Norms and varieties of English and TESOL teacher agency

Abstract

The growing recognition of the plurality of English underling the World Englishes (WE) paradigm has problematised the conventional second language acquisition (SLA) views of errors. If English use in emerging English-speaking contexts is to be judged by local norms, as argued by WE scholars, applying exocentric norms in these contexts can be inappropriate. On the other hand, despite the significant growth of WE, varieties of new Englishes have yet to develop widely acceptable endocentric norms. These developments have raised a critical question: How can TESOL teachers distinguish between errors in the SLA sense and varietal features in the WE sense? Framed around language management theory (LMT) and teacher agency, this paper investigates how a group of global TESOL practitioners in an Australian university evaluated usages of English as a second language, what criteria they used and what implications their judgments and decision-making processes have for TESOL pedagogy and WE research.