Vol 24, No 3 (2020): World Englishes in the Expanding Circle

In Kachru’s original classification, the countries of the Expanding Circle were those where English was learned primarily as a foreign language in schools. English did not play an institutional role within the country. As such they were “norm-dependent” countries relying on exonormative native speaker standards as models and targets for learners of English. In recent years, however, the role(s) of English in many Expanding Circle countries of Asia - these include the economic powerhouses of China, Japan and South Korea - have increased exponentially both within the countries (as English becomes increasingly important as a language of education, for example) and between the countries as a lingua franca (English has been enshrined as the sole working language of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), for example). The aim of this article is to describe how these roles of English in the Expanding Circle countries of Asia have developed. I shall focus on the role of English as a language of education in describing how the role of English has developed within countries and on the role of English as a lingua franca in describing how the role of English has developed between the Expanding Circle countries of Asia. I shall conclude by considering the implications of these developments for English language education pedagogy and policy.

The world of English has been witnessing shifts and turns over the last half century, and a major one is a paradigm shift from a monolithic English to pluricentric Englishes. The term “Englishes” symbolizes the “functional and formal variation in the language, and its international acculturation” (Kachru B. & Smith 1985: 210), and it is primarily concerned with the “intelligibility of form, comprehensibility of meaning, and interpretability of sense” (Proshina 2014: 4). As far as China is concerned, there are estimated 350-500 million learners and users of English, and the functions of English have expanded since the “reform and open door” policies of the 1970s (Kirkpatrick & Xu 2002). In this paper, we explore the expanding functionality of English in China, taking the major shifts and turns surrounding world Englishes as a backdrop, that is, the shift from codifying linguistic features of English varieties to focusing on users’ translanguaging practices in multilingual contexts, as well as the functional turn, the multilingual turn, and the dynamic interactive turn (Sridhar & Sridhar 2018). In particular, we adopt a qualitative approach to researching Chinese English as a translanguaging practice among Chinese English bilingual professionals in order to unpack the expanding functions of English in two major Chinese cities, Beijing and Kunming. Drawing upon semi-structured interviews of Chinese-English bilingual professionals from the two cities, we present a “tale of two cities” in relation to the expanding functionality of English in China.

For the past two decades, the concept of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) has been a topic of much debate among researchers in the global use of English, including those involved in English language teaching (ELT). While in many respects ELF may be viewed just as a new name for its predecessors, such as World Englishes (WE) and English as an International Language (EIL), in other ways it also provides some fresh perspectives for the function of global Englishes. In particular, having grown chiefly out of Europe, where English has traditionally been studied as a foreign language rather than a second language, the ELF paradigm is often suited for the needs of learners of English in the Expanding Circle. With Japan as a primary example, the present paper discusses the significance of the concept of ELF and of the studies within its framework for ELT in the Expanding Circle. An important argument of this article is that studies in the early days of ELF, seeking for elements to facilitate international intelligibility, are still highly useful for ELT in the Expanding Circle. They cater especially to ELT in the Asian Expanding Circle, where pedagogical models are of crucial importance, no less than current ELF studies focusing on the fluid and translingual nature of ELF do. This paper points to the need for ELT teachers to be eclectic and integrative, learning from multiple paradigms, including ELF, WE, and EIL, while even going beyond the newness and oldness of pedagogical approaches, in order to best serve their students.

The paper addresses the use of English in the Russian-based recruitment discourse. Language is viewed through the prism of the sociolinguistics of globalization and understood as a set of mobile trans-locally operative resources used to achieve specific goals of communication. The corpus for analysis includes job ads and résumés posted on the recruitment platforms HeadHunter and Super.Job, videotaped conversations of job seekers with recruiters and employers, and ethnographic interviews with recruitment professionals. We used discourse analysis, ethnographic methods, and quantitative measuring to analyze the data. The study consists of two stages. During the first stage, we found out that English can be used as the main language of recruitment or in the form of “insertions” in the Russian-based texts to demonstrate professionalism, position the company, and “filter” the candidates. The second stage revealed that the all-English segment of the Russian recruitment discourse has narrowed, while the use of English in “truncated” forms has increased. This dynamic is caused by the expansion of the digital segment of the Russian job market (social media, Internet channels), where English-mediated technologies are the main instrument of interaction with clients. It results in further hybridization and boosts translingualism in work-related settings. English, with its tendency to informal personified communication patterns, also affects the communicative conventions of the Russian-based recruitment discourse. The study demonstrates the growing role of English as an agent of global professional discourses and an intermediary between people and technologies.

This article analyzes a World Englishes paradigm shift in four monolingual English-language learner’s dictionaries designed to meet the reference needs of people learning English as a non-native language in the Expanding Circle. The study investigates the question of how modern learner’s dictionaries reflect the current global status of English. The dictionary focus on educational learner needs exclusively seems to ignore the today’s range and depth of the socio-cultural functions of global English. The authors examine the dictionaries’ coverage of non-Inner Circle varieties of English and, in particular, analyze culture-loaded borrowings from Northeast Asian countries (China, Japan, Korea, and Russia) where English is widely used for intercultural communication. The particular interest is in the way the dictionaries define such entries and represent non-English cultures and identities of their speakers from the Expanding Circle through borrowings. Analysis of the wordlists of learner’s dictionaries reveals an ethnocentric approach in compiling the dictionaries. This is manifested both in the patchy coverage of non-Inner Circle varieties of English in the dictionaries and in the inexplicable selections of borrowings to be included. Words associated with the Northeast Asian countries tend to be selected arbitrarily and according to Western rather than regional culture priorities. Anglocentricity is also evident in the definitions of the headwords related to Northeast Asia. The majority of the borrowings are defined in British or American terms without any perspective of the culture from which the words arise. The authors conclude that the representation of non-English cultures in learner’s dictionaries is ideological and ethnocentric and therefore cannot meet the challenges of the globalized world.

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