---
title: "Varieties of English in current English language teaching (2008)"
description: "He proposes three remedies: giving varieties a stronger place in curricula, with more lesson time and… 37 references, cited by 1 paper here."
authors: ["Markus Bieswanger"]
year: 2008
venue: "Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics 38"
source: "https://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/21"
doi: "10.5774/38-0-21"
licence: "CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics)"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bieswanger-2008-varieties-english-current-english-language/"
---
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# Varieties of English in current English language teaching

**Authors:** Markus Bieswanger · **Year:** 2008 · **Venue:** [Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics 38](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/stellenbosch-papers-in-linguistics/) ([Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics 2008](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/stellenbosch-papers-in-linguistics/2008/)) · **Publisher:** [Stellenbosch University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/stellenbosch-university/) · **Licence:** CC BY (journal licence per DOAJ; Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.5774/38-0-21) · [PDF](https://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/download/21/56) · [DOI 10.5774/38-0-21](https://doi.org/10.5774/38-0-21) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2115219091)

**Citations:** 49 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [1](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bieswanger-2008-varieties-english-current-english-language/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Bieswanger asks whether English language teaching (ELT) prepares learners for the English they will actually meet. Most users of English today are non-native speakers, and even most native speakers do not use the idealised "British" or "American" standards taught in schools. The author began from adult evening-class students in Germany. Despite five to nine years of school English, they often could not follow native speakers of other varieties, nor non-native speakers using English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). He then examined a German secondary-school ELT curriculum (Bavarian Realschule), its textbooks and selected university programs for future English teachers. In this exploratory study, varieties of English get little attention and appear late in schooling, a situation he sums up as "too little, too late". He proposes three remedies:
- giving varieties a stronger place in curricula, with more lesson time and matching textbooks;
- starting curriculum-based English in primary school;
- making variety training mandatory for both prospective and practising teachers.

The study matters because communicative competence, the main goal of modern ELT, requires learners to cope with a pluricentric, constantly evolving language.

## Key points
- The cited estimates put native speakers of English at 300–400 million. Estimates of non-native speakers range from several hundred million to over two billion, and the author notes that these counts are unreliable because "speaker" and "user" are poorly defined.
- According to Crystal, Received Pronunciation (RP) was used by at most about 5% of England's population and is probably below 2% today.
- The material examined comes from Bavaria: the Realschule English curriculum, accompanying textbooks and selected German university teacher-training programs.
- In years eight and nine, English gets three 45-minute lessons a week, which the author considers too little to cover varieties.
- Primary-school English in Germany largely lacks binding curricula, so secondary teaching restarts from zero in year five. Proper primary curricula would add two to four years of meaningful learning.

## Interesting ideas
- The study measures the gap between what a system is trained on and the language its users actually meet, using concrete reports of communication breakdowns as evidence.
- The author argues that learners should study how varieties differ in a systematic way, not memorise one variety, because this supports life-long adaptation to new forms.
- The paper treats English as pluricentric, with no single correct norm, so a deviation from the textbook standard is not automatically an error.
- The paper audits curriculum, textbooks and teacher training together, on the view that demands written into a curriculum are useless unless the materials reflect them.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (learn): Log the inputs where Mova fails and group them by variety (spelling, lexicon, ELF-style syntax), so that silver data and evaluation sets are aimed at real gaps rather than at standard textbook prose.
- **I2** (tokens): Encode the differences between varieties as explicit, explainable mapping rules (e.g., BrE/AmE spellings and lexical pairs) feeding one shared lemma inventory, instead of treating each variant as unknown.
- **I3** (answer): When grading school-course tests or reading answers, accept forms from any standard variety (AusSE, CanSE, Indian English) as correct, and flag only genuine errors.
- **I4** (tree): Check that declared support for a dialect or variety is backed by treebank coverage and conversion rules, not only listed in the specification.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

Also on the byline: [Europa-Universität Flensburg](https://ror.org/046e0mt33).

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🧭 Topics (1): [English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/english/) · 2,379 works

## Cite

Cite as: Markus Bieswanger. 2008. Varieties of English in current English language teaching. Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics 38.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{bieswanger2008varieties,
  title = {{Varieties of English in current English language teaching}},
  author = {Markus Bieswanger},
  booktitle = {Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics 38},
  year = {2008},
  doi = {10.5774/38-0-21},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5774/38-0-21}
}
```

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## References

37 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 2 November 2026*