"We wuz robbed, inni'? Towards reconceptualizing the 'native speaker'

Charles C. Mann

College

Br. Andrew Gonzalez FSC College of Education

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Source Title

12th World Congress of the Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquee [AILA]

Publication Date

8-1999

Abstract

In spite of attempts to bury the 'native speaker' (Paikeday, 1985) and to abandon further debate on it (Ferguson, 1986), the concept of the native speaker (NS) remains sociolinguistically relevant, essential for our understanding of bilingualism and multilingualism, and functionally potent, in relation to the job situation in the ELT world.
This paper posits that the NS does not exist, but needs to be redefined, given the spread of bilingualism.multilingualism in the world of today. It reviews extensively traditional notions and the principal views on the NS (Bloomfield, 1933; Chomsky, 1965; Hymes, 1972; Kachru, 1982; 1986; Paikeday, 1985; Rampton, 1990; and, Davies, 1991), and tries argue that there is a common flow in the assumptions of these perspectives; namely, the assumption of the native speaker's standard competence'.
The fundamental position of the paper is that the NS status is a dynamic cone; it also posits three criteria (or conditions), which could serve to sustain a credible redefinition of the NS, while putting the notion of 'expert speaker' in its proper perspective.

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Disciplines

Anthropological Linguistics and Sociolinguistics

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