Introduction

Today’s business students should anticipate coming into contact with English varieties other than Standard American or British English during their professional careers (Kachru & Smith, 2008). Preparing students to understand a range of English varieties, used by business professionals of varying linguistic backgrounds, is one of my primary objectives as a business English instructor in Barranquilla, Colombia. The city serves as Colombia’s most important port city on the Caribbean Sea, so it is especially likely that my students will use English with speakers of one of the many English varieties found in the Caribbean. Therefore, my colleagues and I have sought ways to raise our students’ awareness of other English varieties, as well as expose them to written and verbal samples of other varieties. Rather than compiling samples on our own, we decided to involve our students.

In the fall semester of 2015, we designed and implemented a series of tasks and assessments, which we called the English Variety Project, whereby students chose an English variety from Kortmann’s and Lunkenheimer’s (2013) Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English (eWAVE) database to research and describe in an informational report and a minipresentation. The aim of this article is to describe our project and the lessons we learned from our first implementation in order that instructors who are also looking to raise their students’ awareness of and exposure to English varieties may have a model to draw ideas from.

Project Design

To begin the planning process of the English Variety Project, my colleagues and I targeted four student learning outcomes:

1. Read for main ideas and details (the research component)
2. Write an informational report using sentence variety and APA style (the report component)
3. Speak spontaneously on a given topic (the presentation component)
4. Develop intercultural communication skills for international business (all components)
   
   

The first component involved student research on the selected English variety pertaining to the following areas: history, region, importance/status, vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar. The second component involved outlining, writing, peer editing, teacher editing, and revising the informational report. The final component was a brief student presentation highlighting some of the important features of the selected English variety, including a 30-seconds (maximum) video or audio clip demonstrating the English variety in use.

Implementation

I introduced the English Variety Project to my students by asking them to tell me examples of differences between Colombian Spanish and other Spanish varieties. I ended the discussion by telling students that English has many varieties depending on region and socioeconomic status, just like Spanish. Then I showed students a brief video produced by Cambridge English (2013) on the differences between Standard American, Australian, and British English. During the video, I tasked students with listening for main areas of difference between the varieties. At the end of the video, students recounted four areas that distinguish every English variety, as explained by the narrator in the video: vocabulary, spelling, grammar, and pronunciation.

In order to provide students with more context for understanding and describing English varieties, as well as English as an international language, I guided students through reading “The Karmic Cycle of World Englishes” by Kachru and Smith (2009). I created and distributed a reading guide with a series of tasks to encourage skimming for main ideas, scanning for details and vocabulary, guessing vocabulary from context, and inferring the author’s sentiment.

Once students completed the reading guide, I began the planning phase of the writing process by demonstrating an example outline of the written report. Although students were required to include information on all the aforementioned areas of their chosen English variety, I gave them the freedom to decide how to organize the sections of their report according to what seemed most logical to them.

After outlining, I demonstrated an introductory paragraph and guided students through a brief analysis of four essential elements an effective introduction for an informative business report should contain: general statement, reader relationship, purpose statement, and list of main ideas. I also provided students with two to three sentence starters, which they could use for each of the four elements. Students then wrote a draft of their introductions in class as I monitored and provided feedback. Once it seemed that most of the class had completed or was near completing the introduction, I instructed students to exchange introductions with a partner for peer review. The partner’s task was to read and identify the four parts of an effective introduction by underlining and writing in the margins. I followed a similar process of demonstration, analysis, writing, and peer review for body paragraphs.

Because the report involved a fair amount of research on the part of the students, the assignment required students to include two academic sources using APA style citations. Many of my students were unfamiliar with APA style, so I created two tools alongside the resources provided by the Purdue Owl, which I had already shared with my students. The first was a video screencast, created with the free software Screencast-O-Matic, where I demonstrated how to paraphrase, directly quote, and create a reference page citation in an example report. I believed that a screencast would be more helpful to students than an in-class lesson for two reasons: 1) students could watch all the minute details and keystrokes involved in making a citation from start to finish and 2) students could replay the video as many times as they wanted over the entire course of the assignment. The second tool was an APA style quiz where I provided students a quote from an online source along with all the information they would need to make an in-text and reference page citation. However, the information was given in an arbitrary order, and I provided some irrelevant pieces of information as distracters, requiring students to choose the pertinent information and format it correctly. The quiz was not graded. It was simply used as a way for students to check how well they could cite a source using APA style, and hopefully, for the ones who did not perform well, to create a need to review the resources on APA style.

As an integrated skills class, I was limited on the amount of in-class time that I could give students to draft their report. Therefore, students completed a significant portion of the report for homework outside of class. In order to give students my feedback, I had them submit a rough draft a week before submitting the final draft. My feedback consisted of a series of editing symbols, as well as comments and questions in the margins. Then I promptly returned the students’ rough drafts so they could make the final revisions.

Upon completing the report, students prepared and delivered a 3-minute presentation highlighting a few of the most important aspects of their English variety that they had described in their reports. Students supported their presentations with PowerPoint, Google Slides, and/or Prezi, as well as a short video or audio clip showcasing their English variety.

Reflection

I believe the project was successful in meeting the objective of raising our students’ awareness of the wide range of English varieties spoken worldwide. Students were mostly successful in finding and understanding academic sources on their English varieties, and then communicating their findings in writing and speaking. I was pleased when several students discussed how they learned that some varieties are given priority in business, education, international relations, or politics, but that every variety has intrinsic value by virtue of belonging to a speech community, and is, therefore, worthy of equal respect. Those discussions were student-led, with little interference from me, by those who wrote and presented on varieties that have historically been treated with less importance, such as African American Vernacular English, Black South African English, and Jamaican Creole.

In their reports, I noticed that students struggled to explain the linguistic features of their variety, especially pronunciation. Although I instructed students to write generally and focus only on two or three significant distinguishing aspects or examples, students tried to write with the same level of complexity as they found in their research, and as a result produced unclear sentences with misused vocabulary, grammar, and punctuation. In the future, I plan to show more examples of paraphrasing aspects of an English variety’s grammar and pronunciation, and give more direct feedback in those areas on students’ rough drafts.

In a debriefing session at the conclusion of the project, many students communicated that prior to the project, they had little knowledge of English varieties other than American and British English. Furthermore, many expressed the usefulness of learning about the English varieties through the course of the project, especially those spoken in the Caribbean, because they personally believe they will come into contact with those varieties in their professional careers.

References

Cambridge English. (2013, August 21). English language learning tips - varieties of English. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvbEODnJVTc

Kachru, Y., & Smith, L. (2008). Cultures, contexts, and world Englishes. New York, NY: Routledge.

Kachru, Y., & Smith, L. (2009). The Karmic cycle of world Englishes: Some futuristic constructs. World Englishes, 28(1), 1–14.

Kortmann, B., & Lunkenheimer, K. (Eds.). (2013). The electronic world atlas of varieties of English. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Retrieved from http://ewave-atlas.org

Trey Erwin is an instructor of business English at Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla, Colombia. He holds a BS in business administration from Auburn University and an MEd in ESL from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.