Making World English: Literature, Late Empire, and English Language Teaching, 1919-39

Description

Uncovering the role of literature, late imperialism, and the rise of new models of internationalism as integral to the invention of Global English, this book focuses on three key figures from the "Vocabulary Control Movement" - C.K. Ogden, Harold Palmer, and Michael West - who competed for market share for their respective language teaching systems - Basic English, the Palmer Method, and the New Method - through battles over word lists and teaching methods in the 1920s and 30s. Drawing on archives from the Carnegie Corporation and considering language teaching in eight global sites, this book analyzes how a series of conferences in New York and London resolved their conflicts and produced a consolidated, international standard form of English. As a postcolonial approach to the development of the field of English Language Teaching, it reveals how these language debates were proxy battles over an idealized global subject: an urban, secular, consumer moving seamlessly between the tribal and global, speaking both mother tongues and an international lingua franca, Global English. Featuring analysis of the primary texts of each of the three key figures in this book as well as close readings of their readers, which featured adaptations of well-known literary texts from writers like Poe, Dickens, Wordsworth, Milton and Wells, it recovers a neglected history of English as it was redefined as an international language through anti-colonial resistance in the peripheries and transatlantic power struggles in the metropole during the interwar period.

Michael G. Malouf is an Associate Professor of English at George Mason University, USA. His book, Transatlantic Solidarities: Irish Nationalism and Caribbean Poetics, was published in 2009.

Making World English is a bracing study of the deliberate manner in which English became a world language. Michael Malouf goes far beyond critique to reveal the historical debates and policy moves that contributed to Anglophone dominance. With exemplary care and precision, he uncovers the hierarchies embedded in standardized English, tracing them back to the Basic English debates in the interwar years. Malouf challenges Global English as a natural development from the language's cultural capital by locating its hegemony in the aftereffects of empire. This important book is essential reading for students and scholars of modern linguistics, literary history, and British modernism. * Gauri Viswanathan, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA and author of 'Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India' *