Reading Sample for critical reading and identifying the main point

Sample 1

Tomokazu Ishikawa: The world Englishes paradigm

One way to conceptualise the legitimacy of Asian people’s English is to understand how
English has been localised in some countries or regions. The paradigm of world Englishes
‘seeks to challenge the notion of a monolithic [standard] English emanating from the central
Anglo-institutions of global hegemony’ (e.g., Pennycook, 2007, p. 20). More specifically, ‘to
stress the diversity to be found in the language today, and to stress that English no longer has
one single base of authority, prestige and normativity’ (Mesthrie & Bhatt, 2008, p. 3), this
paradigm pluralises the word English. Having started with English in the outer circle, and
later included English in the inner and expanding circles as well (e.g., B.B. Kachru, Y.
Kachru, & Nelson, 2006/2009; Melchers & Shaw, 2011/2013), world Englishes studies
‘focus on the differences between and the local identities of the various regional/national
varieties of English’ (Wolf & Polzenhagen, 2009, p. 3). Accordingly, up until now, ‘the term
“world Englishes” (WE) has been widely used to refer to localised forms of English found
throughout the world, particularly in the Caribbean, parts of Africa, and many societies in
Asia’ (e.g., Bolton, 2013, p. 227). Regarding the definition of world Englishes, Platt, Weber,
and Lian’s (1984, pp. 2–3) following four criteria are useful even today (e.g., J. Jenkins,
2015a; Mesthrie & Bhatt, 2008).

(1) A world English has developed through the educational system, usually with various
degree of English-medium instruction.

(2) A world English has developed in an area where a native English variety was not
spoken by the majority.

(3) A world English is used for a range of functions among people in the area.

(4) A world English has become ‘localised’ or ‘nativised’ by developing some linguistic
features and rules of its own.

In short, world Englishes are educationally institutionalised, ‘non-native’, intra-community

specific and indigenised varieties, each having its own linguistic norms. At the same time,
two things can be made clear from geo-historical perspectives taken by the Kachruvian three-
circle model (e.g., B.B. Kachru, 1992). First, a community of world Englishes is mainly
associated with a postcolonial outer-circle nation but applicable to the inner circle as well,
given the earlier diasporas of English to Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and to North America,
Australia and New Zealand (see Y. Kachru & Smith, 2008, p. 5). Second, institutionalisation
normally encompasses not only education but also administration in general.

Ishikawa, Tomokazu (2016). “Wold Englishes and English as Lingua Franca: conceptualizing
the legitimising of Asian People’s English”, Asian Englishes. 18: 2, 129-40.

Sample 2

Jay Watson. Flannery O’Connor

Born March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia, Flannery O’Connor was an only child and a
cradle Catholic in one of the most Protestant areas of the United States, the Deep South. Her
father’s declining health forced O’Connor and her mother to move to the latter’s hometown
of Milledgeville, Georgia in 1938, where O’Connor began high school as a writer and
illustrator for the student newspaper. Three years later her father died, at the age of forty four,
of disseminated lupus, an incurable autoimmune disease. The following year O’Connor
entered Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville, majoring in sociology and
English, writing fiction and poetry for the college literary magazine, and contributing satirical
cartoons to the yearbook. Her vivid visual sense and gift for caricature would inform her
mature fiction, in striking depictions of rural and urban landscapes and deft, often devastating
physical portraits of her characters.

After graduating in 1945, she went on to study journalism at the University of Iowa but soon
joined the Writers’ Workshop, the first program in the country to offer the MFA degree in
creative writing. Guided by Workshop director Paul Engle and a series of mentors including
John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, and Austin Warren – some of the
founding figures in American New Criticism– she enjoyed almost instant success as a fiction
writer, publishing her first story in 1946 and placing work with Mademoiselle and Sewanee
Review the following year. After completing the MFA and relocating to New York, she
appeared to be well under way with a promising career when health problems forced her
home to Milledgeville late in 1950. The return would prove permanent: O’Connor was
suffering from lupus, and except for brief reading or lecture tours, occasional trips to visit
friends, and a two-week pilgrimage to Lourdes, France, in 1957, she would remain in
Milledgeville for the rest of her life, under the care of her mother at the family farm,
Andalusia. Blood transfusions and experimental drugs kept her illness under control for over
a dozen years, but early in 1964, an operation reactivated the lupus, and she succumbed to
complications from the disease on August 3. Her weakened condition undoubtedly limited
her literary output, but the fiction she did publish during her lifetime is of remarkable
originality, depth, and quality: two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away
(1960); two story collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955) and
Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965); and a handful of tales that remained
uncollected until 1971.

Critics have given O’Connor an unusual amount of authority to dictate the terms according
to which she is read. In occasional writings and her correspondence, she presented her artistic
vision first and foremost as an expression of her Catholic worldview. Boiled down to its
theological essentials, that vision rested on two elements. The first was a cosmological and
epistemological emphasis on mystery, a conviction that the workings of the universe were
ultimately unknowable, exceeding the limits of human perception and reason. The second
was a deep belief in the radical incompleteness and dependence of humanity, a condition of
ontological lack remediable only by and through otherness, an outside agency she identified
with God’s grace. That human beings characteristically disavow their vulnerability and
limitations, preferring to see themselves as self-actuating, coherent, and in control, was
merely another symptom of their brokenness and imperfection.

O’Connor’s protagonists invariably reject these twin articles of faith. Supremely confident in
their self-sufficiency, their place in the world, and their high opinion of themselves, they
fancy themselves in possession of all the answers and fundamental truths concerning their
lives. This spiritual arrogance takes one of two forms. Many of O’Connor’s most memorable
characters are self-styled intellectuals who are ultimately under-served by their intelligence
and education. As products of “the popular spirit” of the modern age, these characters labor
under the misguided assumption “that the mysteries of life will eventually fall before the
mind of man.”

The other large cohort of O’Connor protagonists consists of middle-class figures, usually
women, whose exaggerated sense of social self-importance leads them to equate human
legitimacy and worth with superficial aspects of ancestry, breeding, manners, and class status
and thus to look down with wilful obtuseness on everyone around them. Their confidence in
their ability to fix others in the South’s social hierarchies goes hand in hand with the pride of
place they so smugly assign themselves in that class structure.

Watson, Jay. Flannery O’Connor (2012) https://www.cambridge.org/core. pp207-219

Sample 3

Laura Wright. Introducting Vegan Studies.

There are many reasons why people choose to become vegan, and there are reasons why
others choose not to be—and there certainly socioeconomic and structural hindrances that
keep veganism from being a viable option for many others. Veganism continues to be a
largely white, upper-middle class identity; it is often depicted as an elitist endeavor, and it is
gendered as a female undertaking and, therefore, often dismissed as naively emotionally
motived—or characterized as disordered consumption.2 Despite the existence of the Vegan
Society, which was founded in England in 1944, vegans tend not to constitute a unified group
in possession of a cohesive ideological mandate; they tend not to be joiners, but they do have
“a propensity towards alternativism in other areas of life … and eschewing the use of all
animal products represents a change that necessarily involves all areas of life” (McDonald 2).
While veganism does not constitute a unified social movement, as an ideology, it is marked
by conscious individual actions that nonetheless stand in stark opposition to the consumer
mandate of capitalism, and for this reason, the actions of individual vegans pose a substantial
—if symbolic—threat to such a paradigm. Whether one is vegan for ethical reasons, for
health benefits, or because of religious mandates, adopting a vegan diet constitutes
environmental activism, whether or not the vegan intends such activism.

ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 24.4, Dec. 2017, Pages 727–
736, https://doi-org.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg/10.1093/isle/isx070