1998 Widdowson Context, Community, And Authentic Language

8/6/2019 1998 Widdowson Context, Community, And Authentic Language

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Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL)

Context, Community, and Authentic LanguageAuthor(s): H. G. WiddowsonSource: TESOL Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), pp. 705-716Published by: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages, Inc. (TESOL)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3588001 .

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THEFORUMThe TESOL Quarterlynvites commentary on current trends or practices in theTESOL profession. It also welcomes responses or rebuttals to any articles or remarkspublished here in The Forum or elsewhere in the Quarterly.

Context,Community, nd AuthenticLanguage*H. G. WIDDOWSONUniversity f ViennaUniversity f London* The TESOL community, like any other, needs the stimulus of innova-tion to keep it going. Although we as TESOL professionals say that weshould not make changes for their own sake, we do make them for thesake of demonstrating that we are still dynamic, and for this purposeeven the appearance of change will do. And this is why old ideas keepcoming back with the veneer of novelty. But we do not want changes tobe too disruptive either. It is preferable for our sense of security that theyshould be easily assimilated, and one way of managing this is to reduceideas to simple terms that sound good: comprehensiblenput, naturallearning, authentic language, real English. These become a kind ofcatchphrase currency whose value is taken for granted without furtherenquiry. And thus we become slogan prone. There is one slogan inparticular that I would like to question. It is often used as a handyshorthand for what communicative language teaching stands for. Theslogan is focus on meaningratherthan onform.A critical look at this sloganreveals a fundamental conceptual confusion, and a consideration of thatconfusion leads to issues about context, community, and authenticlanguage that I believe lie at the heart of language pedagogy.

*This contribution is a slightly revised version of a talk given at the 32nd Annual TESOLConvention, Seattle, WA, March 1998.

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THE STRUCTURALIST APPROACHTESOL professionals are repeatedly told that what distinguishes thecommunicative approach from the outmoded structuralist one is that itfocuses on meaning rather than form. This seems to be taken as a

self-evident truth. But it is not true at all when one looks at the actualevidence. The structuralist approach did focus on meaning, and itstypical techniques were designed expressly for that purpose.

1. Book. This is a book.The word bookmeans this object, This is a bookas opposed to That is abook.This is a word that means here, close to me, proximal. Thatis a wordthat means there, away from me, distal.

2. The door is there.The word themeans something we all know about.

3. I am walkingto the door./She is walkingto the door.This form of the verb means continuous and concurrent action. And soon. Focus on meaning.But what kind of meaning is this? In this teaching procedure teachersdevise a context of some kind and then fit the language into it so that itsmeaning is made plain. So the context is specially designed to demon-strate the meaning in the language. This can be done by situationalpresentation in the classroom or in a textbook, where the context isprovided by a picture, perhaps of a sitting room, with pictures on thewall, a carpet on the floor, and a cat, perhaps, on the mat. There arepeople in the sitting room: A man is sitting in a chair, reading a book; awoman is standing by a table, holding a bag. This is the context. Theaccompanying text reads something like this:

4. This is a man. He isJohn Brown;he is Mr.Brown.He is sittingin a chair.This is a woman. She is MaryBrown;she is Mrs.Brown. She is standing bya table. Mr.Brownhas a book. The book is in his hand;he has a book inhis hand. Mrs. Brownhas a bag....But is this really meaningful language? It is certainly not very realistic.

And it is not realistic because it is redundant. We do not need it. It keepson telling readers what they can already see for themselves. "This is aman." Yes, we can see that. "He is sitting in a chair." So he is. So what?"This is a woman." Really! The text for the most part simply duplicatesthe context. And, of course, the text has to duplicate, it has to make thelanguage correspond exactly with the context in order to demonstrate its

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meaning. But this demonstration by duplication results in language thatis unrealistic by normal standards of use. For in normal circumstancesspeakers use language only to complement the context, to provideinformation that is not already apparent. They do not usually go aroundstating the obvious. The same point applies to situational demonstrationin the classroom.

5. I am walkingto the door.It is unlikely that I would ever say this when I am actually doing it.Speakers do not normally provide such a running (or walking) commen-tary on their actions. So, if I were entertaining guests at home, and I wereto get up from the table and head for the door, I would not duplicate theinformation that is contextually provided by saying, "Iam walking to thedoor." I would complement the context by saying something that is notobvious from my action: "That was the phone, back in a minute." "I'lljustcheck the potatoes." "I think we need another bottle."Notice too that if I were to utter the obvious, "I am walking to thedoor," my guests would assume that I did not just mean what I said butwas implying something else, and they would look for some othersignificance by exploring the context for clues. They would not beinterested in what the language means but by what I mean by it (e.g., "Hemeans he wants us to stop him"; "he means he is going to call the police";"he means he's not as drunk as we think he is").The point, then, is that the structural approach did focus on meaningbut on meaning in form, informed meaning, one might say. That is tosay, the focus was on semantic meaning, that which is encoded as generalconcepts and principles in the language itself. The problem is that thedemonstration of this semantic meaning, real enough in its own terms,necessarily results in unrealistic uses of language. In other words, what issemantically meaningful is at the same time pragmatically meaningless.For to be pragmatically effective speakers have to use language not sothat it duplicates the context but so that it complements it.

LOCATITZEDLANGUAGESpeakers use language in the normal business of communication toengage in social action, to enact a discourse in speech or writing. The

pragmatic meaning they achieve realises that discourse and is, of itsnature, linguistically inexplicit because it is context dependent. Peoplecommunicate by using language so that it makes an appropriate connec-tion with the context of shared perception and knowledge. And in sodoing they proceed on a least-effort principle. They pay only as muchattention to the language as is necessary to make this connection and noTHE FORUM 707


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more. Now contexts are constructed out of the local knowledge ofparticular communities. So when people use language appropriately, in anormal pragmatic way, they localise it, they key it into what is familiar inthe communities they belong to. Things are left unsaid because they areassumed to be common knowledge in the community, and the language,which, as we have seen, is complementary to context, is used only tocompensate for what the context does not provide. Thus communicationis bound up with community. An example will make this plain.A scene that, for some reason, figured quite prominently in structur-ally oriented textbooks was the family breakfast. Mr. and Mrs. Brown arethere, with their son David and daughter Sarah.And what one notices at once is that they are talking a lot and alwaysin complete and well-formed sentences.

6. Sarah:Mr. Brown:Sarah:Mrs. Brown:David:Sarah:Mrs. Brown:Mr. Brown:David:Mr.Brown:

Good morning Father,Good morning Mother.Sarah, do you want someof this porridge?No, thankyou, I'll have some toast.David, here s a cup of tea for you.Thanks.Wouldyou pass methe marmalade,Father,please.The telephone is ringing.David,couldyouanswer t please,I am making the toast.Who was on the telephone?It was UncleArthur.What ime s he coming round to fetch us in his car to go tothe theatre this evening?

This is all very formal-in both senses of that term. And, of course,nobody actually talks like this. If eavesdroppers were to listen in on a realfamily breakfast, they would not hear this kind of language. Indeed, if myown experience of breakfasts is anything to go by, listeners would nothear much language at all. They would hear inarticulate grunts andyawns and occasional elliptical fragments of utterance. They would hearnot this exchange of well-formed sentences but probably only those partsthat are italicised; that is to say, something more like this:

7. Wantsome of this?No, I'll ....Here ....Thanks ....Passme ....Could you ...?Uncle Arthur.What time this evening?

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This piecemeal use of language is entirely appropriate on this occa-sion. This is much more like real English. The expressions are linguisti-cally incomplete (there is not a single sentence to be heard), but theymake communicative sense because they are completed by the contextthat is shared by this particular community. It is shared in part becausethe community members are all together in the same physical setting. Sonobody has to say that the telephone is ringing because everybody hearsit, and Mrs. Brown does not have to say, "Could you answer the telephone[which everyone hears ringing] because as you see I am busy makingtoast for breakfast?" "Could you .. .?"will do. And Sarah does not have toproduce an explicit "Pass the marmalade." She just has to point to it.Furthermore, the context is not only the physical setting but theknowledge the community members share. They know that UncleArthur has a car and that it has been arranged that he is coming roundthis evening to pick them up to go to the theatre, so there is no need toduplicate this knowledge by referring to it. And as members of thefamily, they are familiar with all other customs and preoccupations oftheir small community-that is, local knowledge. And all they need thelanguage for is to activate this local knowledge. The discourse that isenacted is therefore only partially evident in the actual linguistic text.This is realistic language, but one would be surprised to find it in anEnglish language teaching textbook. It is a pragmatically plausible piecein the sense that it exemplifies a contextually appropriate use of English,but it does not exemplify much language precisely because the discoursethat is a function of contextual engagement leaves only a partial textualtrace. So this dialogue may approximate to real language use, but, forthat very reason, it is quite useless as language to learn from. Not only arethese utterances structurally incomplete, but their meaning is a mystery.You cannot infer the semantic meaning from the pragmatic use becauseso much of the meaning that the people make of what they say is not inthe language at all but in the context.What is true of the real language of this small family community is trueof all real language. Its reality is local, pragmatically realised in relationto the contexts of particular communities. Members of the community,insiders, can understand what is going on and participate in theachievement of meaning in the discourse process. But outsiders, who arenot in the know, cannot make the necessary contextual connection tomake appropriate meaning.

For it is only when listeners connect language up to contextualconditions of one kind or another that they can do things with it. Whenpeople are doing things with language, listeners do not ask what thesentences mean but what the people themselves mean by saying thethings they do in these circumstances. Listeners may indeed knowperfectly well what the sentences mean but still be entirely in the darkTHE FORUM 709


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about what the people mean by them. Imagine being in a crowdedunderground train in, let us say, Leicester Square, and overhearing awoman making the following remark (this is quoted as an attestedauthentic utterance in a little collection of overheard remarks calledeavesdroppings):

8. Mymother took hers off at a garden partyin front of the vicar.Her what, one might ask? There are a number of possibilities, all

intriguing in their way. Her hat perhaps? Her coat, gloves, socks, shoes?What is the woman talking about? It could be any item of apparel.Listeners might hazard a guess, of course, but they cannot be surebecause they do not know what reality the speaker is using the languageto refer to. They were not at the garden party themselves, nor are they aparty to the context of shared knowledge, so they do not know what thiswoman is doing with the language. And the train stops and the womangets off, carrying the context with her, so the listeners will never know.They might pursue her to enquire, but such a course of action mightitself give rise to misunderstanding of a rather different kind.LOCAL KNOWLEDGE AND WRI'ITEN TEX'

This contextual dependency applies as much to written as to spokenlanguage use. Consider the following item (a favourite of mine) from aBritish newspaper:9. It takesbottle to cross Channel

Bibbing tipplers who booze-cruise across the Channel in search ofrevelryand wassailcould be in for a rough ride. Itchy-footedquaffersandpre-Christmasholiday-makersare being warned not to travel to France,where widespread disruption continues despite the lifting of the block-ade on trappedBritishlorrydrivers.(TheGuardian,November 11, 1996)Here is a text that is designed with a particular discourse community inmind. The sense of the communication involves the sense of community.The text will remain pragmatically inert to readers to the extent that theyare not members of that community and cannot therefore engage thecontext of common, communal knowledge and assumption. Thus, thewriter here is not only making assumptions that the reader will alreadyknow about certain current affairs, like the French blockade of lorrydrivers, but will also be familiar with the fact that it is common practicefor a certain sector of the British populace to go across the Channel toFrance to buy cheap alcohol and indulge in heavy drinking on the wayhome. But the writer is assuming not only shared knowledge but a sharedattitude to this practice: an attitude of ridicule. For words like bibbing

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tipplers, booze-cruise,wassail, and quaffersmark the text as satirical, comi-cally critical. The writer is inviting the reader to share a joke at thetipplers' expense. This is language used as a kind of conspiracy with thereader. But note that this conspiratorial effect does not arise fromknowing what the language means but from recognising what the writermight mean by it. It is not a matter of reference but of inference. Soreaders who have a problem with the words wassail and quaff, forexample, could consult a dictionary and discover that both are archaicwords and that wassail means merry making with eating and drinkingand quaff means to drink alcohol. But this will give readers no clue as towhy the writer is using such old-fashioned words or what effect this wouldhave on the discourse community for whom this text is written.In making these rather obvious observations, I am not criticising thedictionary. I am simply pointing out that there are words and uses ofwords that no dictionary can ever account for-not even a dictionarythat claims to describe real English. For what makes the language areality for its users is its local value: the specific contextual connectionand the exclusive appeal to common and communal knowledge andattitudes. Without the local knowledge, one cannot locate the meaning.Real language, then, is local language in that it is always associated withspecific contextual realities. It is designed to appeal to particularcommunities, and this will necessarily exclude people who do notbelong. Reality does not travel with the text.AUTHENTICITY IN THE LANGUAGE CLASSROOM

To return now to the slogan: Focus on meaning rather than focus onform. I have said that structuralist language teaching focuses on semanticmeaning, that which is encoded in form. Is it, then, that communicativelanguage teaching is different in that it focusses on pragmatic meaning,that which is contextually conditioned in the way I have outlined andbears the seal of authenticity? This is what many people would have usbelieve in their campaign for authentic language, real English in theclassroom.I would, on the contrary, argue against using authentic language inthe classroom, on the fairly reasonable grounds that it is actuallyimpossible to do so. The language cannot be authentic because theclassroom cannot provide the contextual conditions for it to be authen-ticated by the learners. The authenticity or reality of language use in itsnormal pragmatic functioning depends on its being localised within aparticular discourse community. Listeners can only authenticate it asdiscourse if they are insiders. But learners are outsiders, by definition,not members of user communities. So the language that is authentic fornative speaker users cannot possibly be authentic for learners.THE FORUM 711


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This objection is so obvious that it seems odd that the authenticityargument should ever be taken seriously. The reason why it has canagain, I think, be traced back to a confusion concealed by the seductiveappeal of the catchphrase. The real English that its promoters talk aboutrefers not to the discourse reality of communicative uses of the languagebut to its textual trace.For the promoters, authentic language means theactual linguistic text that people produce and that can be collected andanalysed by computer. This analysis yields many a fascinating fact aboutfrequency of occurrence and patterns of co-occurrence. But what itcannot yield is information about how the texts thus analysed interactedwith contextual conditions to realise discourse. It cannot tell about thediscourse process whereby pragmatic meaning is appropriately achieved:It can only record the overt attested product of that process, its textualtrace.Now the obvious problem here is that this textual product can only bemade pragmatically real as discourse if it is reconnected up with contextof some kind. One obviously cannot reinstate the original contexts fromwhich it came. The only contexts available for reconnection are those ofthe foreign language classroom, which are, of course, entirely differentfrom those that gave rise to the language in the first place. What makesthe text real is that it has been produced as appropriate to a particular setof contextual conditions. But because these conditions cannot bereplicated, the reality disappears. The communicative approach, if it isreally to be concerned with pragmatic meaning, has somehow to come toterms with the learners' reality and somehow create contextual condi-tions that are appropriate to them and that will enable them toauthenticate it as discourse on their terms. The language has to belocalised so that learners can engage with it as discourse. So, paradoxi-cally enough, a focus on pragmatic meaning necessarily entails thecontrivance of contextual conditions to bring it about.But at the same time teachers need to recognise that this engagementin language use has also to lead to language learning. The classroomcontext serves a learning community, and the purpose of any discourseenacted therein is a pedagogic one. So whatever pragmatic activity goeson has to lead to the internalisation of the language as a semanticresource. That is the objective of learning, and in this respect, thestructuralists got it right. What they did not get right was the means ofachieving that objective.ACTIVATING CONTiEXT'S

With this is mind, let us return to the slogan. The structuralistapproach was said to focus on form rather than meaning. In actual factwhat it did was to focus on meaning in form: encoded semantic meaning.

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In so doing it simply used contexts expediently as a device for demonstra-tion. The contexts had no other point. But in normal language usecontexts crucially interact with semantic meaning, and pragmatic mean-ing is achieved as a result. Semantics has no independent status inlanguage use. By giving semantics such a status and thus making contextsubservient to the code, structuralist language teaching in effect pro-duced text that cannot be realised as discourse. And here, I think, is thecentral difficulty about this approach. The language was presented insuch a way that the semantic meaning was brought to the learners'attention, but they could not make anything of it. They could not derivea discourse from the text because they could not engage pragmaticallywith it, so the communicative potential of the language was left unrealised.But the solution to this problem is not to foist authentic user text onthe learners because, in the absence of the appropriately correspondingcontexts that make it authentic, learners cannot engage with this either.On the contrary, they are more likely to be alienated by it. The solutionmust lie in some kind of pedagogic artifice whereby language iscontrived to be both engaged with and learned from. In other words thelanguage of the classroom has to be made effective in two ways:It has tohave some pragmatic point for the learners, and at the same time it hasto point out linguistically encoded semantic meaning.One way of doing this might be to present language that activates acontext in the learners' minds by realising the literary potential ofclassroom texts. As a simple example, take the textbook text consideredearlier:

10. This is a man. He isJohn Brown;he is Mr.Brown. He is sittingin a chair.This is a woman. She is MaryBrown;she is Mrs.Brown. She is standing bya table. Mr.Brownhas a book. The book is in his hand; he has a book inhis hand. Mrs.Brownhas a bag ....This, we can agree, is ludicrous as an example of English use. But, as Iindicated earlier, it is not meant to be taken as use at all but as a displaytext with no discourse implications whatever. As such it is not designed toprovoke a pragmatic reaction. But it is easy to see how it might bemodified so that it does, even though it would remain just as unreal as arepresentation of normal use:

11. This is a man. This is a woman.This is Mr.Brown.This is not Mrs.Brown.She has a look in her eye. He has an idea in his head....

All I have done here is to stimulate the imagination a little by creatinga fictional reality that you can engage with, that sets up expectations.What happens next? The trouble with the original text is that it is sohumdrum that it inspires no interest whatever, and in consequence theTHE FORUM 713


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semantic meanings encoded in the linguistic forms remain pragmaticallyunrealised, that is to say, they are not made real. Or take anotherexample:12. Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It isvery pretty.Here is the family.Mother,Father,DickandJanelivein the green-and-whitehouse. They are veryhappy.SeeJane. She has a red dress. She wants toplay.Who willplaywithJane?See the cat. It goes meow meow. Come andplay.Come playwithJane. The kittenwill not play.See Mother. Mother isverynice. Mother willyou playwithJane? Motherlaughs. Laugh,Mother,laugh. See Father.He is big and strong. Father,will you playwithJane?Father is smiling. Smile, Father,smile. See the dog. Bow wow goes thedog. Do you want to playwithJane? See the dog run. Look, look. Herecomes a friend. The friend will playwithJane. They play a good game.

Play,Jane, play.Unreal, meaningless language, one might say. Unreal, perhaps, but notmeaningless. It comes from a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Morrisoncalled TheBluest Eye (1972).In both of these examples, the point is that, unreal though thelanguage is in reference to normal contextual use, it can inspireengagement and be made real by the play of the imagination thatprojects a contextual significance from the text. As I said before, this isludicrous language. But the term ludicrous is derived from the Latinludere, o play. This is ludic language, language to play with, and languageplay, as my colleague Guy Cook (1997) has argued so convincingly, is alsoa part of reality.Another contrivance for language learning by pragmatic engagementis the kind of purposeful game playing that takes the form of aproblem-solving task. Task design involves the presentation of an incom-plete context that the learners have to use language to complete. Tocomplete the context is to complement it, and in that respect the task isa pragmatic activity. But, to the extent that it also directs attention to thespecific encodings in the language that are needed to complete andcomplement the context, it focuses on semantic meaning as well. Tasksare designed to have designs on the learners: to induce learners to uselanguage they can learn from.If such tasks are to engage learners in this way, their design must takeaccount of the interests, attitudes, and dispositions of the learners, butthese will relate to their own familiar cultural contexts and concerns, notthose of the unfamiliar foreign community whose language they arelearning but whose reality they are in no position to relate to. The wholepoint of language learning tasks is that they are specially contrived forlearning. They do not have to replicate or even simulate what goes on in

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normal uses of language. Indeed, the more they seek to do so, the lesseffective they are likely to be.Of course, this contrived language has to be such that learners willlearn from it and develop the capacity for authentication that they canexploit when they encounter actually occurring language in the realworld. But, except in certain specific cases, there is no way of anticipatingthese encounters in any very precise way. The learners have to learn tofine-tune the appropriate patterns of contextual response for them-selves. The purpose of teaching is to get learners to invest in a generalcapacity for further learning, not to rehearse them in communicativeroles they may never be called on to play. A lot of time is wasted in tryingto teach things that can only be learned by experience. The point ofpedagogy is not to replicate experience in advance but to preparelearners to learn from it. But I have argued all this elsewhere (Widdowson,1990).CONCLUSION

I have argued that certain current ideas about language teaching,expressed in the seductive idiom of catchphrase and slogan, are mislead-ing. It is not the case that communicative language teaching focuses onmeaning whereas the benighted structuralist approach did not: Itfocuses on pragmatic meaning in context rather than semantic meaningin the code. And the focus on pragmatic meaning does not require theimportation of authentic language use into the classroom. This would bean impossibility anyway as the classroom cannot replicate the contextualconditions that made the language authentic in the first place. I thinkthat language teachers should indeed be concerned with pragmaticmeaning, but this can only be achieved if they localise the language,create contextual conditions that make the language a reality forparticular communities of learners so that they can authenticate it, andso realise, in both senses of that term, the semantic resources that areencoded in the language. As TESOL professionals, we need to makelanguage and language learning a reality for learners, and we cannot doso by bland reference to "real English." It can only be done bycontrivance, by artifice. And artifice, the careful crafting of appropriatelanguage activities, is what TESOL is all about. Note that I say appropri-ate, not authentic. By that I mean language that can be made real by thecommunity of learners, authenticated by them in the learning process.And for those who want a slogan, here is one to finish off with: Theappropriate language for learning is language that can be appropriatedfor learning.

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THE AUTHORHE AUTHORH. G. Widdowson has been Professor of TESOL at the University of London and ofapplied linguistics at the University of Essex, and he currently has a chair at theUniversity of Vienna. His main research interests are discourse analysis, languageteacher education, and stylistics.He is the author of several books, including Aspectsof Language Teaching (Oxford University Press, 1990), and editor of LanguageTeaching:A SchemeforTeacherEducationOxford UniversityPress) and the new Oxfordseries Introductions to Language Study.

REFERENCESCook, G. (1997). Language play, language learning. English Language TeachingJournal,51, 224-231.Morrison, T. (1972). The bluesteye.New York:Washington Square Press.Widdowson, H. G. (1990). Aspectsof language teaching.Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

Positiveand NegativeAspectsof theDominanceof English*PE'I'tK MASTERSanJoseStateUniversity* In an ideal world, everybody would have linguistic access to every-thing. If access is denied or hindered in some way, however, a powerdifferential, whether accidental or intended, is engendered. Englishclearly dominates in the world today and, because English is theacknowledged lingua franca of science, technology, and business, thefield of English for specific purposes (ESP) holds a pivotal position inregard to the use or abuse of this linguistic power. It is thereforeimportant for the ESP profession to articulate the positive and negativeaspects of the current dominance of English-in short, to establish acritical ESP.The positive aspect of the dominance of English lies in the extent towhich it fosters universal access, as it does, for example, in being theuniversal language of air and sea traffic control. The opening sentenceabove is a paraphrase of Eastman (1983), who believed that "truelinguistic emancipation would be achieved when everyone in a speech

*This commentary is a revised version of a colloquium paper given at the 1996 InternationalAssociation of Applied Linguistics conference at the University ofJyviskyla, Finland.

H. G. Widdowson has been Professor of TESOL at the University of London and ofapplied linguistics at the University of Essex, and he currently has a chair at theUniversity of Vienna. His main research interests are discourse analysis, languageteacher education, and stylistics.He is the author of several books, including Aspectsof Language Teaching (Oxford University Press, 1990), and editor of LanguageTeaching:A SchemeforTeacherEducationOxford UniversityPress) and the new Oxfordseries Introductions to Language Study.

REFERENCESCook, G. (1997). Language play, language learning. English Language TeachingJournal,51, 224-231.Morrison, T. (1972). The bluesteye.New York:Washington Square Press.Widdowson, H. G. (1990). Aspectsof language teaching.Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

Positiveand NegativeAspectsof theDominanceof English*PE'I'tK MASTERSanJoseStateUniversity* In an ideal world, everybody would have linguistic access to every-thing. If access is denied or hindered in some way, however, a powerdifferential, whether accidental or intended, is engendered. Englishclearly dominates in the world today and, because English is theacknowledged lingua franca of science, technology, and business, thefield of English for specific purposes (ESP) holds a pivotal position inregard to the use or abuse of this linguistic power. It is thereforeimportant for the ESP profession to articulate the positive and negativeaspects of the current dominance of English-in short, to establish acritical ESP.The positive aspect of the dominance of English lies in the extent towhich it fosters universal access, as it does, for example, in being theuniversal language of air and sea traffic control. The opening sentenceabove is a paraphrase of Eastman (1983), who believed that "truelinguistic emancipation would be achieved when everyone in a speech

*This commentary is a revised version of a colloquium paper given at the 1996 InternationalAssociation of Applied Linguistics conference at the University ofJyviskyla, Finland.

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1998 Widdowson Context, Community, And Authentic Language

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