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World Englishes, Vol 16, No. 1, pp. 135146, 1997.

08832919

THE FORUM
EIL, ESL, EFL: global issues and local interests
HENRY G. WIDDOWSON*
This paper by Henry G. Widdowson was originally presented at a conference in Senegal in
December 1995. The author submitted it to WE for consideration for publication with a note
saying that `I wanted to raise a number of questions for discussion, so the paper is provocative.
. . . You might indeed want to consider it as a possible contribution to World Englishes, where
it might provoke some of the reaction it was originally designed to do' (January 29, 1996).
We believe that this would be an appropriate paper for initiating this new section in WE
entitled the Forum. We hope that the readers of WE will find this contribution as provocative
as does the author, and that some will share their reactions with us for publication in future
issues of WE.
The perspective presented in the paper is important since Widdowson is one of the most
articulate and knowledgeable members of the profession. The points he makes in this paper
have earlier been articulated within various theoretical conceptualizations, with persuasive
empirical data from West Africa, Southern Africa, and from South and Southeast Asia.
Almost five decades ago, India's Raja Rao (1938) provides a credo for his creativity which
has become almost classic and has extensively been quoted by Asian, African, and Western
scholars interested in creativity in English. And now in the 1990s, the voice from a guru of the
ELT profession is particularly significant. This voice is indeed a mild indicator of a slow but
sure increase in the degree of awareness of the paradigm shift among the professional
leadership.
Professor Widdowson represents the profession as an educator, as a prolific researcher and
as an academic administrator. He is active in two professional organizations of the Inner
Circle which are extremely influential: The International Association for Teachers of English
as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) and the Teaching of English to Speakers of Other
Languages (TESOL). Editors.
Let me begin by stating the obvious. English has spread to become an international
language. This would usually be taken as a fact which few would dispute, though many
might resent. It is a fact which is a matter of pride, and profit, for those who speak the
language as natives, and in particular those who come from the country of its origin: its
ancestral home, as Chinua Achebe puts it (1975). The fact that English is an international
language is often taken as a reason for national self-satisfaction. This might alert us to the
possibility that this statement of the obvious is not quite so straightforwardly factual as it

*Department of English for Speakers of Other Languages, Institute of Education, University of London,
20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL, UK and Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex,
Colchester CO4 3SQ.
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might at first appear. What actually does it mean to say that English is international?
What, more generally, does it mean to talk about language spread?
Take the word spread itself. As a verb it is ergative: its object can become a subject. And
this means that it can be used to disguise causation. So we can say that a rumour spread
rather than somebody spread a rumour, and so avoid specifying an agent. It just spread
under its own steam. Similarly, we can say English has spread, like a growth or like an
infection, or alternatively that some causative force was behind it, that it has been spread
by some outside agency or other. So you can take up one of two positions on the matter.
You can say that the spread of the language just happened in the natural way of things, or
that somebody, some persons known or unknown, did the spreading. If you take the first
position you might then look at a range of possible environmental factors which act upon
the internal instability of the language itself. If you adopt the second position, it is but a
step to argue that the spreading was deliberate, that people conspired to spread it,
motivated by colonial ambition.
This second view is at present in vogue. It has been vigorously, not to say stridently,
argued of late that English was used, is being used, as an instrument for imposition of
power. In other words language spread is tantamount to linguistic imperialism (see, e.g.,
Phillipson, 1992). Now one may accept that attempts were indeed made, are being made, to
exploit the language in this way in the exercise of colonial control, but this is not the whole
story. For language is a very unreliable instrument for this purpose. And to see why this is
so, we need to consider another feature of the word spread.
If I spread something, or something gets spread, the assumption usually is that it
remains intact. `Start spreading the news,' as Frank Sinatra sings, `I'm leaving today,' and
everybody is supposed to get the same news. Spreading is transmitting. A disease spreads
from one country to another and wherever it is it is the same disease. It does not alter
according to circumstances, the virus is invariable. But language is not like this. It is not
transmitted without being transformed. It does not travel well because it is fundamentally
unstable. It is not well adapted to control because it is itself adaptable. One might accept
the conspiracy theory that there was an intention to use English to dominate, but the
assumption that the intention was successful, which is often taken as a necessary
corollary, is based on a belief in the invariability of the language. The model of language
we have here is that of a fixed code transmitted like news. We are in the world closed off
from change, where communication is the simple transmission of messages by ideal
speaker listeners in homogeneous speech communities. The point about the control of
people by language is that it is bound to fail because as soon as the language is used it
cannot be kept under your control. People appropriate it. Prospero in Shakespeare's The
Tempest provides us with a nice illustration of the point. Here is a colonialist if ever there
was one. He has taken over the island and placed its inhabitants under his autocratic
domination. Caliban is enslaved and Prospero seeks to exercise greater control over him
by teaching him English.
Prospero:

I pitied thee
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble, like
A thing most brutish, I endow'd thy purposes
With words that make them known.
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Caliban:
You taught me language, and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language.

It would appear that although Caliban may be controlled by his master's voice, he is not
controlled by his master's language. Instead he masters it himself, makes it his own, and
exploits it to express his resistance. He learns to curse in English, which is not only a
considerable feat of proficiency, as Davies has pointed out (Davies, 1995), but presumably
goes way beyond any input that Prospero would have provided. The moral of this story,
and of the history of comparable attempts at linguistic imperialism, is that they failed, and
they failed because they were based on ignorance about the nature of language. Those who
claim that such attempts were successful are, it seems to me, similarly deluded.
It is not only language which has this intrinsically changeable character, of course. The
same is true of ideas, beliefs, values, and indeed anything which has its origins in the mind.
Including news, of course. Frank Sinatra may suppose that what he says will be
transmitted intact, but we all know what happens to news once it is spread abroad.
Diseases do not change when transmitted because they pass between human bodies which
are alike, physiologically cut to much the same standard pattern. But human minds are
infinitely various and changeable, formed and reformed by a multiplicity of social and
psychological influences. Of course it might be convenient to reduce the variety and arrest
the change, to gets minds organized and fixed into established patterns of religious or
political belief. But these patterns never stay in place. They too shift and divide, sects and
parties break away, reform, divide again. `The old order changeth, yielding place to new,'
as Tennyson puts it. Or, to invoke Achebe again, quoting Yeats: `Things fall apart.' But
then they get reassembled. Only to fall apart again. And so on. And since language is
inextricably implicated in these things of the mind these ideas, beliefs, values it is
naturally subject to the same process.
But if English does not get spread as a fixed pattern, as a linguistic entity, artificially
kept unitary and stable like a set of regulations, then what does language spread mean?
What is it that spreads so changeably? And how does the change come about?
When we talk about English, French, Chinese, Arabic as different languages, the very
use of this countable noun inclines us to think of them (of them) as relatively complete and
well-defined. This is because we conceive of them in terms of what has been conventionally
encoded. So English is represented by the established words and the rules for their
syntactic combination as recorded in dictionaries and grammars. What does not conform
to the code is not English. Take an example:
When will you ever your round me roaming end?

This is not English. It needs to be corrected so that it conforms to code:

When will you ever end your roaming round me?

This expression may not seem to be a very likely utterance, but at least, as a sentence, it is
English. The first is not. And yet we would say it is in English. It is not in French, or
Arabic. It may not be an English sentence, but these are English words. What the author
has done is to exploit linguistic resources to produce a novel combination, not allowable by
the conventional code, but nevertheless a latent possibility which is virtual in the language
though not actually encoded.
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That is all very well, you might reply, but nobody goes about exploiting virtual resources
in this way to produce such a bizarre expression. But as a matter a fact this example is an
actually attested use of the language. It is part of a quotation:
When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs.

This comes from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ah! a poem, you may retort, that's
different. But different from what? Poets exploit this virtual resource to fashion patterns of
language which are not sanctioned by conventional coding in order to express some
experience which cannot be contained within these conventions. Hopkins takes words and
realigns them into a new syntactic order to suit his purpose. e e cummings (sic) goes further
and realigns language more radically at the morphological level to form new words.
Pity this busy monster manunkind
not.

In respect to the code, `Pity this monster not' is bad enough a syntactic violation of
encoded word order. But cummings also decomposes the two words the noun `mankind'
and the adjective `unkind' into their constituent morphemes to produce the unheard of
hybrid `manunkind' which is neither noun nor adjective, thereby, appropriately enough,
creating a linguistic monster.
We cannot just dismiss these uses of language as aberrations or oddities. We recognize
them as appropriate, and we can assign significance to them. And in so doing we
acknowledge the existence of the virtual language, that resource for making meaning
immanent in the language which simply has not hitherto been encoded and so is not, so to
speak, given official recognition. If we did not recognize this virtual reality, we would not
be able to make any sense of these nonconformities at all.
But it is not only poets who exploit these latent possibilities. Learners of a language do it
all the time, whether they are learning a first or second or foreign language. Children
invent new grammatical rules, coin new words, much to the delight of their parents. Pupils
in school do the same thing with a foreign language, much to the exasperation of their
teachers.
In these cases, we consider the actualization of the virtual language as a transitory and
transitional phenomenon, evidence of developmental stages in learning: a prelanguage or
interlanguage. They occur because learners do not know better: the conventional codings
are not yet internalized, and so they are different from the deliberate exploitations of poets,
who already know these conventions and consciously violate them. Learners are creative in
spite of themselves and their nonconformities are taken as evidence of incompetence,
quaint though they might sometimes be. They are not in control of the language. The
nonconformities of poets are, on the contrary, generally attributed to linguistic control of a
very high order. Nobody would suggest that Hopkins or cummings needs English lessons.
Having said that, it remains true that the language of learning and literature are both
exploitations of the virtual resource.
But in neither case do their innovations get stabilized: they do not take; they are
intrinsically nonconformist actualizations. They do not spread. But there are cases when a
similar exploitation does take, and stabilizes as a convention. And these are cases of
language spread: when a language diversifies into varieties of different kinds: varieties
which are established by common custom as the mode of communication appropriate to
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particular communities. In a famous quotation, which I have already alluded to, Achebe
speaks of his own exploitation of the virtual resource of English (1975: 62).
I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience . . . But it
will have to be a new English, still in communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new
African surroundings.

Achebe, as a literary writer, is not doing anything essentially different from what
Hopkins and cummings do: all of them bend the language to their will so that it carries the
weight of their individual experience. But when he speaks of the language being altered to
suit its new African surroundings, this is not at all the prerogative of poets or novelists. The
language will, in the ordinary way, naturally and inevitably alter to suit its surroundings,
wherever they may be. Achebe is African, so he thinks in terms of African surroundings.
Here is an Indian, Bhikhu Parekh, referring to the work of Salman Rushdie and expressing
similar sentiments to those of Achebe, but in much less measured, much more strident
tones:
Determined to give the Indian sensibility an authentic voice, Rushdie stands up to
English language as an equal and relentlessly plays with its grammar, syntax and
spellings until it becomes pliable enough faithfully to express the way an Indian thinks,
feels, talks, laughs, jokes and relates to language. He does to English what the English have
done to India. He deconstructs the language, colonises it, reclaims it for the Indian with
Promethean courage, and amply avenges imperial history. (Bhikhu Parekh, Independent on
Sunday, February 11, 1990)
Rushdie uses English, I would suggest, to express his individual sensitivity, just as
Achebe uses it to express his individual experience, and in this he is not essentially different
from any verbal artist. But the Indians do not need him to speak for them. They have their
own authentic voice. And Rushdie has not made the language more pliable: it is virtually
pliable already. And so Indians are able to appropriate English without Rushdie's
assistance. In thinking, feeling, talking, laughing and joking with it, they have naturally
adapted it to their own surroundings.
Everybody is creative in the sense that everybody exploits the virtual language. It is, I
think, misleading to claim such innovation as being a specially literary phenomenon. This
is not to deny that in literature the creativity may be more controlled and directed, that the
verbal artist may have a heightened awareness of the virtual potential in language, and
may be particularly adept at exploiting it. But I think it is important to recognize that
literary writers do not devise a special process in their writing, they make special use of a
common process, and one which is endemic in the very nature of language (for further
discussion, see Widdowson, 1987). This is the process of language spread.
So I would argue that English as an international language is not distributed, as a set of
established encoded forms, unchanged into different domains of use, but it is spread as a
virtual language. If one accepts this notion of spread, as distinct from distribution, then it
is difficult to maintain the conspiracy theory that the language itself has powers of
suppression, that it is the English language which colonizes, using the English people
simply as medium, as a means of transmission. By the same token, if you want to avenge
imperial history you do not do it by taking vengeance on the language. If you object to
what people are doing with English, your quarrel is with the people not the language. In
this respect, Caliban got it right: he curses Prospero, and does so in the very language
Prospero taught him.
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When we talk about the spread of English, then, it is not that the conventionally coded
forms and meanings are transmitted into different environments and different surroundings, and taken up and used by different groups of people. It is not a matter of the actual
language being distributed but of the virtual language being spread and in the process
being variously actualized. The distribution of the actual language implies adoption and
conformity. The spread of virtual language implies adaptation and nonconformity. The
two processes are quite different.
And they are likely to be in conflict. Distribution denies spread. So you can think of
English as an adopted international language, and then you will conceive of it as a
stabilized and standardized code leased out on a global scale, and controlled by the
inventors, not entirely unlike the franchise for Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Distribution of essentially the same produce for consumers worldwide. English the lingua
franca, the franchise language. There are no doubt people who think in these conveniently
commercial terms, and if English as an international language were indeed like this, there
would be cause for concern. But it is not. It spreads, and as it does it gets adapted as the
virtual language gets actualized in diverse ways, becomes subject to local constraints and
controls.
What I am suggesting then is that the virtual spreads through different actualizations,
different encodings of the same basic resource. We might draw a parallel with the process
of biological evolution. Different virtual languages are like the gene pool: this provides the
resource for the genetic blueprint which distinguishes different species. This genetic
blueprint is comparable to the distinctive linguistic encodings of different linguistic species,
that is to say, different languages. But linguistic elements and genres are continually on the
move, continually shifting into different combinations: in other words, subject to random
mutation. When certain mutations suit certain environmental conditions, they get selected,
or actualized. The blueprint changes, and over time, the gene pool changes too. And with
genetic as with linguistic evolution it is impossible to determine at what point these changes
constitute a variety of the same species or the emergence of new one.
The question arises as to how this variety comes about; what it is that gives particular
encoded shape to this intrinsically mutable resource? Is there perhaps something in the
emergence of language varieties comparable to the process of natural selection?
Let us begin by considering the concept of language variety more closely. It is
convenient, and indeed customary, to define language variety along two dimensions:
time and space. With reference to time, it is usual to talk of change across different periods,
of stages of a particular language, making the simplifying assumption (originating from
Saussure) that the language is stabilized, held in suspended animation like the state of play
in a game of chess. So historical linguists will refer to Middle English, Early Modern
English and so on. Each is seen as an actual encoded state of what is virtually the same
language. So Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, for example, is in English, but Middle English.
With reference to space, it is usual to talk of variation across different regions. At any on
encoded in a range of various ways. These different encodings coexist. So the English
spoken in Norfolk, for example, differs from that spoken in Lancashire, and, more
specifically, that spoken in Norwich different from that spoken in Liverpool. But they
are acknowledged to be variants of the same language, alternative actualizations. We refer
to them as dialects. All this seems straightforward enough. But what if we go further afield,
cross the ocean, arrive, for example, in Africa. Here too we find the language variously
encoded: Nigerian English, for example, or more particularly that spoken in Lagos. Are
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these dialects too? Well . . . the question gives us pause. The answer does not seem to be so
straightforward. Dialects? It all depends. Depends on what? Why the ambivalence?
There are two reasons which come to mind. First, when we talk of dialects of English we
tend to think of forms of speaking, different encodings which, to use Achebe's phrase
again, are not far from their ancestral home. Indeed they have the same heritage and can
trace their history back to the same ancestors. They have developed concurrently over time
within the same larger community. So the term does not, in fact, only refer to variation
across regions, but to variation which has a pedigree in that it has also developed as change
over periods of time. But the varieties to be found in far flung regions have not developed
like this. They have sprung up in a relatively extempore and expedient way in response to
the immediate communicative needs of people in different communities with quite different
ancestors. There is no comparable developmental continuity. The status of dialects in
England as variant actualizations of the same virtual language is confirmed by their
common history. To the extent that other varieties do not have such a history, one may
hesitate to call them dialects.
The term dialect, I suggest, implies some common communal development which links
them to the same history. It also implies dependency. We come to the second reason for
ambivalence. A dialect presupposes a language it is a dialect of. A code which declares
independence is no longer a dialect but a language in its own right. People in Durham or
Norfolk are not likely to declare independence. People in Ghana and Nigeria are. They
may well wish to appropriate the language and make it their own. In this case, one might
say that what they speak is another English, not a variant but a different virtual language.
And this is what is implied by referring to Englishes in the plural and not English in the
singular. Thus, the alchemy of change results in several virtual languages, not several
variants of the same one (cf. Kachru, 1986 [1990]).
Or, in genetic rather than metaphysical terms, there is an emergence of different
linguistic species. Again, the analogy with biological evolution is quite striking. Darwin
refers to varieties as `incipient species.' The varieties of English that develop in these
regions are similarly incipient languages. `Well-marked varieties,' Darwin says, turn
gradually into `the doubtful category of sub-species; but we have only to suppose the
steps in the process of modification to be more numerous or greater in amount to convert
these . . . forms into well-defined species' (quoted in Dennett, 1995; 44). As with biological,
so with linguistic evolution, we might suggest: varieties convert into distinct species of
language.
This discussion of the appropriate use of the term dialect raises a number of issues. To
begin with, it makes it clear, I think, that the varieties of English that have sprung up on a
global scale cannot be equated with the gradual evolution of dialects through socially
related communities. They are essentially displaced and discontinuous encodings, motivated in the main by communicative necessity, relatively immediate and expedient, with the
slow influence of history replaced by the immensely rapid development of communications
technology. There have never been circumstances like this before. And circumstances, as
they say, alter cases. The varieties we find globally scattered throughout the world are
phenomena unique to our time. They are not dialects, they are something else. Something
less continuous and dependent.
And yet it does not seem satisfactory to give them the status of separate languages either
and say they are different Englishes. For this is to imply, as I have already suggested, that
they are developments of different virtual languages: not Ghanaian or Nigerian English
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but Ghanaian, Nigerian, tout court. And why not, one might ask. After all, in the USA it is
quite common to find people referring to their language as American rather than American
English, thereby asserting its independent national status. But there are difficulties here,
and again these become apparent by considering the relationship between regional
variation over space and periodic change over time. A particular virtual language gets
variously actualized over a period by communities adapting it to their changing needs. If
these communities have reason to assert their own independent identity, they will gradually
generate their own norms dissociated from previous coding conventions. They will be
oriented inwards rather than outwards, and their actual language then ceases to be
exonormative as a dialect and becomes endonormative as a separate language. And
once a community invests its separate social identity in its language in this way, conditions
are naturally created for it to become different as a virtual resource. Once a new linguistic
species has been brought into being, so to speak, it becomes increasingly distinctive under
its own momentum. The change in psycho-sociological attitude to the language triggers off
linguistic change. So it is that varieties evolve into autonomous languages ultimately to the
point of mutual unintelligibility. Members of different species do not, on the whole, mate.
Speakers of different languages do not, on the whole, communicate.
But if English is to be an international means of communication, the evolution of
different and autonomous Englishes would seem to be self-defeating. And yet, it seems
only right and proper to grant that regional varieties do not have the dependent status of
dialects. We have something of a dilemma here. We want independence without autonomy. How then do we resolve this paradox.
We can begin, I suggest, by considering another distinction at this point, one made by
Michael Halliday (in Halliday et al., 1964, and elsewhere) between dialects and registers.
The first is said to be a variety with reference to user and the second a variety with
reference to use, so we can talk about, say, Liverpool English as a dialect and Legal
English as a register. Put another way, dialects are associated with different kinds of
community, and registers with different kinds of communication. The distinction would
seem to provide us with an escape from our dilemma. For we can say that the varieties we
have been considering can be seen in similarly different terms. To the extent that they are
user-oriented and serve the needs of the community, then they are dialect-like, but, as we
have seen, endonormative and independent. They are likely, therefore, to take their own
natural course and in time evolve into separate species of language, adapted to the needs
and expressive of the identity of separate communities, gradually becoming mutually
unintelligible. The very adaptations which make the language suited to local communal
requirement disqualify it from service as a global means of communication. This should
cause us no concern. And anyway, even if it did, we could not do anything about it since
there is no way of imposing any exonormative control to arrest such development. We
should, in other words, expect that English will divide up into different languages in the
natural evolutionary process just as others have done in the past, quite simply because it is
the very virtual nature of language so to do. As French and Italian develop from Latin, so
Ghanaian and Nigerian develop out of English.
But we also need English as an international language for global communication. Does
this not imply that there must be some exonormative control to prevent this diversification
into different species of language, this linguistic speciation, so to speak? Does it not mean
that there must be some custodians of the common code to keep it global, to regulate,
legislate, set the standard? Even if we allow diversification for local communities, we must
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surely deny it in the interests of global communication. It is this view which insists on the
importance of maintaining the standard language (see, for example, Quirk, 1987), for if
this linguistic centre cannot hold, things do indeed fall apart.
There is, however, another possibility and this is suggested by the second kind of variety
that Halliday distinguishes, namely register. Register is said to be a variety of language
which has developed to serve uses for language rather than users of it. So it is that we can
talk of the English used for business, banking, commerce, various branches of science and
technology. This is English for professional and academic activities. English for specific
purposes. These are generally represented as relatively neutral, transactional uses of
language which do not get entangled in the kind of social issues that we have been
considering. The emphasis here is on communication and information rather than
community and identity. So one way of resolving our dilemma is to let English diversify
into kinds of independent dialect, but keep it in place as a range of registers. Speciation in
the one case is counterbalanced by specialization in the other. And after all when we talk
about English as an international language we generally mean the specific use that is made
of it for these professional and academic purposes.
That is all very well, you may say, but how does a focus on register keep the language in
place. If this is a variety of language, how do you prevent it becoming diverse. This too is
surely an incipient species, just as subject to change as the local varieties we have been
discussing. This is true. But there is a difference. Registers relate to domains of use, to
areas of knowledge and expertise which cross national boundaries and are global of their
very nature. You learn the register of scientific enquiry or medicine or commerce or
computer technology in order to communicate with like-minded people in other parts of
the world. What distinguishes a register from a dialect is not, in fact, that it relates to uses
rather than users, to communication rather than community. Registers have their users
too, and indeed define different communities. But these communities are not in this case
local ones which we belong to by upbringing, the shared socio-cultural experience of
everyday life, usually mediated through the spoken language. They are global communities
which we have to qualify to belong to through the secondary socialization of education
and training, involving a heavy investment in the written language. They are defined not by
experience but expertise. We are taught to become doctors, engineers, academics or
whatever by explicit instruction. And learning to become members of these communities
necessarily involves learning the variety of language, the register, which has become
established as conventional for their communication. Learning the language used for
medicine is an entry condition on membership of the medical community, and in many
parts of the world this language happens to be a register of English. Registers as the
varieties used by these secondary expert communities as exploitations of the resources of
the virtual language do indeed, and necessarily, change over time. But the change is
naturally and endonormatively controlled from within by the requirements of communication across the international community of its specialist users. So scientific English
changes, for example, as the communicative needs of the community of scientists changes.
It remains an internationally intelligible means of communication quite simply because the
community that uses it is international. Notice too that professional and academic registers
are, for the most part, essentially written varieties, and tend to retain a written mode even
when spoken. Since writing exerts a stabilizing and indeed standardizing influence, this has
the natural effect that it will be the standard language which will be favoured by
endonormative control. It follows from this that registers will regulate themselves in the
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interests of global communication. There is no need of native-speaker custodians (for

further discussion see Widdowson, 1994).
Of course, if it serves the purpose of a particular expert community to develop a register
as an ingroup language, this will inevitably lead to some loss of more general intelligibility.
There are indeed registers which are inaccessible to outsiders. And these outsiders can be
people who are otherwise highly competent in the language. As a native speaker of English,
for example, I freely confess that the English registers of computer science, finance, stock
exchange reports, genetics, and many more, are largely incomprehensible to me. As far as
these uses of language is concerned, I am incompetent. But the crucial point is that there
are innumerable people all over the world, speaking all kinds of primary language, from all
kinds of primary socio-cultural background who have become competent in these
secondary varieties of the language. And as they have achieved this competence, they
become full members of these global communities with equal rights to initiate innovation.
Whether you are a native speaker of the language or not is irrelevant. It is what you are
now that is important, not where you have come from.
This, I believe, is how English, the virtual language, has spread as an international
language: through the development of autonomous registers which guarantee specialist
communication within global expert communities. And this, it seems to me, is what most
people are learning English for. It is not to indulge in social chat with native speakers. They
may, and in all probability will, incidentally learn how to use the language for more general
purposes as well, for in learning particular actualizations of the virtual language you
become aware of its possibilities as a resource for other communication (as, for example,
the case of Caliban makes clear). But most learners of the language do not have such
general purposes in prospect. Their purposes are more specific: to learn a language which
enables them to become members of expert communities and to communicate with other
members wherever they may be and whatever primary culture they come from. They learn
the language not to conform to any national norms of general use, but to co-operate as
members in international modes of communication. Of course one can argue that the
establishment of such international communities has undesirable consequences, that it
leads to the privileging of certain groups of people and the neglect of others, that such
global purposes act against local interests. But that is a different matter. I think there is a
good deal of substance in such arguments. But they are not arguments against English but
against the purposes to which it is put, purposes which, it has to be said, are generally given
global approval.
I would argue then that English as an international language is English for specific
purposes. Otherwise it would not have spread, otherwise it would not regulate itself as an
effective means of global communication. And otherwise there would, for most people, be
little point in learning it at school or university. This applies as much to places where it is
said to be a foreign language, like Senegal, as to where it is said to be a second language, as
in neighbouring countries like Ghana or Nigeria. Of course in these countries English is
also used as a medium of communication in primary communities. This is true, but
irrelevant. For as such, as I have argued, it will develop under its own momentum, and will
be learned anyway as a local variety which has no global currency. It is also true that in socalled second language countries, English is used more widely for institutional purposes.
But then these come within the compass of specific uses, closely comparable to the global
uses we have been considering. So it is difficult to see how the distinction between foreign
and second language can be sustained. It may be valid for learning in places where English
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is established as the primary language, as in Britain, but that is a different matter, and not,
I take it, the concern of this conference.
Indeed, not only is the distinction between foreign and second language of doubtful
validity, it can actually be misleading. For it can lead people to suppose that where it is a
foreign language, English can, and should, be learned as a means of interpersonal exchange
across primary cultures, as a kind of social accomplishment, with an emphasis on spoken
interaction. The Council of Europe has, of course, encouraged this idea, and again it may
be valid in Europe, where primary languages and cultures are in relatively close affinity
and in close contact, and where there is ample opportunity for developing this accomplishment. But in Africa?
Here, I would suggest, such a perspective is out of place. My argument is that the
objective for learning English is more appropriately linked to secondary international
communities and not primary national ones. Such an argument has to do with the basic
rationale for English learning, and concerns matters of educational policy. But it has
pedagogic consequences too, and these I should like now, briefly, and in conclusion, to
touch on.
The approach to English teaching which is currently widespread is one which favours socalled authentic use, modelled on native speaker norms, and which emphasizes spoken
language. Such an approach presupposes that the purpose for learning is to prepare
learners for engagement in social interaction with primary communities in native speaking
countries. It may be well suited to Europe, but as I have argued, it is likely to be unsuited to
Africa. I would suggest that here a more appropriate approach would be one which focuses
on the language used in the secondary international communities, as I have defined them in
this paper; those concerned with science, technology, business and so on. This means in
effect that English teaching in the general curriculum would be a version of ESP: English
for Specific Purposes. Since these purposes are also to a considerable degree incorporated
into other subjects at school, it would follow that, as I have proposed elsewhere
(Widdowson, 1978, 1990) the English programme should be designed in co-ordination
with these subjects, and integrated across the curriculum.
Let me anticipate two possible objections to such a proposal. The first is that it would
confirm English as a school subject, put it at a remove from the real world and so reduce
motivation for learning. But whose real world are we talking about? The school is the real
world for pupils: they spend most of their day there. All subjects on the curriculum are
faced with the need to so fashion this world that it appeals to the interest of pupils and
motivates them to learn. Other subjects do this without seeking to imitate the world outside
the class. Few things are more associated with school, and more remote from the business
of everyday life, than what goes on in the chemistry laboratory. But this does not of itself
prevent motivation. Indeed it may be that the very remoteness inspires interest, provokes
curiosity, and motivates pupils to make it real for themselves and work together as a
classroom community. So why should English as a subject be any different? Here too we
need to contrive contexts for learning which will appeal to learners, create a reality which
they can relate to, and so activate the learning process. And these contexts are likely to be
very different from those in which native speaker language naturally occurs. The appropriate language for learning is likely to be very different from the authentic language of use.
The second objection is that to associate English with specific purposes in this way
would be to confine learners too much within a narrowly specialist competence in the
language. What if they subsequently needed to use the language outside the domains of use
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H. G. Widdowson

they have been schooled in? The answer here, I think, takes us back again to the notion of
language spread. I suggested earlier that when a language extends into different regions
and domains of use, it is not that encoded actualizations of a language get distributed, like
copies of the same book, but that it is the virtual language which spreads through different
actualizations. In such a view, you cannot keep language confined. And the same would be
true of language learning. As I have already noted, the learners' language does indeed
spread as the virtual resource is exploited. In other words, learners do not simply learn the
actual encoded forms they are exposed to, or instructed in, but learn from the language:
they go beyond the actual input to the underlying virtual resource. So although what is
expressly taught is the actual language associated with particular purposes, more will be
learned from it in the way of virtual language.
So we return to the notion of the virtual language and we are back where we started. In
my beginning, as T. S. Eliot has put it, is my end, and we come to a closure. But I do not
wish to be conclusive. The argument I have pursued here is meant to raise issues relevant to
English language policy and pedagogy, but not to resolve them. My own specific purpose
has been to give my thoughts an airing and to provoke discussion. I hope that in this I
have, in some small measure, succeeded.
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Achebe, Chinua (1975) Morning Yet in Creation Day. New York: Doubleday.
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University Press.
Davies, Alan (1995) Proficiency or the native speaker: what are we trying to achieve in ELT. In Cook and
Seidlhofer (1995).
Dennett, D. (1995) Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. London: Allen Lane The
Penguin Press.
Halliday, Michael, McIntosh, A. and Strevens, P. (1964) The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching. London:
Longman.
Kachru, Braj B. (1986) [1990] The Alchemy of English: The Spread, Functions and Models of Non-native Englishes.
Oxford: Pergamon. (Reprinted: University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Il.)
Lowenberg, Peter H. (ed.) (1987) Language Spread and Language Policy: Issues, Implications, and Case Studies.
Georgetown: Georgetown University Press.
Quirk, Randolph (1987) The question of standards in the international use of English. In Lowenberg, Peter H.
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Phillipson, R. (1992) Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Widdowson, Henry G. (1978) Teaching Language as Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Widdowson, Henry G. (1994) The ownership of English. TESOL Quarterly, 28(2).
(Received 15 July 1995.)

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