Torn between Prescription and Innovation

Abstract

This paper reports on the affordances of corpora in the context of a teaching model that aims to highlight and strengthen the relevance and applicability of (socio-)linguistic content knowledge of World Englishes for university-based teacher education and the ELT classroom. We use large electronic corpora as one resource for the student teachers to explore the spread and extent of use of innovative and variable linguistic structures in Englishes around the world, and to critically examine the fuzzy boundary between errors and variety-specific, innovative linguistic structures. To examine the potential impact that a specific teaching intervention on World Englishes and corpora may have on student teachers’ judgments of the intelligibility and formal correctness of several features of World Englishes, a rating task was administered to an experimental and a control group. Additionally, students of the experimental group were interviewed about their experiences with the corpus intervention and their opinions and attitudes toward the use of corpora for teaching English and, specifically, linguistic variation and innovations in English. The findings suggest that the teaching intervention seems to initiate an increased awareness of the variability of linguistic structures in World Englishes, and supports future teachers in questioning traditional prescriptive norms.