The Hydra Confronted: Addressing Unequal Englishes in English Language Classrooms

John Paul Obillos Dela Rosa, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois, U.S.A.

Who owns English? This is a question that I have been contemplating since the time I entered college and decided to specialize in English education. As an L2 English speaker, I thought that I should always speak in a certain way in order to be heard and appreciated. By a certain way, I mean speaking like how the Americans or the British would speak in English. My linguistic insecurities do not only manifest in speaking, more so in writing. I would always apologize to my English teachers for my writing style, which is different from the ones that I would read in popular English books and magazines. This significantly changed until such time that I learned about unequal Englishes—a term coined by Tupas (2015)—focusing on the unequal spread of nativized variants of English (Sugiharto, 2023). These Englishes include postcolonial varieties, such as Philippine English, Singaporean English, and Malaysian English, to name a few.

Although there is already an academic acknowledgment of the plurality and heterogeneity of English, advocates of World Englishes, emerging localized or indigenized varieties of English, still think that other Englishes are valued unequally (Kirkpatrick, 2021). These differing valuations towards English varieties could drastically affect the lives and identities of their speakers. For instance, in the study of Guinto (2023), Filipino migrant workers in Hong Kong would feel that they have lower English-speaking abilities and rights than native English speakers, causing them to be silent and aloof when they communicate with native speakers. In here, I refer to the Englishes spoken among outer and expanding circles of English (Kachru, 1992), and not those varieties that have gained valued status, such as American English and British English.

Schneider (2018) asserted that English should be viewed and understood not as a single monolithic entity but as a set of overlapping and distinct varieties with variables and outcomes that are context-dependent. However, Bunce et al. (2016) averred that the issue has already become more complex; the unequal perception (and treatment) of other English varieties has already turned into a hydra, a many-headed water monster in Greek mythology that seizes to ungrow no matter how often its heads are severed. Consequently, the notion of unequal Englishes has been pushed forward to shed light on how postcolonial Englishes are subjected to both delegitimization and disenfranchisement.

As language educators, the idea of unequal Englishes may also get in the way of creating a just and compensatory language education for our students. Thus, considering the varieties of English that students bring into our language classrooms would entail action-oriented efforts. Learning more about the issue of linguistic inequalities and how we could address them in our pedagogical practices may seem arduous, but always possible and meaningful.

The Unequal Englishes Page on Facebook

The Facebook page Unequal Englishes has given me perspectives on the issues concerning linguistic inequalities and discrimination. The page was created on March 8, 2017 and has a total of 1, 200 followers as of July 4, 2024. I turned to this page because it is a useful platform that features research studies, books, book chapters, news features, and conferences that are relevant to the discussions of the realities behind the global status of English today.

One insightful resource that widely opened my eyes towards unequal Englishes is Pennycook’s (2014) article on exploring the interactions among language resources, activities, and space in the Philippines. The author underscored the need to understand that the issue does not lie in the differences between Philippine English and American English but in how language resources are made accessible or inaccessible among speakers. Speakers who come from different ethnicities have unequal access to resources, which paints the reality that within the Philippine English variety itself, variations also exist. In our respective language classrooms, being mindful of the varieties of English that our students bring in would make us more responsive in combatting the ill effects of linguistic inequalities and discrimination.

The page also promotes conferences where educators could partake either as audience members or as presenters. I remember referring to the Unequal Englishes Facebook page when I had the chance to attend an international linguistics conference for the first time. It was the Free Linguistics Conference hosted by the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 2018. I was given the opportunity to share my research paper on the contrastive analysis of cover letters written in Philippine English and American English, respectively. I was able to present the distinctive features of both discourse communities by highlighting the job applicants’ politeness strategies. As language educators, our participation in professional development activities would allow us to expand our knowledge and understanding of global Englishes and to interact with other scholars who are also passionate about advancing the importance of accommodating the emerging varieties of English in various contexts, such as in English Language Teaching (ELT).

Aside from prospects about useful research articles and conferences on unequal Englishes, the Facebook page also shares posts about trends and issues concerning language teaching and learning. Most of the articles are freely accessible and downloadable. Greater access to various research articles is a way to revolutionize the dissemination of scientific knowledge and information. The Unequal Englishes Facebook page advances academic inclusivity and contributes to a wider reach for many useful resources that aim at addressing inequalities among the Englishes through research-driven solutions. This open accessibility in scientific knowledge transfer could therefore increase the credibility, equity, impact, and efficiency of research (Fleming et al., 2021).

Addressing Unequal Englishes in English Classrooms

The available resources on the Facebook page are a good starting point to gain insights about the disparities and inequalities among the different varieties of English. They also help raise awareness about classroom teaching practices that promote linguistic diversity and equality.

In classrooms where students assimilate to the more valued varieties of English, the learning experience becomes subtractive rather than additive. My enthusiasm and engagement with the notion of unequal Englishes made me realize the explicit and implicit existence of linguistic injustice in many language classrooms even up to this day. Following are some of the strategies that I apply to my own English classes to promote linguistic justice and deter the debilitating effects of viewing the varieties of English unequally.

Fostering Linguistic Justice through Our Course Materials

As a writing instructor, I continue to (re)think about how I would foster linguistic diversity using my course syllabus. In my class policies, I encourage my students to freely use the varieties of English that they are most comfortable with. Even with their written compositions, they are free to choose (and use) the English variety that best represents their writerly identities. Welcoming linguistic justice in our classes also entails cultivating effective negotiation of meaning with our students. As such, I often incorporate writing conferences, peer revision workshops, and reflective writing into our class activities, so that students would be able to articulate their rhetorical choices and decisions in relation to the varieties of English that they used in writing their projects.

Reconsidering the Place of Grammar in Assessing Students’ Writing

This strategy may be radical for many language teachers, but we really have to reconsider the place of grammar in English teaching. Stemming from the idea that no grammar may be considered right or wrong, I started excluding grammar as a criterion in grading my students’ writing projects. I really appreciate that our department spearheads professional development activities that guide us in integrating linguistic justice into our own teaching. Baker-Bell’s book published in 2020, Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, is one valuable resource that helped me rethink about grammar correction in writing instruction. I welcome students’ diverse voices in writing by allowing them to communicate their thoughts using the ‘grammar’ that has been enriched by their home literacies and other sociolinguistic factors. Giving them choices and not reducing their writings to one, single variety of English, is a way to serve linguistic justice. However, I must admit that it was difficult for students to challenge the idea of doing away with academic grammar, especially when it is already ingrained into their past writing practices. What I do is I provide them with samples of writings, both literary and research-based, where the authors utilize different varieties of English. For instance, I would refer my students to the vibrant writings of many Jamaican authors who proudly celebrate Jamaican Patois, a variety of English spoken in Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean. Lastly, I would also teach them the value of rhetorical context in writing. I emphasize the need to adjust their writings depending on the expectations of their audience and their rhetorical purpose.

Confronting One’s Language Ideologies

It is also crucial for us as language educators to examine how our own biases towards the different varieties of English affect the way we view our students as speakers of English and the pedagogical practices that we enact in our language classrooms. This is something that I personally went through being an L2 English speaker myself. The truth is, it is not possible to offer what one does not have. In my case, all the insecurities that I have towards the variety that I speak will not help me nurture linguistic justice in my classes. I had to accept that if people speak other varieties of English, that does not mean they are less of an English speaker. We need to go back to the idea of genuinely welcoming linguistic diversity, where students are not coerced to speak or write a certain way and forget about their own linguistic repertoire.

Surely, the curse of the hydra would not vanish in just a blink of an eye. Our goal is to hold that burning torch of positive change to constructively alter the current rhetoric surrounding unequal Englishes. We need to cauterize the inequalities and unfairness that have been sabotaging and destroying inclusivity in language education. Ultimately, I hope that this many-headed water monster does not reside in us.

References

Baker-Bell, A. (2020). Linguistic justice: Black language, literacy, identity, and pedagogy. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315147383

Bunce, P., Phillipson, R., Rapatahana, V., & Tupas, R. (Eds.). (2016). Why English?: Confronting the hydra. Multilingual Matters.

Fleming, J. I., Wilson, S. E., Hart, S. A., Therrien, W. J., & Cook, B. G. (2021). Open accessibility in education research: Enhancing the credibility, equity, impact, and efficiency of research. Educational Psychologist, 56(2), 110–121. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2021.1897593

Guinto, N. L. (2023). Lived experiences of unequal Englishes of Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong. International Journal for Research in Education, 47(2), 13–52. https://scholarworks.uaeu.ac.ae/ijre/vol47/iss2/2/

Kachru, B. B. (Ed.). (1992). The other tongue: English across cultures (2nd ed.). University of Illinois Press.

Kirkpatrick, A. (2021). The Routledge handbook of World Englishes (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003128755.

Pennycook, A. (2014). Principled polycentrism and resourceful speakers. The Journal of Asia TEFL, 11(4), 1–19.

Schneider, E. W. (2018). English and colonialism. In P. Seargeant, A. Hewings, & S. Pihlaja (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of English language studies (pp. 42–58). Routledge.

Sugiharto, S. (2023). From unequal Englishes to the praxis of decolonial fissure: Englishes in the Indonesian periphery. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 18(1), 33–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2023.2210098

Tupas, R. (Ed.) (2015). Unequal Englishes: The politics of English today. Palgrave Macmillan.

John Paul Obillos Dela Rosa is a PhD in English candidate, specializing in Rhetoric and Writing Studies, at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, U.S.A. His research interests include World Englishes, Critical Discourse Analysis, Rhetoric and Writing Studies, and English Language Teaching. John Paul is also interested in the teaching of Tagalog as a world language. He was a grantee of the Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant (FLTA) program and served as a Tagalog teaching assistant at Northern 
Illinois University in 2019 until 2020.