Competence. will be linguistically invalid to impose such patterns on Kachru’s ‘Outer

will be linguistically invalid to impose such patterns on Kachru’s ‘Outer

Circle’ countries (e.g. India), where English is used as a second language

by millions of English-speaking bilinguals, let alone their transfer to

‘Expanding Circle’ countries (e.g. Turkey), where English is not even a

second language.

Who then is the ‘real’ native speaker-listener typifying accurate and

proper language use, if not another abstraction, or an idealization?

Paikeday (1985), in his book entitled The Native Speaker is Dead!,

shows native speakership as a linguistic myth, and argues that its true

meaning is no more nor less than a proficient user of a language.

Rajagopalan (1999), noting the growing critique of the native speaker

concept in ELT circles, calls the construct ‘at best a convenient myth the

linguists have got used to working with, and at worst the visible tip of an

insidious ideological iceberg’ (p. 203). In the same vein, Kramsch

questions the notion of native speakership by birth or education or

membership in a native speaker community, and posits a conceptual

framework where the competence of the bilingual nonnative speaker

who operates at the border between the two languages is taken as a

pedagogic model. This involves ‘adaptability to choose which forms of

accuracy and which forms of appropriateness are called for in which

social context of use’ (1995: 10). Yet many stereotypes are still being

perpetuated in the ELT materials of Britain and the United States due to

communicatively-oriented considerations of use taking precedence over

those of usage. Only by producing instructional materials that

emphasize diversity both within and across cultures can one perhaps

avoid presenting English meanings in fragmented and trivialized ways,

where communicative functions are conceived as simple speech acts

realized through specific structures, and where situational content

generally portrays an idealized image of the English-speaking culture. It

is perhaps time to rid the ELT field of its educational vision and practices

based on a utopian notion of communicative competence involving

idealized native speaker norms in both language and culture.

Nevertheless, this will be difficult to achieve, as ‘[g]enerations of applied

linguistic mythmaking in the indubitable superiority and the

impregnable infallibility of the “native speaker” has created stereotypes

that die hard’ (Nayar 1994: 4).

Communicative competence, with its standardized native speaker norms,

fails to reflect the lingua franca status of English: Social and economic

globalization has necessitated the use of an international means of

communication in the world. English has become the language of

international communication. It was estimated as early as 1985 that the

number of people who used English worldwide either as their native or

nonnative language was one and a half billion. English is likely to

remain the basic international medium of communication well into the

twenty-first century, and within a short period of time the number of

people who speak English as a nonnative language may well exceed

the number of its native speakers. Even now English is the world’s

primary vehicle for storing and transmitting information. An estimated

75% of the world’s mail is in English, 80% of computer data is in

Cem Alptekin

English, and 85% of all information stored or abstracted is in English

(Thomas 1996).

Given the lingua franca status of English, it is clear that much of the

world needs and uses English for instrumental reasons such as

professional contacts, academic studies, and commercial pursuits. In

this context, much communication in English involves (and will

increasingly involve) nonnative speaker–nonnative speaker interactions.

How relevant, then, are the conventions of British politeness or

American informality to the Japanese and Turks, say, when doing

business in English? How relevant are such culturally-laden discourse

samples as British railway timetables or American newspaper

advertisements to industrial engineers from Romania and Egypt

conducting technical research in English? How relevant is the

importance of Anglo-American eye contact, or the socially acceptable

distance for conversation as properties of meaningful communication to

Finnish and Italian academicians exchanging ideas in a professional

meeting? Such samples point to the need for a radical rethink in terms of

a modified and expanded definition of the traditional notion of

communicative competence.

Constraining view of Communicative competence, with its standardized native speaker norms,

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