8 - Beliefs about ‘Good English’ in Schools

Summary

This chapter seeks to evaluate how student users of English are viewed beyond the English-as-school-subject curriculum, both in and out of classrooms. In particular, it exposes some of the tangible effects of ontologies of English in the education context, with important implications for education policy. Despite extensive scholarly work in Applied Linguistics offering positive reconceptualisations of language use in a variety of approaches, such as World Englishes, English as a Lingua Franca, and translanguaging (e.g. Creese and Blackledge, 2010; Hornberger and Link, 2012; García and Wei, 2014; García and Kleyn, 2016), the notion of a ‘target’ for the learning and teaching of ‘good English’ for most monolingual mainstream teachers in the United Kingdom remains based on the norms of Standard English, or N-English (to adopt the categorisation terminology proposed by Hall, this volume). For more discussion on the nature of linguistic norms, see Harder (this volume). In this chapter, I show how the presentation of Standard English as the ideal, on the assumption that it is “the language we have in common” (DES, 1988, p. 14), alienates not just multilingual learners of English but also many school children who would regard themselves as first-language English speakers.