Week 12 Post: Three Concentric Circles are Not Enough

McKay & Bokhorst-Heng
Chapters 2 & 3

Chapter two describes the social contexts in which English is being learned. It introduces Kachru’s model of concentric circles the describes the type of English speakers. The three circles are the inner, outer and expanding circle. The inner circle is where English is the primary language of the country. For example Australia and Canada. The outer circle is where English serves as a second language in a multilingual country such as India. The expanding circle is where English is widely studies as a foreign language such as China. These explanations are hard to wrap your mind around at first. But as the chapter goes on, we are able to understand each more deeply.

The inner circle is the most prevalent type of English learning context and it involves recent immigrants to the country. I believe we can relate this to America and the types of students we might be teaching one day. They use the terms to describe individuals who do not speak English “language minority students.” Because of the negative connotation that this term holds, the terms “English Learners” is more appropriate.

There are however, many controversies that follow this model. Bruthiaux (2003) criticizes it because he believes it overlooks the variation of English used within specific geographic areas. It also does not consider the variation within specific contexts such as Afican-American English vernacular.

Something that I thought was very interesting were the policies regarding the education of ELs and how they differ between the UK and the US. British policies tended to support they mainstreaming of ELs while American policies tended to promotes English as a second language pull out programs or bilingual programs to the extent where they were mandated by legislation or Supreme Court decisions. As a pre-service educator, I believe that the pull out method that America has in place seems to be the best solution to helping our ELs. While observing at my mom’s school, I spent most of the day with the TESOL teacher picking her brain and watching how she went about assimilating the students. She told me stories about how after students are here for several months, they start to go to some mainstream classes to see how they can handle it. She said that a lot if not most of her students go through a period where they break down. I worked with one girl that was in her room who had just came here from Mexico and could not speak a word of English. She cried and had a lot of break downs because she was so overwhelmed with not understanding anything and having to get through the school day. I don’t know how she could have possibly made it through the day if she was mainstreamed. At least in the pull out program she knows they we are there to help her with the specific intent to help her learn English. I feel that mainstreaming these students too quickly can lead to them shutting down and possibly giving up on learning English.

In chapter three, the authors discussed multilingual countries characterized by diglossia and those without diglossia. They also discuss the mother tongue and support for mother tongue maintenance. Support for the learning of English is provided through official language in education policies and through its status as an official language. By providing English education alongside the mother tongue languages, it is seen as a very important feature of the nationalist policy.

Fishman’s (1967) argument is that diglossia maintains languages. He extends Ferguson’s classic diglossia to other multilingual situations where two mutually unintelligible languages occupy the H and L niches. “Who speaks what language to whom and when in those speech communities that are characterized by widespread and relatively stable multilingualism (Fishman 437, McKay et. al 60).”