Andy Mering - Mid-Atlantic English in the EFL Context

Within the ‘MAE’ paradigm, it is also vital to address another major tenet: situational adaptation. It is closely bound up with the issue of consistency. The following sub-chapter therefore discusses this important notion of situational adaptation.

2.3 Situational Adaptation

Situational adaptation or linguistic accommodation implies the intercultural speaker’s ability to “appraise the situation” in the communicative act (Modiano, 2009, p. 13). In order to facilitate interaction with their interlocutor, it is communicatively more expedient for the intercultural speaker of English to gauge, if possible, their interlocutor’s level of English, educational background and the variety of English they speak. In Modiano’s words, “this linguistic etiquette is in stark contrast to an insensitive speaker who goes forward expecting others to understand what they have to say without making any effort to package their message in a form which is more easily received by others” (2009, pp. 13–14).

One important step of this professed increase of pedagogical flexibility is not to coerce students into an unadulterated BrE rendition. It should be acknowledged that NNSs have now become so influenced by AmE that they are using an amalgam of the two major varieties. The corollary to this changing sociolinguistic profile is that ‘MAE’ deserves its rightful place in the EFL enterprise. The focus should be placed on awareness-raising of BrE/AmE contrasts concomitant with flexible accommodation skills by consciously employing a mix of BrE and AmE suited to the given communicative context. (Modiano, 2009, p. 61, p. 137). The principle of implementing situational adaptation against the backdrop of the ‘MAE’ paradigm is to foster and apply a mega-perspective defined as “a constant process of adaptation to the linguistic challenges of the communicative act at hand” (Modiano, 2009, p. 109). Due to the ubiquity of AmE worldwide, at the lexical level an effective international communicator, for example, is likely not to employ typically BrE culture-specific words such as ‘rubber’, ‘public school’, ‘pudding/sweet’ but would instead rather resort to ‘eraser’, ‘private boarding school’ and ‘dessert’. Sometimes, even words used in either main variety but with radically different meanings would be prone to misunderstanding in international forums, e. g. ‘to table a proposal’. In BrE, this phrase connotes that the proposal is brought up for discussion but in AmE it is ‘postponed’. A speaker with a cross-cultural orientation would avoid such ambiguity and either use ‘to suggest something for discussion’ for the BrE connotation of ‘to table’ or ‘to delay the discussion’ for the AmE connotation.

Another term that needs to be addressed within the ‘MAE’ paradigm is the ‘singularity principle’. It is closely related to the standard language ideology controversy and quite naturally overlaps with the issues of situational adaptation and consistency. This will be the focus of the next sub-chapter.

2.4 The Singularity Principle

Proponents of the singularity principle assert that one language is inherently superior to others. In the context of BrE and AmE, the privileged and predominant variety has to date been BrE in EFL teaching, which acts as the bulwark of correct usage on account of its quasi-incontestable enormous legacy of overt prestige (Modiano, 2002, p. 10). Nonetheless, this view may lack pedagogical credibility to accommodate today’s diverse EFL environments under the impact of linguistic Americanisation, because it cannot be argued that BrE inherently has higher status than AmE or any other variety of English. This posture contradicts a seemingly different sociolinguistic reality: NSs’ and NNSs’ mixing of BrE and AmE.

By dismissing the singularity principle as inappropriate pedagogy in this global era, a mixed version of BrE and AmE can justly be considered as a basic key communicative strategy, particularly utilised in international settings (Modiano, 2009, p. 61). How ‘MAE’ usage manifests itself among EFL students and teachers in Germany and Switzerland will be the objective of this study.

Hence, it becomes apparent that empirical studies of the coexistence of BrE and AmE in EFL settings, viewed from a synchronic and descriptive sociolinguistic frame of reference, can reveal a great deal about the nature and degree of mixing among the EFL constituency. In seeking to identify the assumed role of English, several studies related to the ‘MAE’ paradigm were carried out prior to mine, notably in Sweden. The subsequent chapter will provide a brief critical selection of these, preceded by a short introduction, and finish with some concluding remarks.

2.5 Previous Studies

Introduction

The current position of English as a world language seems to be unassailable. According to Crystal, the world’s linguistic authority on the English language, English is the most widely taught foreign language in the world (2003a, p. 5). Fuelled by the strong Americanisation process worldwide since the end of World War Two, global English has come under the increasing influence of AmE. Hence, NSs’ but especially NNSs’ linguistic behaviour is inevitably affected by this variety. This also holds true for the EFL community.

The BrE variety, the most sought after as a sole educational standard, is now undergoing significant erosion as a result of its de facto coexistence with AmE. This sociolinguistic shift in usage of the English tongue typically results in mixed speech patterns of BrE and AmE and therefore challenges the concept of keeping the two main varieties apart in the EFL classroom (Modiano, 1996a, p. 5; 2009, p. 61). To date, teachers have been “quick to advise their students not to mix variations” of English, in particular BrE and AmE (Modiano, 1993, p. 38). This posture is no longer realistic as AmE is building up tremendous momentum, in such a way that it even encroaches upon EFL learners’ mother tongues and UK English.

Furthermore, the EFL constituency’s’ mixing of BrE and AmE features in the four language areas of lexis, pronunciation, lexico-grammar, and spelling appears to have truly become a natural state of affairs. Their English is increasingly becoming Americanised, emanating from influences such as American-based audio-visual forms of media, for instance television, the Internet, computer games, etc. From a pedagogic and sociolinguistic vantage point, this mixed use of the two strands of English is highly conducive to being employed as a conscious and an effective international communication strategy. In this way, speakers of ‘MAE’ are more optimally geared towards the cross-cultural interlocutor. This communicative strategy hence runs counter to misunderstandings or even communication breakdowns.

Following up on this, the idea of keeping BrE and AmE apart is sociolinguistically and pedagogically unrealistic in EFL education. For this reason, it is crucial to scrutinise the linguistic nature of difference and convergence of BrE and AmE with the help of corpus linguistics and large-scale questionnaire-based studies like the present study. To my knowledge, little empirical effort has hitherto been made to achieve a deeper understanding of the role of BrE and AmE in the German and Swiss EFL context. A serious research gap exists in this regard that urgently needs to be filled. Accordingly, the present quantitative empirical study seeks to monitor not only the informant constituency’s attitudes but also their actual linguistic behaviour with respect to the role of BrE and AmE in EFL teaching.

Several mainly quantitative studies on attitudes, awareness, and usage of the two main reference varieties among EFL students and teachers were carried out in Sweden as well as one in Germany. I selected four of them for this brief critical review. Similar to my own extensive quantitative questionnaire-based survey, notably Swedish scholars and B.A. and M.A. university students investigated the divergence and convergence of AmE and BrE, always coupled with the issue of educational standards and practices for EFL teaching and learning (Modiano, 2002, p. 10). 4Nonetheless, after careful perusal of a large number of research papers investigating the influence of AmE, it emerged that these surveys in the aforementioned countries were either rather small-scale or else limited in terms of the monitored language areas and variables.