ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the impact of English as a global language on bilingual education internationally.

In comparison with other World Languages, Graddol (1997: 13) positions English at the top of a hierarchy as the global lingua franca. What does this mean for English and which Englishes are implicated? Research in the world Englishes tradition (Kachru 1992) differentiates world Englishes, and established literature in the outer circle of Nigerian English or Singaporean English shows how ‘the Western language can be used for communicating sociocultural nuances that are completely alien to Western culture’ (Kumaravadivelu 2006: 19). In contrast, descriptions of English as an International Language (Strevens 1992) or a World Standard Spoken English (Crystal 2002: 185) assume a common core shared by ‘standard’ varieties such as British and American English, as codified in reference grammars informed by corpora of naturally occurring written and spoken language from the UK (Carter and McCarthy 2006) and the US (Biber et al. 1999), whereas research in English as a lingua franca (Seidlhofer 2004; Maurenen 2006; Jenkins 2006), and specifically the English used internationally among non-native speakers, sheds light on the English used for intercultural communication. Although corpus-informed grammars suggest a common core, as well as systematic variation across modes (e.g. spoken vs written), registers (e.g. academic vs conversational) and users (e.g. British vs American), others point to the boundaries of Englishes to show how English is ‘fragmented, struggled over, resisted … centrifugal and even incommensurable with itself ’ (Pennycook 1994: 28) in its mutually unintelligible varieties. In this vein, recent scholarship has explored how users draw on the resources of several languages in performances as diverse as hip-hop in Malaysia (Pennycook 2007) and complementary schooling in the UK (Blackledge and Creese 2010). Globalization processes mean that we have to look beyond national and international varieties. Indeed Pennycook (2007: 34) questions whether there is such an object of analysis as global English, and turns his attention instead to linguistic performance and transcultural flows:

The notion of performativity can take us beyond views of language and identity that tie them to location and origins, and instead opens up possibilities for seeing how languages, identities and futures are constantly being refashioned. In both the claims that hip-hop is

a language itself, a language that transcends assumed divisions between languages, and the mixing of English with other languages, we can see the performative possibilities of a constantly shifting range of identifications.