the english language and its teachers: thoughts past present, and future

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The English language and itsteachers: thoughts past present,and futureJohn SwalesThis paper derives from a talk given last year in London at the IATEFL SilverJubilee Seminar. John Swales was among a group of experts invited toconsider developments in ELT over the last twenty-five years and predictwhat might be the issues of the next twe nty-five years. His talk focused onthe topic of the English language and its teachers, and ranged across anumber of key issues: English as a world language, non-native users ofEnglish, aspects of language change, developing areas of language study,and the career concerns of the ELT profession.

Introduction Twenty-five years ago at the founding of IATEFL I was, I recollect,considering my future. I seemed to be coming to the end of a short-terminvolvement in ELT. For five years I had been a vagrant in Europe andaround the Mediterranean, supported by various accumulations of small-time ESL jobs. My parents were muttering increasingly fiercely about'settling down' or 'something safe in the City'. But instead, I decided toget some post-graduate training. It was certainly never my expectationthat I would finish up with 'something safe in the American Midwest'.Today I get to speak about the English language and its ELT teachers overthe last quarter century and, with my colleagues, I get invited to offer afew thoughts of what the next twenty-five years might bring. We are heretoday for a celebratory event, or as my new friends in Rhetoric wouldprefer me to say, an epideictic one, there being in their view little that hashappened in our understanding of communicative events since Aristotlesaid it almost all.

English as a world The dual call for both celebration and reflection does, however, presentlanguage the speaker with the problem of aligning two rather different narratives.There is indeed a story about the irrepressible march of the Englishlanguage across the face of the earth; of its happy union with the powerfulnew technologies for disseminating information; of the growth ofregional and functional varieties of the language; of the personal andfunctional value of being able to communicate in English. Here, forexample, is a short passage, written in 1985, by perhaps the last of thegreat classic lexicographers of the English language, Robert Burchfield:English has also become a lingua franca to the point that any literate,educated person on the face of the globe is in a very real sensedeprived if he does not know English. Poverty, famine and diseaseare instantly recognized as the cru de st and least excusable forms of

ELT Journal Volume 4714 October 1993 Oxford University Press 1993 283

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Non-native usersof English

Example 1

Example 2

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deprivation. Linguistic deprivation is a less easily noticed condition,but one nevertheless of great significance.It is this kind of belief that impels many governments, corporations,institutions, and educational systems to invest heavily in improving theEnglish skills of their citizens, employees, and students. Per Angliam adastral And so the next chapters of this narrative speak eloquently of the equalmarch across the face of the earth of the purveyors of the English language:its publishers, its networks of language schools, its textbook authors, itsteachers and teacher trainers. The story too includes, as well it should, the riseof the major professional organizations, IATEFL and TESOL, the latterhaving grown from 375 members in 1966 to about 20,000 today.The narrative so far has had a triumphalist air about it, a celebration ofascendancy. If we then wish to celebrate the fact that English, forwhatever reason, has established itself as the world's internationallanguage par excellence, then there is perhaps a small price, but one wellworth paying, for this putative victory. We have to concede the obviouspoint that true internationalism favors no nation nor gives any permanentcredit for the length of membership in a global association. Therefore, wehave to concede that it no longer makes any sense to differentiate betweenthe native speaker and the non-native speaker. As many have argued, suchas Braj Kachru and Edwin Thumboo, this is a sensible, sensitive, andpolitically necessary loss of privilege.Nowhere, as many have pointed out, is this non-native appropriation ofEnglish more surprising than among the Japanese, who use English as aform of play and display, and English phrases as quasi-randomly selectedicons of sophistication. My first personal inklings of this occurred aboutten years ago when we offered our first summer course for Japanese atAston University. The group leader gave me a key-ring with this messageon it: 'Love chance in a blue sky'an enigma to this day!Professor Thumboo has spoken today of non-native speaker uses ofEnglish as a means of cultural salvation. I would like to offer two otherbrief illustrations of what the non-native speaker can do with thelanguage. The first is known to me as 'The famous Arthur Miller Comp'.We have on the wall of the Testing Office in the English LanguageInstitute a faded transcript of a composition written as part of theMichigan English Language Assessment Battery. It was produced as athirty-minute impromptu writing task by a non-native speaker of Englishapplying for university admission. According to our records, thecomposition was written in 1983 by a Chinese-language candidate takingthe test in Toronto. The topic chosen by the candidate was 'If you couldspend an afternoon with a living person, whom would you choose andwhy?' The composition rece ived a five on a ten-point scale, a score a fulltwo points below that usually required by university admissions officers.Here is the famous 'Arthur Miller' composition:

If I were the lucky person who could spend an afternoon with ArthurMiller, that would be a great moment in my life. He, Arthur Miller, isJohn Swales

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the author of the great drama 'Death of a Salesman'; I like this bookvery much, and so as the writer himself.First, I would ask him about his ideas on modern tragedies. Since hehas stated that tragedies can have happy endings, and tragediesshould entertain more hopes, therefore, I should clarify about thosepoints. Moreover, there must be difference between old-age tragedyand modern tragedy; this question has been confused me for a longtime. It's good to be with Arthur Miller.Nex t, I believe Arthur Miller is a person with humour. Being with afriend like him, nothing could stop our conversations. Discussingabout whether the world is round or not, or discussing how manywords of humour can be added to his drama; nearly everything canbe our topic. It's good to be with Arthur Miller.Then, we could have a snack at a donut shop. With a cup of coffee,we could taste it precisely and give commands about it. We start tofussy about everything: the a ir conditioning is not cool enough, thesets are not in proper place etc. Although nobody would listen towhat we complain, who care? I t's still good to be with Arthur Miller.Finally, we don 't think time has a limit. An afternoon is easily spentwith Arthur Miller, though!

While the passage has obvious English language flaws, it is myexperience that practically everybody who reads the composition is struckby it in some way. Some find appeal in its idiot-savant quality, in itsjuxtaposition of the bizarre and the banal. Others comment on the sense ofclosure achieved by its satisfying structurea sense, of course, hard toachieve under severe time pressure. But most people additionally makesome reference to the passage's sustained rhythmic cadence. Andcertainly, the repeated refrain at the end of paragraphs two and three ('It'sgood to be with Arthur Miller'), the minor variation to close thepenultimate paragraph ('It's still good to be with A rthur M iller'), plus thelimited retention of 'w ith A rthur Miller' in the final line, creates the kindof reverberative effect that we normally might associate with, say, theclassic Border Ballad.I do not know if literature is possible under the circumstances of theMichigan Test, particularly by an author with limited English proficiency.But if art is possible, then the 'Arthur Miller Comp' would appear to haveachieved it. Although of course the system can only award it a failing grade.

Example 3 My third celebration of non-native speaker English is very different. It isthe writing of Joyce (not her real name), a Taiwanese who attended mydissertation writing class a couple of years ago. Joyce got a PhD inEnglish Literature in four years at the University of Michigan, pretty closetorecordpace . Joyce chose as her dissertation topic 'Sexuality, desire, andcross-dressing in three Shakespearean comedies'. Not at first sight anexpected topic for a young Taiwanese literature scholar. However, asmight be expected, Shakespeare's plays endure as the most canonicalbody of texts in Taiwanese English departments. So by opting for thesetexts Joyce can, on the one hand, assure herself of a place in the centralThe English language a nd its teachers 285

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hierarchy, and , on the other, adopt a feminist critique as a direct challengeto conventional literary criticism. Here are just two sentences fromJoy ce 's dissertation. They show a post-modemist reflecting on the natureof textual matters:If to read these three plays either as elaborate patriarchal devices forcontainment or as a straightforward celebration of femaletransgression is to erase the conflicts and complexities of theideological effects of cross-dressing, then I suggest it would bebetter to adopt the rhetoric of both/and in place of the rhetoric ofeither/or. In order to disclose both the complicitous and contestatoryaspects of the plays, this double gesture will aim at keeping alive thedynamics of containment and subversion, both preserving thepossibility of criticizing the plays' essential ideology andforegrounding the destabilization of gender identity already at work.

Buried within these two substantial sentences is a subtle conjunction oftwo unusual adjectives. Complicitous and contestatory indeed. Thispairing has come, for me, to capture magically one of the essentialcharacteristics of academic work. For aren't we all 'complicitous' insome of our disciplinary value systems, methods of analysis, modes ofspeaking and writing? And yet aren't we all 'contestatory' in others?Further, aren't the attitudes of the rest of the world to the ascendancy ofEnglish themselves both 'complicitous' and yet 'contestatory'.

The rise and fall On that ascendancy there is doubtless much to say. Those of us who haveof English investigated the place of English in Science, or Agriculture, or M edicinefind many large claims about its overwhelming predominance to beexaggerated, since they are based on biased and pre-selected data. Thelate Peter Strevens could persuasively pile up the evidence for continuedexpansion, while Richard Bailey (1992) can produce evidence of anopposing trend. Bailey can point to low rates of population increase incountries where English is strong, and high birth rates in countries whereEnglish is weak. And in some countries with high birth rates and a strongEnglish tradition, evidence of decline is patent as, for example, it is in thePhilippines. Moreover, in the last decade we have w itnessed a collapse in

the model of economic development that laid stress on 'missing humancap ital' in developing countries. 'Invest in training and use English to doit' now seems a partial and fragile answer to Africa's many problems.Meanwhile John Maher (1986) has convincingly argued that languagesrise and fall according to the amount of new information they contain.And so he traces the linguistic history of medical advance: Sanskrit,Chinese, Greek, Arabic, Latin, German, and now English. This ispresumably not the end of the line, even though I have heard it argued thatEnglish is now so global that today 's situation differs in kind not in degreeto those pertaining to earlier periods, and hence the place of English isunassa ilable. Unassailable by breakdown in the international order? By aclimatic disaster? Even by temporary global computer crash? I think not.English looks close to its apogee.

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Twenty-five yearsof languagechangeGenerification

Return toeuphemism

Stigmatization ofsexist language

Uses of speech andwriting

Apart from growth, the last twenty-five years have also seen remarkblechanges within the English language, only a few of which I have time tofleetingly mention. For one thing, we have seen not so much the greeningof English but its generification. Over the last few decades theexpectations and specifications for many communicative events have,respectively, sharpened and solidified. Verbal behavior becomesincreasingly a matter of protocolsbe it handling complaints,commenting on teaching, acting as interviewer or as interviewee, writingjob applications, or environmental impact statements. Wherever we lookguidelines, and training for those guidelines, proliferate. Even as I speak,a fierce debate has broken out in the United States as to the proper form,ethos, and arrangement of one of the last bastions of freedom, the so-called scholarly essay! Generification leads, of course, to jargon,acronyms, code signals, inner circles, specialized discourse communitiesand the likea trend that has both its supporters and detractors.Another trend, especially in the United States, has been the return of theeuphemism, otherwise known as 'Doublespeak'. So, semi-parodically,the 'short and fat' are now supposed to be described as the 'vertically andhorizontally challenged'. And we see, in these hard economic times, aplethora of expressions to euphemise losing a job: the old terms like'fired' or 'dismissed ' went long ago to 'laid off', which now is beingreplaced by 'pink-slipped', 'repositioned', 'separated from the payroll',or with that most Crocodilian of phrasal verbs, just plain 'let go'.A more dramatic and important phenomenon has been the stigmatizationof sexist language. At the beginning of IATEFL that distinguishedpioneer in ourfield,John Bright, could observe 'In English grammar, manembraces woman'. No longer. Although the road to reform for somebodylike myself brought up under the John Bright assumption has been long,hard, and full of falls from grace, I consider the near-achievement ofgender neutrality in language to be the most remarkable and the mostsatisfying development in the use of English in my working lifetime.Although I regret, of course, that this change has not been accompaniedby comparable equity in promotion, opportunity, or pay, or by full genderequalization in our ELT teaching materials.There is space for one final observation on changes in the Englishlanguage: the recent phenomenon of further blurring between the formsand uses of speech and writing. This results partly from the rapidexpansion of such means of communication as electronic mail, and partlyfrom a host of forces that sees reading and writing as in some waydialogic, and so recognizes the mirroring of those ghastly question-and-answer sequences as attention-getting devices. Doubtless you are familiarwith this phenomenon from your junk-mail:

Haven't you always dreamed of a holiday in Hawaii?And haven't you always said that you could never afford one?Well, now you can!And what do you have to do to go on the dream holiday of a lifetime?All you have to do is . . .

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Twenty-five years Although the English language continues to evolve and diversify in waysof language study that most of us find interesting and exciting, these developments palesomewhat when compared to the changes in the last twenty-five years inour efforts to understand our language.Discourse analysis

Contrastive rhetoric

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In 1992, it is hard to realize that twenty-five years ago discourse analysishardly existed. Now it has become the cuckoo in the nest of languageanalysis. It is being used for increasingly d iverse purposes: to rewrite therules of gramm ar, to unpack the information structures of text, to expandthe envelope of pragmatics and contract that of semantics, to betterunderstand social interaction, to increase cross-cultural and cross-genderunderstanding, to protect the underclass, to validate performance tests,and to improve teaching m aterials. Not all of these equally successfully,perhaps especially the last. But there are lots of Brave New Worlds outthere. One of these has been contrastive rhetoric, itself with a twenty-five-year-old history as Bob Kaplan's original article was also published in1967. A few comments, mostly sly, on contrastive rhetoric will serve meas a bridge as I go on to say something about the status and prospects ofteachers of ELT.Contrastive rhetoric is a nicely prejudicial expression. Like its probableprogenitor, contrastive analysis, the label predicts a search for difference,for culture shock, for confusion and trouble at border crossings. It also, ofcourse, provides an attractive professional interest for those who wouldseek a wider analytic horizon than sentence management; and who wouldsubsequently claim to offer insights of valuable application to translation,to language teaching, and to cross-cultural training.The field now offers an eclectic body of work dealing (mostly) withacademic text in a number of languages. For all their differences though,these studies have at least one thing in common: the other language isalways contrasted with English, typically Academic English. Of course,Academic English is neither a simple nor a singular phenomenon, for weknow that it is marked by divergence in terms of field, genre, period, andschool. Such variation itself presents no threat to contrastive rhetoricoronly does so in terms of the generalizability of claimssince variationcan be controlled by using the same 'kinds of texts' in the two languagesbeing contrasted.There is another factor though, a 'spanner in the work s', which itself maybe of variable significance, again according to different fields, genres,periods, and schools. This factor is the national provenance of theanglophone product, most neatly observable in terms of any possibledifferences between the rhetoric of American and British academic text.Even in our own unpretentious field differences are detectable (seeSwales, 1993 for illustrations). Many Americans in ESL and AppliedLinguistics confess to admiring British academic writing, especially forits stylistic effects, but to admire does not necessarily entail any wish toimitate. Equally, many British academics admire the transparentstructure, that felt sense of knowing where they are, of American w riting.John Swales

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The E nglishlanguage teacher

Career structure

Salaries

However, yet again, that does not mean that they want to committhemselves to a heavy weight of direct metadiscourse.I no longer think it sensible to merely conclude with some kind of 'vive ladifference' exhortation. Rather, I see some kind of affectionateexasperation between two major traditions of ESL investigation,development, and scholarship; an exasperation that needs tempering bybetter mutual understanding as we go into the next twenty-five years ofIATEFL and TESOL.And so, via this excursion into cross-cultural patterns of how we writeabout ELT, we reach the ELT teacher. If the English language hasextended its range, use, and distribution during the last quarter century,and become in the process rather unnervingly more of an attribute ofpowerful elites and less of a window into the world for the disadvantaged,then this growth seems modest in comparison to the growth in the numberof ELT teachers. Over this time period, we have moved in consequencefrom under-supply to over-supply, and many long-serving professionals,including personal friends and acquaintances, have been squeezed in thisprocess.A year ago I returned after thirty years to Bari in Southern Italy, where Ihad my first teaching post as a lettore at the university. At that time I wasthe only occupant of such a position; today there are more than twenty-five lettori and lettrici. As far as I could discover, working conditions,standard of living, marginal status, sought-out opportunities for secondand third jobs, were almost exactly the same for them in 1992 as they hadbeen for me in 1962. So I worry for them.If there is one area where we have seen little growth, it is in seniorpositions. The number of established, regular, and adequately-rewardedjobs has lagged far behind growth in teaching, in qualifications, andmaterials. In the US the number of adults enrolling in ESL classes hasrisen 50 per cent over the last four years to an estimate of one and a quartermillion. However, I suspect that the number of tenure-trackprofessorships and authorized administrative positions has actuallydeclined during this same period. The part-timer, the adjunct, the visitinglecturer, are the open positions of today.A recent TESOL survey showed that the average annual US salary for anESL professional was US$30,000 a year: US$34,000 for men;US$27,000 for women, who as usual constitute the majority of thelanguage teaching workforce. These figures are also certainly inflated,given that the 11 per cent of the TESOL membership who responded arelikely to be drawn disproportionately from the upper ranks. US$30,000may represent a decent living wage in the smaller towns and citites of theMidwest, but clearly does not do so in the higher-cost East and Westcoasts where much of the employment is concentrated. There isabsolutely no doubt that in the US, university ESL lecturers earn less thanhigh school teachers of French, Spanish, orGerman. Interestingly, it is ourThe English language and its teachers 289

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Professionalization

Teacher preparation

non-native speaking colleagues in EFL contexts who are oftencomparatively, if not absolutely, better off; for in their case the authoritiescannot avoid recognizing the extra effort involved in learning English as asecond language in the first place.Perhaps the greatest growth of all, however, has occurred in textbooks,teachers' books, journals, papers, conferences, associations, diplomas,certificates, and degrees. The panoply of professionalization. In 1966, in myown field of English for Specific Purposes, the international output ofrelevant and interesting papers was two or three a year, now it is two or threea week. I do not think we old hands sufficiently appreciate the difficulties ofthose entering the field as they try to sort their way through libraries andbookshops of our stuff. Although there are welcome signs that we are givingmore attention to preserving and projecting the story of ESL/ELT for thebenefit of incoming generations, there is more that needs to be done.Finally, there is the issue of ELT teacher preparation and qualification. Ihave little doubt that in many parts of the world Diploma and Master'slevel teacher training courses in ELT are models of what can and shouldbe done. But I do have an observation to make on the twelve-month MAand its attractive alternativemodularization across the calendar year.Twelve months ago, I attended the biennial conference of the BritishAssociation of Lecturers in English for Academic Purposes inSoutham pton. Many old friends there are as much involved in putting onspecial courses and in teacher-training modules as they are with theirtraditional EAP work. As an ex-member of this group and a transatlanticvisitor, I was struck by how exhausting the lives of my ex-colleagues hadbecome. Throughout the year, it seemed, no sooner were they saying'goo dbye' to one group then they were saying 'he llo' to another. I worryabout that too.

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Conclusion So, to conclude, we have seen in the last twenty-five years an amazinggrowth in ELT as an intellectual, educational, and commercial activity.We have seen great improvements in the preparation of teachers, bothnative and non-native speakers of the language. Our research base and ourinsight into teaching and learning processes have grown exponentially,there have been many landmarks of achievement: my personal listincludes David Wilkins' notional syllabuses, Henry Widdowson'sdichotomies, Christine Nuttall's text-attack skills, Chris Candlin'sunequal encounters, Michael C anale and M errill Sw ain's comm unicativecompetencies, Peter Strevens' seaspeak, and John Sinclair's COBUILD.We have matured as an educational activity. We have not, however,matured into a recognizable and recognized profession. We have itspanoply, as indeed this seminar iterates, but not its substance. Indeed, thatpanoply operates as a palliative, covering up (understandably enough)weaknesses in career structure, and terms and conditions of employment.As Robert Kaplan trenchantly commented in a recent EFL Gazette: 'Ifwe 're that wonderful, how com e w e're not paid better?' Neither quite aJohn Swales

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caring profession nor a cared-for one. Of course, the truly exceptional willoften thrive, but I think in many other occupations the averagely above-average performers are more likely to find more satisfactory and stablecareers than they do in ours.So, to finish, I only have a few questions for the next twenty-five years.Questions, and tentative answers.1 Will the long-term trend for the use of English around the globe be upor down? Probably level; possibly down.2 Will we remain a group of peopleat least as far as native speakers areconcernedlargely composed of white females? Very probably yes.3 Will the supply of able and qualified teachers and the availability ofacceptable jobs even out? No, it will get worse; infiveyears lecturers inthe US as well as assistant professors will be expected to holddoctorates.4 What are the likely relationships between the private and publicsectors? Don't know, but the differences between them are likely toshrink further.5 Are there hopes for a more interdisciplinary relationship betweenlinguistics and language teaching? Not until Chomsky stops assertingthat all questions concerning that relationship are 'trivial' and'uninteresting'.6 Will ELT remain attractive to young people? Yes, exceptionally so as ashort-term para-career.7 Will ELT be able to fully professionalize? See previous answer.8 Have the last twenty-five years in ELT been personally satisfying toyou? Beyond my wildest hopes.Received August 1992

Selected references Thumboo, E. 1992. 'Language and Literature.'Bailey, R. 1992. Images of English: A cultural history Paper given at the IATEFL Silver Jubilee Sem inar,of the language. Ann Arbor: University of London.Michigan Press.Burchfield, R. 1986. The English Language. Oxford:Oxford University Press.Kaplan, R. 1967. 'Contrastive Rhetoric and theTeaching of Composition.' TESOL Quarterly 1:10-16.Kaplan, R. 1972. The Anatomy of Rhetoric: The authorPrologomena to a functional theory of rhetoric. John M. Swales is Professor of Linguistics andPhiladelphia: Center for Curriculum Developm ent. Director of the English Language Institute, TheKachru, B. B. 1986. The Alchemy of English: the University of Michigan, and has taught at thespread, functions, and models of non-native universities of Ban, Libya, Leeds, Khartoum, andEnglishes. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Aston. His most recent book is Genre AnalysisMaher, J. 1986. 'The development of English as an (Cambridge University Press, 1990) and he has beeninternational language of medicine.' Applied co-editor ofthe English for Specific Purposes JournalLinguistics 7/2. since 1985. With Christine Feak, he is currentlySwales, J. 1993. 'Language and success: lessons to preparing for publication Academic Writing forand from the United States' in Blue, G. (ed.). Graduate Students: Essential Tasks and SkillsLanguage and Success. London: Macmillan. (University of Michigan Press, 1994).

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