The Pluricentric Approach to Teaching English: An urgent demand

Simply put, Kachrue's pluricentric approach to English means that "there are several global centers, native and non-native, each with its own standard variety of English" (Jenkins, 2009, p. 70). This implies that English is no longer a monolithic entity, but rather, it is a pluralistic one which entails the fact that all the varieties of English entertain the same level of legitimacy in its own social context. Thus, if this is the de facto situation of English nowadays, it could be argued that it is no longer realistic to ignore the pluralistic nature of English if we are to teach EIL. The real challenge then, I strongly believe, does not rely on whether we accept this reality or not. Rather, the challenge is on how we bring this into English classroom and understand its associated practices such as teaching, testing and evaluation.

I understand Quirk's position against the idea of Englishes and how WE approach might be problematic particularly when it comes to the so-called language standards. However, if we agree with Quirk, aren't we swimming against the current and overlooking the reality of today's world? I think it is our responsibility to, at least, open our students' eyes to the existing Englishes because, if we did not, we might put our students in a situation where they either devalue the speakers of the OC or EC Englishes or feel ambivalence as to how to deal with the reality of the different Englishes which they will definitely encounter in their life.

The crux of the issue, then, is not only to investigate how to expose and teach our students the communicative skills needed to deal with English today, but also how we, as teachers, can develop our understanding to accommodate Englishes and their associated conventions, be it spoken or written, and how to transform our long held beliefs about the so-called Standard English. Therefore, I strongly believe that for my teaching context (i.e. EFL in Saudi Higher Education) the starting point will be to conduct extensive need analysis research to determine where and how WE perspective fits and implemented in the EFL curriculum.