Resisting Standard English Norm in Teaching WE

Well, to begin with, you can obviously tell that I build my blog’s title on that of Canagrajah’s book Resisting linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching. While WE perspective has strong arguments to justify accommodating the existing Englishes in the world, the so-called Standard English (SE) still seems to dominate education settings in IC and EC countries despite the diverse population within these countries. In the past two days in our World Englishes course, we quite frequently touched upon the issue of how to teach our EFL/ESL students within a WE perspective while the reality in our school system and the general common sense is to value SE and reject WE as the norm for teaching EFL/ESL.

I think that Canagrajah’s (1991) view about how to resist linguist imperialism in teaching English provides some insight to us, as language educator, as to how we can resist the SE norm in our EFL/ESL education system. Canagrajah (1991) argues that while English teaching has become a reality in the context of Sri Lanka, there is still a room to resist its existence but this would not happen overnight. Rather, Sri Lankan teachers should learn how deal with while at the same time slowly resist and help to transform the current situation of English. Thus, it is possible for us, as English teachers who believe in the reality of WE and its potential in EFL/ESL pedagogy, to do the same. The question then, is how we can accomplish such relative strategy within our education system. Well, I’m still not sure how to bring this idea into practice, however; I really think it is possible.