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Divergence and Convergence: The Ebb and Flow of English as an

International Language

Seyyed Bagher Mirshojaee

APA Citation format of the paper: Mirshojaee, S. B. (2011). Divergence and Convergence:

The Ebb and Flow of English as an International Language. In Chandalia, H. S. (Ed.),

Language and literature teaching: ELT across borders. (pp. 65-79). New Delhi: Creative

Books.

Abstract:

English as a globalized and nativized language should be seen and taught with a democratic approach. Both

aspects of English should be manifested in real teaching and testing practices. In the coming decade, one step

forward is having curriculum, syllabi, textbooks and materials which focus on both i.e. intra-national and

international sides of English language coin without any linguistic bias. Intra-national Englishes express the

collective selves of the communities using them; international English expresses the universal selves of the

citizens of the global village. The divergent and convergent forces in the spread of English go hand in hand to

promote linguistic democracy in English language teaching and testing. In this paper, we will deal with these two

complementary aspects of English(es) and some practical suggestions will be put forward regarding the

application of this democratic model in both English teaching and testing.

Key words: World Englishes, divergence, convergence, complementary model for English

Introduction

One of the oldest preoccupations of human being is having a common language understood

by all people. Today, global dominance of English, its acceptance and selection by

communities living almost all parts of the world show that mankind wants to meet his/her

universal linguistic needs by means of English. Not only does English work as a global

language, but also it functions as a nativized language in different countries of the world; lots

of people use English in their social interactions in national or international contexts without

being its native speaker. English has two courses of change in its spread: it moves away from

the commonalities to perform its local and intra-national functions and then it has to return

towards commonalities to satisfy each community's global and international needs. The

direction depends on the needs of the users of English. Bolton (2006: 291) points out to this

phenomenon of language change as Bakhtinian's distinction between "centrifugal" and

"centripetal" forces.

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To guard this property of human being and make it maintain its fruitfulness, both of its

divergence and convergence should be described by applied linguists, its global and local uses

should be taught and tested in pedagogical milieus. In this paper, firstly the reasons behind the

birth of different varieties of English i.e. World Englishes (WEs) will be dealt with, secondly

the global perspective in the use of English i.e. English as an international language (EIL) will

be explained, thirdly a model will be proposed to make peace between these two functions of

English in the second decade of the twenty-first century and finally real manifestations of

such a perspective in the pedagogical scenes will be put forward.

Models of the spread of English

Englishes spoken in different parts of the world move away "from the English of what

Chinua Achebe(1965: 29) called as 'its ancestral home', i.e. Britain and from each other"

regarding linguistic features like pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary/ idiom and discourse

style"(Jenkins, 2003:23).Whether we call them legitimate or illegitimate offspring of the

parent languages, they are in existence and they are going to lead their own lives, having their

own sociolinguistic, cultural, national, political and psycholinguistic functions.

Different models of the spread of English were proposed by different scholars (See

Jenkins, 2003: 15-21). Here I deal with three of the models proposed for the spread of

English.

Among them, Kachru's (1985) three circles model is the most cited one. He divides the

WEs into Inner Circle countries speaking English as their native language like the US and

UK, Outer Circle countries using English as their official or second language Like India and

Nigeria, and Expanding Circle countries employing English as a foreign language like Japan

and Iran. According to Rajadurai (2007: 75) this model "emphasizes pluralism, linguistic

diversity and inclusivity." But because this model considers the Inner Circle countries as the

source of correctness, it diverts from its main tenets promoting a form of language hegemony

and linguistic imperialism (Graddol, 1997: 10; Modiano 1999: 24; and Rajadurai, 2007: 75)

Another model proposed by Modiano (1999) is based on features of English common to

all varieties of English. At the centre is English as an International language (EIL) having

core features comprehensible to the majority of native and competent nonnative speakers of

English. The outer area includes new varieties of English with their own particular features

and incomprehensible to the members of other communities (Jenkins, 2003: 20). The problem

with this model is that it is difficult to distinguish between core and non-core varieties.

Another point is that in this model in the core based on Modiano there are native speakers and

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competent non-native speakers which indirectly says that all native speakers of English are

competent users of English which is untrue.

Schneider's (2003) dynamic model of the revolution of New Englishes has a diachronic

approach. Schneider (2003: 242) describes an evolutionary pattern in the formation of New

Englishes applicable to all varieties of English which is composed of five identifiable stages:

(1) foundation: English speakers settle in a previously non-English speaking territory and they

keep the language norms of home country. The indigenous population and the settlers have

restricted language contact; the two groups are separated.

(2) Exonormative Stabilization: The settlers view the language as outposts of their native

land while some new items are added to English. Schneider (2003:246) describes it under the

notion of "English plus": "genuinely British no doubt, but seasoned with the additional flavor

of the extraterritorial experience which those who stay home do not share." Elite bilingualism

is spread and English is a key to upward social mobility. Lexical borrowing is one linguistic

feature of this stage.

(3) Nativization: The political ties between colonizers and colonized are weakened. The

colonized gain political independence but they have cultural associations. Sociolinguistically,

widespread and regular contacts between the two can be seen. Sociolinguistic cleavage

between innovative and conservative speakers occurs and heavy lexical borrowing,

phonological innovations, structural nativization are among linguistic effects of nativization

stage.

(4) Endonormative stabilization: The colonized country is self-dependent and the member

of this society considers themselves as a new nation and think of their own territory. They

accept the local norm, have positive attitude towards it and create literary works in the new

variety. The new variety is stabilized, homogenized and codified (by dictionary writing).

(5) Differentiation: The country becomes a stable young nation which has its own internal

sociopolitical differentiation. They have a new national identity specific to their community.

Some social networks are constructed which have increasingly group interactions. New

dialects are born as well as have ethnic, social and regional varieties. (Mukherjee, 2007: 161-

3)

In light of this model we can see the divergence of English to completely metamorphosed

English diachronically. In light of Schmit's model, we can find the roots of divergence but

what this paper is going to say is that English has another course of change which is towards

commonalities because of its international function in the globalization age.

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In the following sections different reasons behind divergence and convergence of the

Englishes will be discussed.

Divergence in the Spread of English

WEs move away from their parent languages and from one another for lots of reasons. The

nativization of English ( Kachru, 1992) enabled English to adapt itself to new contexts and to

take on localized identities. These Englishes move towards achieving their own

individualities. Different origins can be considered for the birth of these varieties. They are

historical, educational, cultural and linguistic origins.

Historical origins: There are two historical reasons for the birth of the varieties of English.

One is settlement and the other is colonization. Mesthri and Bhatt (2008: 15) defined these

historical origins in the following way:

The former resulted in what are sometimes called ‘transplanted varieties’ of English in the

United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and islands like St. Helena and the

Falklands. Colonies of exploitation frequently started off as trading outposts with small numbers

of traders who did not have the intention of long-term settlement, as in parts of Africa and Asia.

In such situations ‘fort pidgins’ frequently arose. These colonies were typically appropriated in

the second half of the nineteenth century and expanded into exploitation colonies. It was in

these colonies that the prototypical ‘English as second language’ emerged.

According to Mesthri and Bhatt (2008) within the United Kingdom internal colonization

over Wales, Scotland and (for a second time) Ireland, and then industrialization and

immigration of English speakers caused the spread of English. In inner circle countries first

there was colonization and then its English was changed into an inner circle English with its

own norms of speaking. The first American colonies who settled in America were mostly

English speakers from various parts of Britain. After the United States' gaining independence,

American tried to standardize their version of English and it changed into the first major

variety outside the British Isles. The same story is true in the case of other inner circle

varieties like Australian English, New Zealand English and South African English.

According to Trudgill (2004: 13) these Englishes arose "as a result of dialect contact,

dialect mixture and new dialect formation.

The period of the colonization of some of them like India takes two centuries. After

declaring their independence and living in the postcolonial era, they preserve English and its

use in the community which caused to the birth of new varieties of WEs. National culture and

identity were reflected in the use of this nativised variety having its own phonological, lexical,

syntactic, pragmatic and discourse features. The result was divergence of English.

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Educational origin: It is not irrelevant to the historical origin of divergence in the spread of

English. Kachru (1983:19-21) identifies three stages in which English was introduced in

India: (a) a missionary phase that began around 1614; (b) a phase of ‘local demand’ from

leaders; and (c) the educational phase that began with formal colonization in 1765.

In every colonized society the first generation was taught English by native speakers of

English directly, so native norms and standards were the criteria for success in English

learning. Native speakers were the perfect model of language proficiency.

These trainees became the teachers of the second generation. Since they were non-native

speakers of English, their speech or language use directly or indirectly was influenced by their

mother tongue. The new generation moved farther from native speaker norms. As a result,

their speech went away from the native speaker pronunciation norms and these diversions

happened in the case of other aspects of language including vocabularies, grammar, pragmatic

appropriateness and discourse.

Cultural origin: In the majority of the outer circle countries, people accept English as a

second language but they adapt it based on their own cultural features and values. They are

not to make a copy of American or British culture or to be under linguistic imperialism

(Phillipson, 1992) but to introduce, strengthen and update their own cultures. Literature

provides an environment in which cultures are presented in English (e.g., Tawake, 2006; and

Bhatia, 2006).They do not do this unless they nativize, localize and decolonize their own

English.

Linguistic origin: Two factors are at work regarding the linguistic forces behind the

divergence in the spread of English. One is the plentiful chances of exposure non-native

speakers have to use English. If a group of people is increasingly exposed to English and

under some circumstances they have to use it, they add some new elements to English by

transferring some features from their mother tongue, come up with new linguistic innovations

typical of their own variety, and set their own seal on English.

The second linguistic factor is the linguistic milieu of the host country. In some

countries like India, there are a lot of languages used by different groups of people from

different geographical origins. In such a situation a lingua franca is needed to help

communication. People decided to choose English to play the role of the lingua franca. There

are some other sociolinguistic forces in operation according to Mesthri and Bhatt (2008: 19):

"Whether speakers come up with a pidgin, EFL, ESL or ENL depends on factors

such as the following: (a) the relative number of speakers of the different

languages, including the TL; (b) the social relations between them; (c) the

duration of the contact; and (d) educational opportunities in the TL."

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Convergence of the English Varieties

Due to so many reasons different varieties of WEs are in a dialogue with one another to

have mutual intelligibility, and/or follow the norms of a common parent language not to cause

miscommunication in international gatherings. "The need for intelligibility in international

communication has already motivated the learning of English as an international

language"(Yano, 2001:125) and several attempts have been made "to provide a common

standard for mutual intelligibility in international interactions." Seidlhofer's (2001, 2004)

Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) focuses on the collection and

analysis of speech samples to determine the characteristics of English as an international

language (cited in Acar, 2007) and ELFA (English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings,

Mauranen, 2003)

If varieties continue going towards their individualities in an unrestrained manner, the fatal

fruit is mutual unintelligibility. The convergent forces are enriched by some cultural and

scientific motives as follow: globalization, cultural globalization, international commerce, and

technological needs.

Globalization: Globalization refers to "the worldwide diffusion of practices, expansion of

relations across continents, organization of social life on a global scale, and growth of a

shared global consciousness ( Lechner, 2005). In today's world, human being whether wants it

or not, is involved in the globalization process. In this global village, people's visions, lives,

identities and characters are different from their national, local and cultural ones. It shows

human beings reach maturity in the new millennium so that they can break the linguistic,

geographical and national borders and arrive at a higher place having universal eyes and

mind. In such a position their "universal selves" should be satisfied, developed and flourished.

It goes without saying that the universal self wants its own devices; the most important one is

its language.

Cultural globalization: In accordance with enhanced mobility and the rise of various

cultural networks in all domains of life, people assume multiple and flexible identities instead

of one uniformed national character. As a result, there exists “an intellectual and aesthetic

stance of openness toward divergent cultural experiences, a search for contrasts rather than

uniformity” (Hannerz, 1990: 239).Cultural globalisation is evident in the spread of the

English language around the world and in the films and TV programs that are sometimes seen

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by millions of people in different countries at the same time. As the spread of English

progresses, English is bound to reflect a diversity of distinct cultures.

Global commerce: Nowadays, nations are dependant on one another economically in both

importing and exporting goods. The increasing globalization of the marketplace is forcing

companies to pay more attention to international developments. In an international

environment they have to select a common language to remove communication troubles.

Graddol (1997: 32) clarifies six possible concerns which might relate to the English

communication needs and communication patterns in globalized economic development:

1) A local concern: Basically joint venture establishments account for local matters, and

they tend to use a common language, English, in communication. This situation may create

the need for local communities to learn English.

2) Legal documents: Because international legal agreements are written in English based

on an international consensus about the meaning of terms, obligations and rights, this may

create a requirement for specialist English language training for lawyers.

3) International business involvement: A joint venture ownership company is likely to be

involved in international trade importing raw materials and exporting finished goods. This

will create a need for office workers, sales and marketing staff with skills in English.

4) Technology transfer: Principally most transfer is sourced by a TNC some of whose

members are either English speaking or use English for external trade, which is strongly

associated with English. Technology transfer is not only limited to the joint company business

itself but may also be related to linked infrastructure growth such as airports, railways and

telecommunications.

5) Supporting services: Supporting services such as hotels and tourist facilities may be

required for international visitors. The staff of minor enterprises may also require training in

English for these visitors.

6) A new job order: Jobs in joint venture companies may be better paid and more attractive

than those in the public sector of a developing country. English qualifications may become an

entry necessity, or have perceived value in access to jobs.

Now some studies which show the importance of English from commercial viewpoint are

reviewed in this section.

Kam and Wong (2004) assessing the economic and political circumstances of East Asian

countries, emphasize that to be successfully relocated into the large-scale worldwide business

system, strong economic rudiments, including a commitment to education and learning as

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well as advanced levels in English language proficiency amongst the workforce, have become

the key issues in steering individual nations in this highly competitive globalized atmosphere.

In South Asia, Gargesh (2006: 90) comments that English does not only act as a shared

language between people of different regions with different mother-tongue backgrounds, but

also as the common language among the South Asian countries. English is currently

acknowledged as a national and international language which represents the modernization

and progress of individual countries.

In China, according to Wylie (2006), a prominent national policy has been issued and put

in place which does not allow a student to graduate from a Chinese university without passing

the National Basic English Exam. Thus the estimated number of Chinese children who are

studying English would far outweigh the entire population of the British Isles.

According to Kachru. Y and Smith (2009: 2) in East Asia, e.g., China, Japan, and Korea,

the motivation has been economic – the need for the expansion of international trade requires

the populations to become more proficient in English which is the language of international

business, commerce and finance. To cite as an example, changes happened to the language

policy of some countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Mongolia. "When the Malaysian

government recently decided that Malaysia’s economic future as a regional centre was in

decline and that better English language proficiency on the part of school leavers was needed,

they decided to switch to using English for the teaching of math and science, starting from

primary school (Richards, 2009)."

Technological needs: Today information is transmitted and received at increasing speed.

The competitive demands of governments, industries, and corporations, both national and

multinational, for technological progress requires an understanding of the language of that

technology—English. In less than 20 years, information processing, once limited to the

printed word, has given way to computers and the Internet. Computer-mediated

communication is closing the gap between spoken and written English. On 7th March in 2005

Newsweek reports that "technology plays a huge role in English's global triumph. Eighty

percent of the electronically stored information in the world is in English; 66 percent of the

world's scientists read in it, according to the British Council."

Modern communications technology continues to spread at every level – locally, regionally

and globally – with greater diffusion of information transmitted with greater intensity and

velocity. As a result, the geographically local might appear less familiar, more alienating than

images projected via satellite from across the globe. The local thus often becomes

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defamiliarized and the global familiarized, blurring the boundaries between what is local and

global, leading to what Robertson (1995) terms ‘glocalization’.

Democratic Complementary Model

For convergence in the WEs, there are some models. The first model returns to the parent

or native speaker varieties. There are enough reasons to support such a model.

The U.S and U.K are powerful countries economically, technologically, scientifically and

politically. The developing countries are in search of meeting their economical, scientific and

technological needs. To do so, they need a common language through which they achieve

what they want. According to Kachru (1985), native speakers are norm providers for the

Outer and Expanding circles. Based on this model, when it comes to the intra-national needs,

every variety has its own say and when needs arise; native speaker varieties serve the

international functions of English.

In this model, there are some contacts between native speaker varieties and nativized

varieties; native speaker varieties affect non-native speaker varieties' norms and their teaching

and testing. The term Macdonaldism was used to convey this message (Jenkins: 2006).

The second model that I propose here focuses on a type of linguistic democracy in the

production and manifestation of a common international language in which each variety plays

an active role with respect to its social, cultural, political, linguistic and national functions. All

varieties have the right to vote for such a norm. It is termed under the title of pluricentralism

(Jenkins: 2006). Such a democratic model is complementary because it considers both

international and intranational functions, description, and needs of English.

We should not be ignorant of the fact that native speaker varieties have one share, too. It

leads into linguistic pluralism preserving all voices and having linguistic, cultural, ideological

polyphonies. Relying on the commonalities for the sake of mutual intelligibility seems to be

logical regarding the economy of sociolinguistic realities of language.

However the challenges of power come to the fore. All should step forward to have one

common standard. As the speakers of the WEs should avoid going to extremes using their

variety in an international milieu, native speakers move in the direction of offshore English

(Richards, 2009) which is an English lacking idioms, complicated grammatical points, and

complex lexical items. Richards warned native speakers that they need to develop the ability

to use a type of English that makes use of high frequency vocabulary that avoids

colloquialisms, vague language, and obscure syntax which is like Basic English. According to

a recent report about meetings held in European Union in the Economist, native-English-

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speakers are hard for colleagues to understand because they talk too fast and use unclear

idioms. (Richards, 2009).

English Language Teaching

In traditional Second Language Acquisition native speaker norms were considered as the

standards for all learners of English from outer circle countries or expanding circle countries.

Such a perspective is not accepted (Cook, 1999; Davies, 1991; McKay, 2003; Rampton,

1990). According to Jenkins (2006) "native speaker accents are not only socio-linguistically

inappropriate for communication in which native speakers are not involved, but also psycho-

linguistically and socio-psychologically unachievable for the majority of adolescents and

adult learners." It will cause learners to get disappointed and quit learning English. Strictly

focusing on native speaker's norms or the production of native or native-like speakers is

psycho-linguistically impossible and pedagogically idealistic and unattainable.

Nature is full of balanced paradoxes. Gathering two conflicting forces together naturally

causes balance in the phenomenon affected by such forces. Applying the complementary

model of English language teaching that balances divergent and convergent forces of the

spread of English in pedagogical scenes is another possible paradox. In my opinion, the nature

of the symbiosis of convergent and divergent forces should be manifested in the process of

teaching. Human being can not be manacled just to his/her own soil, culture, nationality,

values, ideologies, languages and collective selves, but s/he has global concerns, culture,

identity, values, belongings and language, too.

It is not far from reality to say that in the coming decade of twenty-first century,

researchers move in both directions of the changes in English language and in the future

students will strive to have both of these wings to fly in the future national and international

skies. On the one hand the teachers have an intra-national perspective and teach the use of

language to meet intra-national functions; on the other hand they have a universal viewpoint

and prepare the citizens of the global village to understand other cultures and to tolerate other

citizens of the village.

To be communicatively competent in today's borderless world, a language learner should

be familiar with both intra-national and international ways of speaking and must be able to

switch , when needed, from private voice to a public voice (Kramsch, 1999) and should have

" local appropriation" and "global appropriacy" (Alptekin,2002: 63).

Pakir (1999) named English as the "glocal" language serving both local and global needs.

Rajadurai dealt with this point while studying two faces of English in Malaysia:

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When engaging in global interaction, English points us outwards as a language of wider

communication, but when used within the community, it points us inwards into our very being, our

sense of individual and social identity. These two faces of English establish a tension that learners and

users must come to terms with. As for educators, they must grapple with the uses of English for global

communication, without losing sight of how it is embedded in local contexts. (Rajadurai, 2007: 83)

It goes without saying that such an educational system needs curricula, plans, syllabi,

contents, dictionaries, course books and norms which are considerate of both of these two

poles in the spread of English.

Now the global society is to decide, that is, every nation with its own English variety plays

a part in the process of writing an international English dictionary. It owns one part of the

world as its own property, so it is true in the case of the world language. If a word is supposed

to be added to the English dictionary, all varieties have the same chance. If a person makes

effort to learn English in one part of the world, the same amount of effort is needed for other

people living in the other parts of the globe. "In the past the onus of understanding native

varieties was on the non–native speakers. Now, the onus of understanding non-native varieties

is on native speakers (Patil, 2009)."

In teacher training such a movement should be more accentuated. Unfortunately in the past

the gap between theory and practice in the issue of WEs was great; lack of success relates to

teacher education program's lack of concern about this issue. Would-be teachers getting their

BA or MA degrees pass no courses related to WEs.

Using the model, we can deem both local culture and global cultures. It causes to maintain

a balance between these cultures and not to go to extremes in any direction. Mackay

(2003:10) cited from Gortazzi and Jin (1999:204-5) who suggest three types of cultural

information language textbooks and materials can use: Source culture materials that draw on

the learners' own culture as content, target culture materials that use the culture of a country in

which native language is used, and international target culture materials that use a wide

variety of cultures in English and non-English speaking countries around the world.

Integrative motivation to learn a foreign language is not the case nowadays and it lost its

meaning because all the world is the owner of English and it doesn't have "a real meaning" in

the age of globalization. Ushioda and Do¨rnyei (2009:4) pointed out that Lamb's (2004) self-

report data from junior high school students in Indonesia showed that "their motivation to

learn English may partly be shaped by the pursuit of a bicultural identity, that is, a global or

world citizen identity on the one hand, and a sense of local or national identity as an

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Indonesian on the other". They may thus search for to ‘a vision of an English-speaking

globally-involved but nationally responsible’ (Lamb, 2004: 16).

"The notion of Global English is less and less associated with any specific L2 community

and is linked increasingly to a cosmopolitan community" ( Do¨rnyei, Zoltan., Csizér, Kata., &

Németh, Nora (2006)).Consequently the empire of native speaker variety came to an end;

now the world celebrates the democracy of Englishes belonging to all of their users.

Kumaravadivelu (2008:46) asserts that few language programs “develop a global cultural

consciousness in the learner”. “True global cultural consciousness will be perpetuated by

culturally informed and progressive teaching practices, suggesting that teachers take the

initiative to incorporate a more ground-up approach that is relevant to the local community”

(Canagarajah, 2005 : xxvii).

It seems that in coming decade outer circle countries find louder voices regarding

administering justice in the construction of English as an International language; English

books will have different contents and colors containing corpuses of the words of people who

use English all over the world. Such corpus-based course books make the citizens of the globe

believe that English is actually their own property to the extent that it is not as is the case with

other phenomena like the earth, the sky, soil and other shared properties.

English Language Testing

If we want to consider one part of language pedagogy as its Achilles heel looking from

WEs viewpoint, that point will be language testing. Whether we like it or not, all the

pedagogical processes are evaluated by testing. If we want to shift from the concept of native

speaker proficiency, we must first present a definition for EIL proficiency. This involves the

cooperation of researchers across the world.

Each variety of WEs has its own norm. Based on their norms, their proficiency can be

defined operationally. But the problem gets worse when it comes to testing English from a

global perspective since we don't know whose norms should be used.( Davies, A, Hamp-

Lyons, L and Kemp, C, 2003)

Lowenberg (1993:95) showed that " in language testing an implicit (and frequently

explicit) assumption has long been that the criteria for measuring proficiency in English

around the world should be candidate's use of particular features of English which are used

and accepted as norms by highly educated native speakers of English."

So the problem with TOEFL and IELTS and even TOEIC tests is that they have native

speaker bias and their objectives are to evaluate the language proficiency of a person who

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wants to attend a native speaking situation. Other nations take shelter in TOEFL and IELTS

because they lack such powerfully constructed and globally administered and supported tests.

Behind these tests, linguistic and cultural imperialism (Philipson,1992) and interested

knowledge (Pennycook,2001), and western cultural spread along with pedagogy

prescriptivism(Kachru, 1985:21 cited from Acar, 2007) lie.

Most of the time the most dangerous part is what we are sure of it. The scenario of norm

wars was written (Davis, A. et .al.) and it is going to be played in coming decades and a call

for researchers was yelled. Language testing has such a future in applied linguistics. This

phenomenon, which has an acceptable appearance and is supported by the prophets of

language testing and statistics, has shaky legs regarding its validity.

Brown ( 2004:318) listed Englishes that may have some influences on English language tests :

1. the English(es) of the test takers’ local community,

2. the dominant English of the test taker (which may not be the same as the local

community),

3. the English(es) of the test content,

4. the English(es) of the test proctors,

5. the English(es) of the test scorers/raters,

6. the English(es) of the decision target community,

7. the English(es) of the decision target purpose,

8. the English(es) of the decision makers

With regard to WE paradigm, we should take an action as soon as possible and think about

the most appropriate tests which take into account linguistic, ethnic, cultural, ideological,

social, and political considerations.

The complementary model considers both local norms and global norms as standards when

needed. In such a standard all varieties have the same chance of appropriateness and being

problematic. It is a democratic norm specification in which all members of English varieties

have the same challenge and common concern for the same cause i.e. intelligibility.

Solving language testing problems involves solving problems of communicative

competence, syllabus designing, language teaching, and teacher education. Davidson (2006:

714) stated that "empirical work in language testing and world Englishes scholarship is

essential."

Conclusion

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Pluricetrality of English in the world is proposed in the WE paradigm; every variety has its

own say in such a perspective. Nations of the world, while using their own variety which is

rooted in their collective selves, should have a careful look at the world with which they have

interactions in the global village and the language used in such circumstances to solve the

problems of the terrestrial planet.

Critical issues have gained ground in applied linguistics; new varieties of English can be

considered the shouts of pleading for justice from the speakers of theses varieties to take the

same advantage out of the global language that Inner Circle varieties have.

One big challenge in coming decade is how to put the complementary model into practice.

I hope those who are concerned about ELT across the globe start doing something for our

common concern, that is, to decolonize English. It is originally a call for democracy. In the

coming decade the progeny of the parent languages show their own identities and

characteristics and they also give birth to newer varieties.

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