De-foreignizing English in the Expanding Circle: the Case of Tunisia

Among the three orthodox pedagogical models (native, nativized, lingua franca), EFL learners are often exposed to the native model to the exclusion of other competing models. The reason has always been to prepare learners to function in an English-speaking community within the confines of the Inner Circle (Kachru, 1985). The sociolinguistics of globalization, however, defines communities beyond the conventionally demarcated homogeneous speech groups and perceives learners as constantly shuttling back and forth across liminal spaces oblivious to rigid linguistic and cultural frontiers. This paper is set to problematize the status of English as a foreign language in the Tunisian EFL curriculum and tocontest the paradigm of exonormativity, which binds English language teaching in the Expanding Circle to a Standard pedagogical model produced by the Inner Circle. The corpus consists of selected texts from the English Programs (EPs) and samples of audio-clips designed to teach listening comprehension in Basic and Secondary Education. Critical Discourse Analysis isemployed to unveil biased discursive construction and "naturalization" of any covertly imposed model. The findings demonstrate an exclusive reliance on a Standard pedagogical model through conceptualizing English as a system that resists synchronic variation and diachronic change in the EPs, and through promoting Anglo-American accents in instructional listening materials. Drawing on the sociolinguistics of "contact" (Blommaert, 2010), the paper discusses a viable pedagogical model in an Expanding Circle that is becoming less foreign.