Marginalized Knowledge: An Agenda for Indigenous Knowledge Development and Integration with Other Forms of Knowledge

Implications for Communicative Competence and English Language Teaching

Smith (1981:8) has argued that international English is “not owned by the native speaker” most of whom develop special skills in order to communicate internationally. Obviously, it is against this background that the Cox Report (1988) and Kingman Report (1988) both recommend that the integrity of a native speaker’s local dialect should be preserved, but also that he or she should also be able to communicate effectively with a wider speech community. By the same token, African speakers and learners of English in Africa, whether they are first language or second language speakers, should equally command both their local dialect(s) and the one that is closer to international English.

With regard to the recruitment of teachers of English, Quirk, (1989) warns that employment of language teachers who are ‘qualified through accident of birth’ has potentially adverse effects on language learners. A Director at one large EFL School in Europe, as quoted in Makoni, (1993:48) has observed the following about native speakers who get hired to teach English by virtue of their birth:

In recent years we have become all too aware that, with the exception of those with degrees in modern languages, many English graduates – in contrast to their Irish, Scots, North American antipodeans and non-native English peers – are unaware of the elementary points of grammar and have been known to correct students’ perfectly accurate English to fit their own ungrammatical English.

Considering that Southern Africa as a region is characterised by diverse multilingual and multicultural situations, it is to be expected that inter-socio-cultural and inter-linguistic transactions are the norm rather than an exception. The question that has to be posed is in what language or varieties? Many countries in Sub-Sahara Africa have opted, for different reasons, to adopt English as the major language of education and officialdom.

The driving force has been the parents who send their children to school with an explicit message that a good knowledge of English is a passport to a good job and a better life. Many opponents of this development argue that Africa has been betrayed by her own sons and daughters who after independence still retain the language of former masters at the risk of marginalizing their mother tongues.

This is a very controversial matter, but one has to point out that opting to use English does not necessarily mean that one has abdicated from one’s mother tongue or individual identity nor is it a lost opportunity for sophisticated and effective expression of terms which the mother tongue offers.

There are two positions that have attracted support from teachers of language for many years. The view that a teacher of language is essentially a teacher of culture, and that a language is a carrier of culture does lead one to conclude that it is impossible to isolate a language from its culture. Obviously, there is a need to disentangle the two separate issues:

1. 
   that a language is part of a people’s culture;
   
2. 
   that a teacher of language cannot escape transmitting the socio-cultural load of a language.
   

The first assertion seems to be accepted among socio-linguists and some teachers but there is reservation about the import of the statement.

Wilma Rivers (1964) makes the point:

If we teach language without teaching at the same time the culture in which it operates, we are teaching meaningless symbols to which the student attaches the wrong meaning.

This may be a valid point where it relates to the foreign language teaching. It may not necessarily hold strongly in a situation where the target language is a second language and a lingua franca.

The other view held is that a language can be taught and learnt as a social tool reflecting not the culture of its originators but that of the user even in transplanted environments. This view has led to learning material being prepared and developed to reflect the socio-cultural and linguistic realities of the learners of the English language in many parts of Africa. Many African writers, for example, Chinua Achebe (1975) have used the foreign language English to mirror and give expression to their culture and traditional societies. Indeed, English has become the possession of the many people who use it as a lingua franca. It needs to carry the culture of the people who have adopted it and when it is taught it would be absurd to expect it to carry a foreign culture. The question to be asked is ‘for what purposes is English used in Southern African contexts, and what degree of competence is the desired goal?’

Too often an impression is created that there is a general type of English which can be learnt. The justifications for this view would seem to be found in the pervasiveness of the written word. True enough, the rules of the written word are less flexible than those which govern the spoken word and there is greater an approximation to a common syntactical standard in written English than there is in spoken English. This point is valid for both English as an intra-language or inter-language means of communication.

Therefore, inter-group contact and communication through different varieties ought to be encouraged. The different socio-cultural and linguistic features that cut across different groupings and their corresponding connotations need to be understood and used in different situations. The argument then is for an individual’s democratic knowledge and use of features drawn from a broad linguistic and socio-culture repertoire. The imposition of a particular variety as the only standard is restrictive in the sense that it limits knowledge and communication to a narrow single variety. Halliday (1978) has pointed out that communication by multilingual is complex because of its diverse meaning potential.

Obviously, this is not to suggest that an individual’s knowledge and use of English from their respective backgrounds excludes them from learning and using the standard variety. The point is that, this form of English has been established and adopted for use in education and different worlds of officialdom. However, it has to be stressed that, in social contexts, the use of the strictly standard form often has condescending overtones and discriminatory connotations.