Applied Linguistics 2014: 35/1: 82–86 ß Oxford University Press 2013

doi:10.1093/applin/amt043 Advance Access published on 23 December 2013

FORUM

Nonnative Teachers in the Expanding

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/applij/article/35/1/82/310548 by University of Edinburgh user on 23 March 2023

Circle and the Ownership of English

ISAIAH WONHO YOO

Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Sogang University

Numerous scholars (e.g. Crystal 2003; Widdowson 2003) have argued that
English belongs to nonnative speakers because English is widely used as an
international language and because there are more nonnative speakers than
native speakers. Many nonnative teachers in the Expanding Circle accept this
argument, believing that having the ownership of English empowers them. This
forum piece, however, argues that the issue of English ownership is not as
relevant for them as it is for those living in the Outer Circle because there
may not exist a local variety of English in their respective country. Moreover,
claiming the ownership of English can bring about detrimental effects in their
classroom, especially when only ‘good English’ is accepted as ‘a powerful sym-
bolic resource’ (Park 2010: 193), as is the case in Korea. This article also argues
that the real source of nonnative teachers’ empowerment stems from their iden-
tity as the ideal teachers of English to English as a Foreign Language learners.

INTRODUCTION
In July 2010, the Korea Association of Teachers of English (KATE) held its
annual international conference in Seoul with the theme ‘Teaching and
Learning English as a Global Language: Challenges and Opportunities’.
Researchers and teachers from nine different countries came to Seoul and
presented their views on what it means to teach and learn English as a
global language. A high school teacher from Japan discussed the notion of
World Englishes to empower English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners,
while a Korean doctoral student presented on the identity of Asian English as a
Second Language (ESL) teachers, often regarded as inferior to their native
counterparts. Distinguished plenary speakers such as Canagarajah and
Pennycook emphasized the importance of recognizing the World Englishes
perspective and teaching English as a local language. Evidently, at the core
of all these presentations were the following two issues: nonnative teachers’
status or perceived identity and the ownership of English.
Widdowson (2003) maintains that ‘the very fact that English is an interna-
tional language means that no nation can have custody over it’ (p. 42). Making
a similar claim is Crystal (2003), who argues that ‘if there is one predictable
consequence of a language becoming a global language, it is that nobody owns
 FORUM 83

it any more’ and that ‘everyone who has learned it now owns it . . . and has the
right to use it in the way they want’ (pp. 2–3). Many nonnative teachers in the
Expanding Circle accept these arguments, believing that having the ownership
of English empowers them. However, they should realize that the issue of

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/applij/article/35/1/82/310548 by University of Edinburgh user on 23 March 2023

English ownership is not as relevant for them as it is for those living in the
Outer Circle. Indeed, there are distinctly separate issues more pressing and
relevant for each of the three concentric Circles in the World Englishes per-
spective: for the Inner Circle, what constitutes standard English; for the Outer
Circle, who owns English; and for the Expanding Circle, whether there exists a
local variety.

WORLD ENGLISHES AND THE OWNERSHIP OF ENGLISH

Mostly advocated by native educated speakers, a ‘standard’ US English may
only be ‘an abstraction’ (Lippi-Green 2012: 46) and cannot be confined to a
single variety as there are other national varieties spoken by less educated
speakers. This still important issue of standard English in the Inner Circle
becomes less relevant for those living in the Outer Circle, where the most
important issue for them is the ownership of English. Likewise, in the
Expanding Circle, English ownership becomes less relevant as it is unclear
whether there exists a recognizable local variety of English whose ownership
its constituents can rightfully claim.
Traditionally, the ownership of English was assigned to the Inner Circle—for
example, Britain and Canada. However, the legitimacy of the varieties of
English spoken in the Outer Circle—for example, India and Singapore—has
been firmly established since the introduction of Kachru’s (1990) model of
World Englishes. Consequently, the Inner Circle’s traditional claim on the
ownership of English has been challenged, and rightly so, by the Outer
Circle. One of the main arguments cited for taking away English ownership
from native speakers is the fact that more nonnative speakers use English—
especially in the Expanding Circle, for example, Korea and China—than native
speakers do (Crystal 2003). However, does it really follow from this fact that
nonnative speakers in the Expanding Circle can and should claim the owner-
ship of English? Not necessarily, for ownership and use are completely differ-
ent ways of relating to the English language.
To illustrate the fallacy of the argument that use determines ownership, I
will draw an analogy with something that is unmistakably mine but is used
more often by others: my name. It would sound strange if my mother claimed
that she owned my name because she used it much more frequently than I did
when I was little. There are, also, many other people who have used and will
use my name, but no one would claim to own my name. The ownership of my
name does not get transferred to others just because they use it more than I do.
By the same token, English is a language spoken by those living in the Inner
and the Outer Circles and consequently owned by them, not by those living in
the Expanding Circle. Speakers living in the Inner Circle own the varieties of
84 FORUM

English spoken in the Inner Circle; those living in the Outer Circle own the
varieties of English spoken in the Outer Circle. Speakers in the Expanding
Circle, however, cannot claim any ownership when there are no local varieties
spoken in the Expanding Circle.

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/applij/article/35/1/82/310548 by University of Edinburgh user on 23 March 2023

NO ENGLISH OWNERSHIP FOR THE EXPANDING CIRCLE
The right to claim English ownership is understandably an important issue for
those living in the Outer Circle, and they certainly are entitled to the owner-
ship of the varieties of English that they speak. People living in the Expanding
Circle, however, do not speak English on a daily basis, and there are no
separate local varieties of English for them. It is indeed true that someone
can be ‘a native-speaker of Indian English’ (Walker 2010: 4), but nobody
can be a native-speaker of Korean English, or Konglish, which is just broken
English used by Koreans without any consistent patterns distinct from other
varieties of English and thus ‘might rather be conceptualized as a sub-variety
of Korean’ (Lawrence 2012: 73). Until a sufficient number of Koreans use
English on a daily basis and distinct features emerge out of these daily inter-
actions—for example, omitting the articles altogether and treating all nouns as
uncountable—Konglish cannot be considered a local variety.
It is also true that ‘[o]n a daily basis millions of people from the Expanding
Circle successfully communicate with each other through English’ (Walker
2010: 4); to say that, however, ignores the fact that far more people in the
Expanding Circle have no need to communicate with each other through
English. Deterding (2006) asserts that Chinese English may one day ‘become
established with its own independent identity’ (p. 195). However, I would
argue that neither Chinese English nor Korean English will ever develop
into new varieties of Asian Englishes as neither Chinese nor Koreans will
ever use English intranationally. A local variety of language can develop
when the language is used intranationally; an increasing number of Koreans
and Chinese are indeed learning English, but it is not the case that an increas-
ing number of Koreans and Chinese are using English as a communication tool
between themselves. Instead, English often serves as a gatekeeping mechanism
to control access to higher social status in these countries.
In Korea, English is ‘a powerful symbolic resource mediating relations of
class, privilege, and legitimacy’, and it is used as ‘a basic criterion for hiring and
promotion in the white-collar job market’ (Park 2010: 193). One corollary of
this lionization of English as a symbolic resource is the general social atmos-
phere of stigmatizing those who use various forms of ‘incorrect’ English,
including Konglish (Park 2010: 201). Evidently, it would be difficult to imagine
how a local variety of English would emerge in a place where any form of
English different from ‘good English’ is labeled as ‘incorrect’. Unless English
stops being used as the gatekeeper to higher social status and starts being used
as a communication tool locally, it is naive to believe that a local variety may
 FORUM 85

one day ‘become established with its own independent identity’ in Korea or in
any other Asian Expanding Circle country.

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/applij/article/35/1/82/310548 by University of Edinburgh user on 23 March 2023

EMPOWERING NONNATIVE TEACHERS IN THE EXPANDING
CIRCLE
Why then would teachers in Korea want the ownership of English when there is
no local variety of English spoken in Korea? They believe that having the own-
ership of English empowers them because scholars argue that English should be
taught as an international language and that doing so will empower nonnative
teachers (e.g. Holliday 2005). When we nonnative teachers in Korea hear that
our English is just as good as any native speaker’s English, we understandably
feel empowered. We tell ourselves that it is the native speakers who should
learn our English. But what if our students use the same argument? What if
they argue that it is us the teachers who should learn the students’ English?
Claiming the ownership of English may help us feel empowered, but unex-
pected chaos could ensue in the classroom as conscientious teachers would
have no principled ways to determine what is acceptable English.
A more appropriate way to empower nonnative teachers starts with the
recognition of their advantages over native teachers. As Widdowson (2000)
aptly points out, there is a primordial difference between native and nonnative
speakers: ‘The reality of the language for people learning it . . . is a function of
its unfamiliarity, its foreignness, something that primary language users
cannot possibly experience’ (p. 26). Although native teachers can try to ex-
perience this unfamiliarity by learning another language, they will never be
able to experience the unfamiliarity of English and its foreignness that their
students are experiencing. Medgyes (2001) seems to argue for a similar pos-
ition when he asserts that one advantage of being nonnative teachers is that
they provide ‘a better learner model’ (p. 436). He then proceeds to argue
that ‘the ‘‘ideal teacher’’ is no longer a category reserved for native English-
speaking teachers’ (p. 440). I would argue, however, that the ‘ideal teacher’
never was a category reserved for native teachers. Would it not be strange to
argue that the ideal teachers have not experienced or cannot possibly experi-
ence the reality of something that they are trying to teach? The ‘ideal teacher’
thus seems a category reserved only for nonnative teachers as only nonnative
teachers can experience, or have already experienced, the reality of English for
people learning it: ‘a function of its unfamiliarity’.
Having argued for the position in theory of recognizing nonnative teachers
as the only ideal teachers, I would also submit that in practice, native teachers
and nonnative teachers should maintain a symbiotic relationship in which
native teachers respect nonnative teachers for having experienced the reality
of English for people learning it and nonnative teachers in turn respect native
teachers for having the ownership of the language.
86 FORUM

CONCLUSION
During his plenary speech at the KATE conference in Seoul, Pennycook (2010)
argued that ‘we need to teach English with a far greater sense of flexibility,

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/applij/article/35/1/82/310548 by University of Edinburgh user on 23 March 2023

seeing English as local, emergent, divergent and hybrid’ (p. 13). This view,
however, is relevant only to the extent that there is a recognizable local lan-
guage practice. When there is no local variety of English, ‘seeing English as
local’ becomes a moot point, and having the ownership of English can bring
about detrimental effects in the classroom, especially when only ‘good English’
is accepted as ‘a powerful symbolic resource’, as is the case in Korea. Nonnative
teachers in the Expanding Circle should thus resist the temptation of claiming
the ownership of English because there is nothing to gain from acquiring it.
Instead, we should rightfully claim the status of the only ideal teachers of
English to our students.
So, help us empower ourselves by giving us the respect that we deserve as
the ideal teachers of English to EFL learners, not the ownership of English,
which rightfully belongs to the speakers of English in the Inner and the Outer
Circles.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank the anonymous reviewer and Melissa Moyer for their invaluable comments and sugges-
tions, which helped to shape the arguments in this paper more clearly. This work was supported by
the Sogang University Research Grant of 2012 (201210064).

REFERENCES
Crystal, D. 2003. English as a Global Language,
2nd edn. Cambridge University Press.
Deterding, D. 2006. ‘The pronunciation of
English by speakers from China,’ English
World-Wide 27/2: 175–98.
Holliday, A. 2005. The Struggle to Teach English as
an International Language. Oxford University
Press.
Kachru, B. B. 1990. The Alchemy of English: The
Spread, Functions, and Models of Non-Native
Englishes. University of Illinois Press.
Lawrence, C. B. 2012. ‘The Korean English lin-
guistic landscape,’ World Englishes 31/1: 70–92.
Lippi-Green, R. 2012. English with an Accent:
Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the
United States, 2nd edn. Routledge.
Medgyes, P. 2001. ‘When the teacher is a non-
native speaker’ in M. Celce-Murcia (ed.):
Teaching English as a Second or Foreign
Language, 3rd edn. Heinle & Heinle,
pp. 429–42.
Park, J. S. 2010. ‘Images of ‘‘good English’’ in
the Korean conservative press,’ Pragmatics and
Society 1/2: 189–208.
Pennycook, A. 2010. ‘Teaching and learning
English as a local language,’ Proceedings of the
Korea Association of Teachers of English 2010
International Conference, 12–13
Walker, R. 2010. Teaching the Pronunciation of
English as a Lingua Franca. Oxford University
Press.
Widdowson, H. G. 2000. ‘Object of language
and the language subject: On the mediating
role of applied linguistics,’ Annual Review of
Applied Linguistics 20: 21–33.
Widdowson, H. G. 2003. Defining Issues in
English Language Teaching. Oxford University
Press.