Abstract
Andy, thanks very much for agreeing to be interviewed for this special issue of RELC Journal on teaching and assessing pragmatic competence in global Englishes contexts. To begin with, I’d like to ask about your personal experience of Englishes around the world. How did you become interested in this field?
Oh, I guess it all goes back to my childhood. I grew up in Malaysia and Singapore, and my dad worked there as an engineer in the early 1950s and 1960s. And I was surrounded by Malaysians who were speaking varieties of English, and it just became a fascination for me from then on, because you had Malay people speaking Malay, Malaysian Chinese speaking different varieties of Chinese, a number of Indians speaking different Indian languages, all living together, as it were, in this multicultural, multilingual Malaysian context. And as well as using a type of English as a lingua franca among each other, they also used a colloquial variety of Malay as a lingua franca. And as we now know, there were also the developing postcolonial varieties of world English that we now know as Malaysian English and Singaporean English. So, my childhood was the real key to my interest in the field, I guess.
Could you speak Malay or any of the other languages yourself?
As a kid, I spoke what used to be called bazaar Malay, a sort of market Malay, which was the lingua franca. So, I used to run around the compound with kids in the kampongs, which is the Malay word for village, and we tended to speak a variety of sort of gobbledygook, in some sort of way that we seemed to understand each other in this variety of Malay. This sort of bazaar Malay was the kind of lingua franca then. So yes, to a certain extent I spoke that, enough to be able to play with playmates, if you see what I mean. Right in the compound around where we used to live.
And you didn’t start out as an English teacher, did you? You were a journalist for a while.
Yes, I started out wanting to be a journalist, but it was – well, let me get this right. I tried to be a journalist in the early days, back in the UK, when I went to the University of Leeds to study Chinese. But on graduating I saw myself as perhaps being a commentator or contributor to Private Eye magazine and various titles like that. And I did have a run of doing about six months of work for them, but it didn’t come to anything. And then I got this opportunity to go to China as a postgraduate student, which changed things. And I did a bit of journalism writing for the Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER) (now sadly defunct) while I was in China, and when I came out of China I did write for the FEER and other outlets. But I also started teaching English at that time at the British Council in order to earn extra money. And then I became interested in that, and so went back to the UK to York University to do a masters in ELT and linguistics. So, I got into it that way. After that I was lucky enough to get a job at the Institute of Education in Singapore where I worked for four years, and that's when I really started my interest in applied linguistics and ELT. That would have been what, 1981, I think, when I first went to Singapore.
So, as you moved into academia and thinking about applied linguistics in English, how did your experience growing up in Malaysia and so on shape the way you approached applied linguistics and language teaching, if at all?
I think I was familiar with the way that English was spoken in different ways by various people, so I don’t think I’ve had a prejudice against anybody else's type of English. And I rather enjoyed it all, and certainly enjoyed it when I was back in Singapore, and then I went to teach in other parts of the world, including Myanmar for a while, four years or so, as well as several years in Hong Kong at different times – and here in Australia, of course. And it just became fascinating to me, seeing how English was developing among the speakers in these different postcolonial settings that I was now working in. And I tried never to put myself forward as the native speaker expert, but I tried to encourage people that the way they were using English was perfectly acceptable, and that they should be proud of being multilingual users of English. And I’d try to get people to concentrate, focus, to understand that they are multilingual users of English, not trying to be native speakers of it, and this was a perfectly acceptable and highly praiseworthy thing to be.
How well did that idea go over in the early 1980s? Was it reasonably well accepted?
In Singapore, there was fairly sensible debate about it, and the Regional Language Centre, who I think you’re working with, was involved very much in it, holding conferences on English and the teaching of English in Asia and so forth. And there was certainly a large number of people who were very supportive of the idea of Singaporean English. But there was also a powerful group that were not, in particular the Singapore government, who were keen for Singaporeans not to be laughed at by speaking what they would call colloquial Singaporean English, and promoting the Speak Good English campaign, which was based on standard varieties of English. But it hasn’t been terribly successful in that sense because Singaporean English is a well-established variety now and it operates on a cline, if you like, from educated to colloquial. I think the colloquial variety of Singaporean English still works very well as an identity marker. But the educated variety of Singaporean English is perfectly intelligible internationally.
How do you see global Englishes research as having evolved over the years, particularly in the areas of pragmatics and pragmatics pedagogy?
Well, not so much in terms of pragmatics and pragmatics pedagogy. There has been some, and your own work, for example, would be an example of it, as would be the work of Will Baker and others. I think the work of Sharifian at Monash before his untimely death was very important in this area, where he looked at, in particular, Persian English and how people use language in order to achieve certain ends. But I think generally speaking, it's a tricky area of research, especially in an ELF context. A very simple example would be Chinese request patterns, which in Chinese tend to be framed around putting the arguments for the request you’re going to make early with the hope that the person you’re talking to will actually get what you’re asking for and grant you the request before you actually have to make it, which is very good for face saving, because if you ask for something and the person can’t give it to you, that's a great loss of face. So, I think English speakers, when they learn Chinese, need to learn that this way of making a request is very often used. At a different level, even at a syntactic level, you can say in Chinese ‘I like apples’ using that subject-predicate word order, but on the other hand, if you say ‘apples, I really like them’, this sounds more Chinese, as Chinese prefers this topic-comment construction. And so you need to learn these kinds of pragmatic norms of the language that you’re working with, but these are also negotiable in use. You know, the other person has to do some work too. So it's pretty tricky.
To give a specific example from my own experience, when I was a postgraduate student of Chinese literature at Fudan University in Shanghai in the 1970s, the winter of 1976 was unseasonally cold but the heating in the dormitories was not turned on. My two Chinese roommates, thinking a request from a foreign student would carry more weight than if they made the request, asked me to go to the relevant authorities to request that the heating be turned on. So, I went and made the request in Chinese but using the ‘English’ pragmatic norm of making the request directly. When I reported to my roommates that I had simply asked them to turn the heating on they were mortified. They felt I should have prefaced my request with possible reasons for it with remarks such as ‘I am not sleeping well’, ‘I am constantly cold’, ‘I think I am getting a fever’ and hoping these reasons would persuade the authorities to offer to turn on the heating. In the event, however, perhaps because I was considered an ignorant foreigner who did not understand Chinese pragmatic rules, the heating was turned on.
And there's that famous cartoon of an American businessman and a Japanese businessman meeting, and the Japanese businessman has got his hand up to shake hands, but the American businessman is bowing. Which is an example of how it's not working quite as it should do. Both parties are aware of the different, as it were, pragmatic behaviour in these contexts.
It's been found that ELF users often co-construct mutual norms and standards of what is appropriate and acceptable in a given situation. So, if one interactant breaches another's conventions of appropriateness, they may just ignore it, and carry on with the interaction. I wonder if you could comment on this. Have you had any experience of it? Do you think it's something that could/should be taught about explicitly?
An early ground breaker in pragmatics research was John Gumperz who made the crucial point that if a second language speaker makes a mistake in grammar or pronunciation this is immediately noticeable by interlocutors – so, for example, if someone speaking English says ‘you need to take these peels twice a day’, it is easy to understand ‘peels’ as ‘pills’ from the context. But if someone makes a pragmatic mistake and transfers the pragmatic norms of their first language into the second language, the interlocutors do not know that a mistake has been made. So, for example, someone who transfers an English request pattern and makes a simple direct request upfront of a Chinese may be considered pushy and impolite by the Chinese. This is why it is so important that speakers understand that pragmatic norms differ across cultures so that they can make allowances if the pragmatic norms of their own culture are breached in any interaction. It is always worth bearing in mind that it is rare for any speaker to want to offend others deliberately. So, what may appear offensive to a listener is more likely to be an inadvertent transfer of the speaker's pragmatic norms and not a deliberate attempt to offend.
What do you think are the theoretical and methodological challenges in researching pragmatics and pragmatic pedagogy through a global Englishes lens?
Well, I think it's very easy to fall into stereotypes. I mean, identifying pragmatic norms that one culture has in itself is not easy because the context is so important. An example might be complimenting. In Japanese culture, mothers would be embarrassed, I think, if one was to compliment them directly on the academic ability of their sons or daughters. They’d feel uncomfortable. But does that mean you should never compliment Japanese mothers on the brilliance or good qualities of their children? I don’t know, I think there must be ways of complimenting people. So, I think it's actually extremely hard sometimes to find out how best to do these things. And a lot of learning how to do these things, I think is done ad hoc. You know something about the culture you’re dealing with, but you have to try and work out how it actually operates in these cross-cultural contexts. Stereotyping is to be avoided. And the understanding and learning of pragmatic norms of different languages and speakers is something that needs to be studied, and thereby learned, if you like, by others. I think Sharifian's work was a good example of how that could be done, but I think there's much more that could be done on this.
Do you think the ‘let it pass principle’ is something that comes into play in negotiating this sort of context?
It comes into play if immediate understanding of a word or phrase is not considered essential at the time. But there are times when you can’t let it pass. If you’re noting down an address, for example, you can’t let it pass if you can’t figure out whether it's 15 or 50, you have to check back straight away to make sure that you’ve understood the right number. But, in another context you might think ‘oh let's let this go, I’m sure I’ll get there in the end’. So again, it depends on context whether you let it go, let it pass. And if you are very keen to find out something, you can adopt the ‘don’t give up’ strategy: chisel, chisel, chisel actually to get what you want. And in courtroom negotiations, for example, you can’t let it pass. I mean, it's a different type of context. You need to know what's going on, pretty well straight away.
In any field, some areas are inevitably researched more than others, like some geographical areas or contextual areas or topical areas. Within global Englishes pragmatics and pedagogy, what areas do you think could be foregrounded more, and why?
I think pragmatics is the area that needs the most research. There's a lot of work done on the syntactic variation and so forth, and morphological variation. But I think we don’t really know enough about how people operate when moving across cultures in terms of understanding what's going on, and again there's this danger of stereotyping. You know, one learns from the work of people like Anna Wierzbicka, that speakers of Slavic languages feel they can tell you something quite directly if they think what they are saying is good for you. For example, someone might see a friend wearing something that the friend thinks doesn’t look right, so she might say ‘you look dreadful in that hat’. Well, that may be all right for Slavic speakers. But how do you take that? I mean, would you have the self-confidence to use that if you were speaking Russian to someone? Maybe you would, I don’t know. But it's these kinds of stereotypes and how to manage them in real life interactions that I think is really, really tricky.
And so, the more research into pragmatics and cross-cultural pragmatics we have the better in order to give people an understanding that pragmatic norms differ across cultures. And this is especially relevant for ELF research, because it's a wonderful opportunity to see how people negotiate meaning and communication through ELF, how they actually do work with these different pragmatic norms, or try and understand the other person's pragmatic norms and whether they work or not, and constant renegotiation's going on. It's really strategic. So, I mean, that's hard work.
What about in Asia specifically? Are there any particular areas of global Englishes and pragmatics that you think could be researched in that particular context?
Certainly, in the Asian Corpus of English, we found that there certainly seems to be a kind of Asian feeling that dialogue and consensus (musyawarah and muafakat in Malay) are crucially important in any interaction. And explicit confrontation is really disfavoured. And I think a fundamental part of certain Asian discourse is the need for the other person, the person you’re dealing with, not to feel belittled or not to feel humbled, not to lose face, if you like. Whereas in more European-focused discourse, you can be more upfront and be more critical in a direct way perhaps than in Asia, where the criticism can be there, but it is indirectly expressed. That doesn’t mean to say that it's not understood. It's expressed in what seems to be a gentler way, perhaps, but is in fact a just as effective way of criticism, if you know how the system of local pragmatic norms work.
I mean, very often you hear these stereotypical things, such as that Indonesians never like to say no if they don’t know something. Well, that's not quite true. They may not say no, but if you know the pragmatic norms, you know very well this person is saying no, even though they’re not directly saying no. But you know, if you’ve dealt with Indonesians, that this is a polite way of saying we’re not going to grant your request, for example.
Yeah, and it's not considered a lie because the person who's hearing it knows perfectly well that this does mean no, it's just not being explicitly stated.
Yeah, exactly.
How do you see global Englishes pragmatics and pedagogy developing in the future, and what developments do you think might be most significant for language classrooms?
In terms of pedagogy, I think an awful lot of people are writing about ELF pedagogy. And how to develop communicative strategies, which you might call pragmatic strategies as well, depends how you look at these things. There's quite a lot of work with that going on. What is not happening very much is the acceptance of these things in the actual classroom, among senior teachers anyway, and ministries and so forth. So, there's a long way to go, I think, before research into pragmatics is foregrounded more in the English language classroom. I don’t think it's really happening yet. And again, I think partly that's because the institutions involved in the teaching of English, particularly ministries of education and so forth, are conservative. And they say, if you’re going to learn English language, it should be in English, and it should be an English that's spoken by speakers in the Anglosphere. And therefore, the cultures that should be in the classroom, the pragmatics in the classroom, should be those of English speakers from the Anglosphere. And by English speakers they mean native speakers from the traditional countries such as the UK or the US.
But if you look at, say, ASEAN, it's a very good example I think, where English is the official lingua franca of the group. You have the members of ASEAN talking to each other, you’ve got Cambodians talking to Vietnamese, talking to Thais talking to Filipinos, et cetera. It seems that that is the area where a study of pragmatic norms could actually be extremely effective in the classroom and be translated into some sort of pragmatic pedagogy. So, you would assume that Indonesians speaking to Filipinos, for example, would benefit from knowing what the pragmatic norms of Filipino English are and vice versa, that Filipinos would benefit from knowing more about Indonesian pragmatic norms, especially since Filipinos tend to be stereotypically portrayed as being fluent speakers of English, but at the same time fairly upfront. Whereas Indonesian speakers of course, would be almost stereotypically classified as being more – not introverted, but certainly not as upfront as Filipinos. So, you could predict clashes between Filipino speakers and these speakers, if they did not understand the pragmatic norms of the other. So, I think in those contexts there's an awful lot of work that can be done in looking at the varying pragmatic norms, because English as a lingua franca is officially established as the sole language of communication for that group. So, it seems to me it would be an obvious place really to look at how Cambodians make requests compared with how Malaysians make requests compared with how people in Myanmar make requests, or whatever it might be. So, that could then assist with the sorting out of certain problems that occur across ASEAN, of which there are many.
Is formal assessment something that could include pragmatics? What are your thoughts on that?
I think it's very, very difficult. I mean, how would it be examined? And this goes back to the problem of even assessing spoken English. How many assessors do you need? How much speech do you need to listen to in order to make a genuine, valid assessment? And in terms of pragmatics, it's very difficult. How would you set up an assessment that would see whether these students had mastered or were able to handle pragmatic differences in communication? It's very hard to judge it. Now, you can learn things by having corpora, like the Asian Corpus of English, where you can see how people have done it. But I don’t know how you then proceed from that to see whether anyone can do it in an assessment context. So, I don’t have any ideas of how that could successfully be done on a large scale that would also be fair to the test-takers. I mean, you need two test-takers talking to each other if you’re going to see how people communicate across norms. And then you have the big problem of, if one of the pair is more proficient than the other, how do you assign the marks? It's tough. So, I hold very little hope, I’m afraid. There are people who have worked on this. Tim McNamara, who sadly passed away recently, did a lot of work in this field. He's certainly worth reading. But I think in terms of getting it adopted as an assessment in a large scale across different cultures is very hard.
That's the last of my questions, so thank you very much, Andy. We appreciate your time.
Thank you.
