Zoya Proshina The abc and Controversies of World Englishes ббк 81

Native Speaker vs Non-Native Speaker

Before the world Englishes paradigm was established, there was (and still is in some places) a strong tendency in ELT pedagogy to orient English-language students to speaking only with native speakers (NS) who were considered “to be the owners of the language, guardians of its standards, and arbiters of acceptable pedagogic norms” (Jenkins 2000: 5). A native speaker is defined as a person speaking his/her mother’s tongue acquired as the first (L1) language in early childhood (Cook 1999: 186-187; Richards, Platt & Platt 1993: 241) or a person “born to the language” unlike a non-native speaker (NNS) who “learnt it through education” (Jenkins 2003: 15). Traditional ELT practice has predominantly relied on British and American native speakers only, which means that even some varieties of Inner Circle Englishes were not taken into consideration. ELT students were supposed to comprehend British or American oral speech; to imitate British or American accent, and to use British or American grammar and rhetoric rules in writing. The goal of English language learning was seen in approximating the native speaker as if native speakers did not vary in their accent, vocabulary, and even grammar.

Today, pedagogical objectives have shifted. It is assumed that no matter how hard non-native speakers may try to perfect their second or foreign language that is acquired or learnt, they will never become native speakers. As V. Cook put it, “Adults could never become native speakers without being reborn” (Cook 1999: 187). Their “non-nativeness” will be seen, to a larger or smaller degree, in their accent, syntax, or choice of words because their mentality or the way of thinking and inner visualizing the world is different. Of all language differences between native and non-native speakers phonetic accent is the least significant. So, for example, an outstanding British novelist Joseph Conrad, who was of Polish origin, is known to have been claimed as “a foreigner talking only broken English” despite the excellence of his written English (Cook 1999: 195).

Native speakers are often considered to be superior to non-native speakers because they have better intuitions about the language (Quirk 1990 /2006: 506). However, the proponents of this view pay little attention to the fact that many native speakers do not speak the idealized, standardized language; their speech is influenced by geography, age, occupation, and social status. Another factor to be taken into consideration is that beside native speakers of the Inner Circle there are quite a lot of bilingual native speakers in the Outer Circle whose English is different from that of the British or Americans. This gave ground for Jennifer Jenkins to criticize the term:

Taking into account that bilinguals of the Outer Circle also consider themselves native speakers, Braj Kachru (1999) proposed a distinction between “genetic nativeness” and “functional nativeness” (cited by Yano 2001: 122) when giving a key-note address to the 12^th World Congress of the International association of Applied Linguistics in Tokyo. While genetic nativeness is historically and geographically bound, functionally native English speakers can be met everywhere, especially in the Outer Circle.

With English serving as a lingua franca in the global context, it is evident nowadays that English is likely to be used not only for communicating with native speakers but mainly for non-native users speaking with other non-native users because non-native speakers outnumber English native speakers. Thus, in the Russian Far East, we often use English when communicating with the Japanese, Chinese, or Koreans. To communicate with them successfully and understand their local varieties of English, we need to know the major features of their Englishes and their cultures.

There are three dimensions of successful communication, singled out by Larry Smith (1992):

1. 
   intelligibility,
   
2. 
   comprehensibility, and
   
3. 
   interpretability.
   

Difficulties in intercultural communication can occur at all the three levels. For example, intelligibility might be difficult when sounds are substituted and epenthetic vowels introduced between consonant clusters as it is often characteristic of East Asian Englishes. For an unprepared Russian listener it is difficult to recognize Vladivostok in Burabosotoku as sometimes pronounced by a Japanese speaker. Difficulties in recognizing a word can occur not only in oral speech but also in writing – a Chinese journalist from the China Daily put down a Russian place name exactly as he heard it (according to his Chinese phonetics) and it became next to impossible for a Russian to recognize the settlement of Pogranichnyi in his transcribed name of Bogelaniqinei. In non-native Englishes comprehensibility of meaning can be difficult since a meaning might be changed for different reasons – either under the influence of the word semantics in the indigenous language, or because a new word is just created by a speaker as s/he thinks it suits the named thing better, or a word is sometimes mistakenly confused with some other word. The following examples have also been picked in the China Daily newspaper telling a reader about inking a deal on establishing Suifenhe-Bogelaniqinei port – a place on the Russian-Chinese land borderline far from the ocean, river or lake. Interpretability is most difficult, for it requires certain background knowledge. Without knowing Chinese culture, it is difficult to interpret the following sentence and say what stands behind its culture-loaded words with implied connotations: During every major festival, like Duan Wu Jie, Dragon Boat Festival, or Zhong Qiu Jie, Moon Festival, my parents and I would go to Grandma's house for a short stay.

It is incorrect to believe that native speakers are the sole judges of what is intelligible or that native speakers are always more intelligible than non-native speakers (Smith L. & Nelson C. 2006: 429). At the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, Larry Smith (1992) conducted an experiment on intelligibility with groups of native and non-native educated users of English. The following most valuable results of the experiment are very significant:

• 
  Native speakers are not the most easily understood, nor are they the best able to understand the different varieties of English. Not all Inner-Circle varieties are mutually intelligible with one another.
  
• 
  Language proficiency is most important for comprehensibility, but being a native speaker was not shown to be a deciding factor.
  
• 
  Familiarity with several different English varieties makes it easier to interpret cross-cultural communication in English as it involves an awareness of cultural differences and some knowledge of various specific cultures.
  
• 
  It is possible for Standard English to be spoken with many different accents.
  
• 
  Interpretability is at the core of communication and is more important than mere intelligibility or even comprehensibility (Smith L. & Nelson C. 2006: 437-441).
  

Aware of their linguistic identity, competent and proficient non-native speakers take pride in their English variety. Tommy Koh, a senior minister in the Singapore government, became famous by saying proudly, "I should hope that when I’m speaking abroad, my countrymen will have no problem recognizing that I am a Singaporean" (Koh 1979, cited in Davies, Hamp-Lyons & Kemp 2003). A Philippine poet expressed it metaphorically, “We have our own way of thinking… own own way of feeling, by which we then use this language called English. So that English is ours. We have colonized it too” (Bolton & Bautista 2004: 1-2).

31. Compare a native speaker and a non-native speaker using the following parameters (singled out in Cook 1999):

• 
  subconscious knowledge of rules;
  
• 
  intuitive grasp of meanings;
  
• 
  ability to communicate within social settings (depending on a social situation);
  
• 
  range of language skills;
  
• 
  creativity of language use;
  
• 
  identification with language community (e.g., British in Great Britain);
  
• 
  ability to produce fluent discourse;
  
• 
  knowledge of difference between standard and non-standard form;
  
• 
  ability to interpret and translate.
  

Do you agree that all these parameters refer to solely a native speaker? Can you give arguments to prove the contrary, i.e. that they are applicable to a non-native speaker as well?

Fig. 6. English used in tourism.

36. Find English equivalents to the Russian key words stated before the text of the chapter. Discuss the meaning of the terms.