Questão de Inglês — Verbos (Verbs) — VUNESP 2024

In 1985 Kachru described the world of English in terms of three circles. In the inner circle he put countries such as Britain, the USA, Australia, etc., where English is the primary language. The outer circle contained countries where English had become an official or widely-used second language. These included India, Nigeria, Singapore, etc. Finally, the expanding circle represented those countries where English was learnt as a foreign language – countries such as Poland, Japan, Mexico, Hungary, etc.

Kachru’s numbers have been dramatically surpassed. But something else has happened, too. It was once assumed that there was some kind of inbuilt superiority for inner circle speakers. They spoke “better” English, and there were more of them. Among other things, this situation ‘bred an extremely enervating inferiority complex among many a non-native speaker learner/teacher’ (Rajagopalan 2004:114). But since English is now used more often as a lingua franca than as a native language – and since the majority of competent English speakers are not native speakers, but second language users – the inner circle has lost much of its linguistic power, real or imagined (though there are still many people who advocate using a native-speaker model to teach international English).

As a result, a consensus has emerged that instead of talking about inner, outer and expanding circle Englishes, we need to recognize ‘World Englishes’ (Jenkins 2006:159) or ‘Global English’ (Graddol 2006:106). World English (in Rajagopalan’s words) ‘… belongs to everyone who speaks it, but it is nobody’s mother tongue’ (2004:111). Nobody owns English anymore – perhaps we could say that we all, native and non-native speakers alike, own it together and have, or should have, equal rights as English users.

(Harmer (2007) The practice of English Language Teaching. Pp. 17,18)