Some years ago, I knew a teacher of English in France named Hannah. Hannah was Scottish, and she spoke English with a marked Edinburgh accent; in conversation with me and with other teachers she vigorously defended the value of her variety of English against what today I would label the hegemony of RP or Received Pronunciation, the accent of the upper and upper middle classes of southeastern England which has long been considered the standard pronunciation of British English. Yet Hannah confessed to me at one point that when she taught her French students the pronunciation of English, she changed her accent and taught them RP. It seems to me that Hannah’s decision to teach RP, despite her own beliefs about the equal importance and validity of her own regional form of English, was a moral decision. Furthermore, I mention it here because it highlights a constant issue in our profession: the decision about which form of English we should teach. Although this dilemma extends to all areas of the language—including syntax, lexis, discourse, and pragmatic conventions—I confine my remarks to the area of phonology as being particularly salient and representative. It is commonly known in our field that the English language includes a bewildering diversity of varieties, especially accents. I was brought up in Lancashire in northwest England. When I was perhaps 8 or 9, during a visit to my grandparents on Tyneside in the northeast, only 100 miles from my own home (Britain is a very small island), I went to play soccer with some of the neighborhood boys. At one point one of them, a little younger than the rest of us, leaned toward his older brother, pointed at me and whispered: “Is he English?” Since those days, through travel and especially the media, speakers of English all over he world have become somewhat more familiar with different accents and dialects of their own language. Yet this familiarity has done little to change the accents themselves, or attitudes toward them. The problem in the field of ELT is to know which of these varieties to teach. My contention that this decision is moral in nature—that is, that it is grounded in values—stems from the fact that, as seen from Hannah’s own defense of her Scottish accent, language varieties themselves are not value neutral. Quite the opposite, in fact is true: The different varieties of English are highly value laden. Accents are closely linked to the identities of individuals and groups of people; to value one accent over another is, rather directly, to value one group of people over another. The fact that the English of the upper and middle classes of southeast England (the area around London) is seen as the British standard, while that of the working class in the north (where I come from), or of Ireland, or Scotland, or Wales, is not, reflects a broader social notion that the middleclass south is in other ways also the norm or the dominant social group. In other words, this choice of “standard” accent both reflects and reinforces a sociocultural and political hegemony. The same can be said, of course, about regional accents in the United States and other countries, and more broadly about the relationship between British English (or American English) and other varieties of English around the world that have not been accorded the same status—the English of Nigeria, India, or Jamaica, for example. At the same time, in the teaching and learning of English there are good moral reasons for selecting such a variety and sticking with it. It is probably objectively true that, because of the widespread adoption of RP as a standard (at least in areas where British English is preferred to U.S. English), a student who is taught RP will have fewer problems communicating than one who has been taught to speak with a Scottish accent. It is also probably objectively true that in many educational contexts teachers could get into trouble for teaching what departmental authorities would, rightly or wrongly, see as a marked form of English. Last, while at one level we may rightly wish to make our students aware of the great range of English accents across the world, for pedagogical reasons I would argue rather strongly that it is too much to expect all but the most advanced students to have more than a vague notion of different language varieties, and that for their own good they need to be taught a straightforward and consistent way of pronouncing the language they are learning, with the minimum possible number of variations. In light of this pedagogical fiat, though, we really do have to choose which variety will serve as the standard to be taught. And here we are faced with a serious moral dilemma. Which form of English are we going to value by making it the standard? How can we determine which variety it will be in the best interests of our students to know and use? This is what I call the morality of phonology. There is no easy solution; the matter needs to be given some serious, conscious thought. In many programs and contexts there are certain unspoken assumptions: for example, about the relative “superiority” of American or British English, of American or British “standard” forms over regional accents, or of “center” varieties over “periphery” varieties (Phillipson, 1992). I suggest that in considering the moral meanings underlying pronunciation teaching and the moral messages we send in our teaching it is important to bring these assumptions to light and question them rather than letting the matter be determined by instinctual, unspoken preferences that often arise under particular sociopolitical conditions. Yet at the same time we must acknowledge that by teaching one set of forms over another we may also be reinforcing existing hegemonic relations.
Some years ago, I knew a teacher of English in France named Hannah. Hannah was Scottish, and she spoke English with a marked Edinburgh accent; in conversation with me and with other teachers she vigorously defended the value of her variety of English against what today I would label the hegemony of RP or Received Pronunciation, the accent of the upper and upper middle classes of southeastern England which has long been considered the standard pronunciation of British English. Yet Hannah confessed to me at one point that when she taught her French students the pronunciation of English, she changed her accent and taught them RP. It seems to me that Hannah’s decision to teach RP, despite her own beliefs about the equal importance and validity of her own regional form of English, was a moral decision. Furthermore, I mention it here because it highlights a constant issue in our profession: the decision about which form of English we should teach. Although this dilemma extends to all areas of the language—including syntax, lexis, discourse, and pragmatic conventions—I confine my remarks to the area of phonology as being particularly salient and representative. It is commonly known in our field that the English language includes a bewildering diversity of varieties, especially accents. I was brought up in Lancashire in northwest England. When I was perhaps 8 or 9, during a visit to my grandparents on Tyneside in the northeast, only 100 miles from my own home (Britain is a very small island), I went to play soccer with some of the neighborhood boys. At one point one of them, a little younger than the rest of us, leaned toward his older brother, pointed at me and whispered: “Is he English?” Since those days, through travel and especially the media, speakers of English all over he world have become somewhat more familiar with different accents and dialects of their own language. Yet this familiarity has done little to change the accents themselves, or attitudes toward them. The problem in the field of ELT is to know which of these varieties to teach. My contention that this decision is moral in nature—that is, that it is grounded in values—stems from the fact that, as seen from Hannah’s own defense of her Scottish accent, language varieties themselves are not value neutral. Quite the opposite, in fact is true: The different varieties of English are highly value laden. Accents are closely linked to the identities of individuals and groups of people; to value one accent over another is, rather directly, to value one group of people over another. The fact that the English of the upper and middle classes of southeast England (the area around London) is seen as the British standard, while that of the working class in the north (where I come from), or of Ireland, or Scotland, or Wales, is not, reflects a broader social notion that the middleclass south is in other ways also the norm or the dominant social group. In other words, this choice of “standard” accent both reflects and reinforces a sociocultural and political hegemony. The same can be said, of course, about regional accents in the United States and other countries, and more broadly about the relationship between British English (or American English) and other varieties of English around the world that have not been accorded the same status—the English of Nigeria, India, or Jamaica, for example. At the same time, in the teaching and learning of English there are good moral reasons for selecting such a variety and sticking with it. It is probably objectively true that, because of the widespread adoption of RP as a standard (at least in areas where British English is preferred to U.S. English), a student who is taught RP will have fewer problems communicating than one who has been taught to speak with a Scottish accent. It is also probably objectively true that in many educational contexts teachers could get into trouble for teaching what departmental authorities would, rightly or wrongly, see as a marked form of English. Last, while at one level we may rightly wish to make our students aware of the great range of English accents across the world, for pedagogical reasons I would argue rather strongly that it is too much to expect all but the most advanced students to have more than a vague notion of different language varieties, and that for their own good they need to be taught a straightforward and consistent way of pronouncing the language they are learning, with the minimum possible number of variations. In light of this pedagogical fiat, though, we really do have to choose which variety will serve as the standard to be taught. And here we are faced with a serious moral dilemma. Which form of English are we going to value by making it the standard? How can we determine which variety it will be in the best interests of our students to know and use? This is what I call the morality of phonology. There is no easy solution; the matter needs to be given some serious, conscious thought. In many programs and contexts there are certain unspoken assumptions: for example, about the relative “superiority” of American or British English, of American or British “standard” forms over regional accents, or of “center” varieties over “periphery” varieties (Phillipson, 1992). I suggest that in considering the moral meanings underlying pronunciation teaching and the moral messages we send in our teaching it is important to bring these assumptions to light and question them rather than letting the matter be determined by instinctual, unspoken preferences that often arise under particular sociopolitical conditions. Yet at the same time we must acknowledge that by teaching one set of forms over another we may also be reinforcing existing hegemonic relations.
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