather than just learners, and language wielders rather than just receivers.