Introduction
“Yaar
Accent Check Kr”
“Bolta
to theek hai lakin Accent Desi hai”
“Kahin
Sae Bhi Pakistani nahi Lugta Accent sae bilkul Gora Lugta Hai”
“Hamari
Nai Teacher Ayi, Yaar Pure British Accent main baat krti hai”
“Presentation
tou bari fit thi itni samj nai aie lakin larki American Accent main Bol Rahi
Thi”
These kinds of
sentences echoed in the air of the walled city, often in a canteen and in
university corridor. People still feel like speak a foreign language (English)
in a way it is being spoken abroad. Usually, they cannot distinguish between
various accents British, American, Canadian or Australian, but they want to
listen to same native like aspirated sounds, stress and foreign phrases.
Moreover, they even don’t know the difference between accent and pronunciation,
what is language acquisition? What in a certain age one can learn and cannot?
But, they still have a soft corner for those who speak in a foreign accent. The
current qualitative study aims to learn the reasons and factors behind the motivation
of learning foreign English accent the second language learners in Lahore.
Lahore
is the capital of Punjab and considered as the educational hub, the city is
overstuffed with outsiders. Not only from other cities of Punjab, but from
other provinces of Pakistan every year students rush to the city. Hence, the
city has a cosmopolitan population, and people speak different languages. Urdu,
Punjabi, Siraiki, Pushto and Sindhi are widely spoken languages of the country,
where Urdu is considered National language of the country. English language is
considered as second language of the country. The context of the current qualitative
studies is the universities. In Lahore there are thirteen public sector
universities and twenty two private sector universities (HEC, 2014).
In these universities students belong to different rural and urban area,
moreover, they are enrolled in different discipline and they belong to elite,
middle and lower middle classes.
Ours
is a multilingual country, and English predates its establishment here at
Pakistan. English entered here in subcontinent with the colonial powers in
seventeenth century, yet English has continued its presence to date. Pakistani
English, a ‘nativized’ and ‘vernacularized’ English (Kachru, 1992), (Mehboob, 2004), (Rehman, 2011) is in the journey of approbation of its
own identity and credence. Around thirty to forty million Pakistanis can speak
English to some extent, stated Mahboob (2013) in his recent article based on
WAVE survey, although the proficiency levels of the speakers vary greatly.
World Atlas of Varieties of English (WAVE) questionnaire has catalogued 235
features and only 55 are found in PE ‘making Pakistani English look rather
close to Standard English’ (Mehboob, Pakistani English, 2013)
Research
Question
How ‘Second Language
Learners’ are motivated to acquire foreign accent of English language in
university setting at Lahore?
Selection
of subjects
For
the current studies, The University of Punjab (PU) and Beaconhouse National
University (BNU) have been selected. The researcher can easily select students
from social sciences, and pure sciences. Further, it will remain convenient for
him to find some subjects, who belong to middle and lower middle class. Elite
class can be easily selected from BNU.
Expected
Time for the Research
Following are the
details of expected time required for the current studies:
Research Phases
|
Days
|
Introduction
|
15
days
|
Selecting
methodology and deciding course of action
|
5
days
|
Literature
Review
|
60
to 90 days
|
Observations
|
90
to 120 days
|
Interviews
|
60
to 100 days
|
Data
analysis
|
30
to 60 days
|
Revising
Draft
|
20
to 60 days
|
Consulting
Supervisors
|
20
to 30 days
|
Total
Time
|
9
months to 18 months
|
Table
1: Expected time frame of the study
Theoratical
Perspective
The land, Pakistan belongs to the area, once was part and parcel of a
sub-continent of India and has witnessed the colonization process. The land was
plundered for the purpose of money, elbowed to have some helpers and routed to
make own territory, many a times. Then, the English entered in the scene. They
did what they think the best for the longevity of their rule in this area. Since then, the people of this land
considered the colonizers superior socially, academically and culturally. The
thought was the result of physical and mental subjugation process done by the
British Empire, through academic, religious and social means. History witnessed
that how the report of Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1854 diminished the
local languages of the sub-continent and English was promoted to that edge,
where it surpasses all other spheres, to support the imperial order. This
thought is transferred to the current generation through heart and soul.
It is no denying the fact that English is now enjoying the status of
lingua-franca of the world and almost all knowledge firmaments are either
written in this language or at least translated into this very language. So to
speak, seeking knowledge and consulting any aspect of a field, one is bound to
have this language in one’s vicinity. Albeit, the concept of superiority is
existed in the minds of the people of this area, the concept is now multiplied
in the shape of Neoclonialism a new shape of colonialism. In the words of (Sartre, 2001-03), Neocolonialism is
the geopolitical practice of using capitalism, business globalization, and
cultural imperialism to influence a country, in lieu of either direct military
control or indirect political control, i.e. imperialism and hegemony.
Neocolonialism is studied under the academic discipline of
Post-colonialism, which is about
postcolonial studies is an
academic discipline featuring methods of intellectual discourse that analyze,
explain, and respond to the cultural legacies of colonialism and imperialism,
to the human consequences of controlling a country and establishing settlers
for the economic exploitation of the native people and their land. Drawing from
postmodern schools of thought, postcolonial studies analyse the politics of
knowledge (creation, control, and distribution) by analyzing the functional
relations of social and political power that sustain colonialism and neocolonialism—the
how and the why of an imperial regime's representations (social, political,
cultural) of the imperial colonizer and of the colonized people. (Wikipedia, 2014)
Methodology
and Method
A lot of deliberation has
done on the selection of methodologies for the current qualitative study,
ethnography, grounded theory, phenomenology and other perspectives are
discussed in the light of different scholarly articles, periodicals and essays.
Except ethnography other methodologies deal with meanings, interpretations and
different issues, which are not related to the current study.
Qualitative study is a
subjective frame work of research, where it should be taken in a natural
setting and the researcher must neutralized the observant presence and other
external factors, which could create artificial aspects in the study. For this
purpose, it is necessary to take the subjects into confidence. This is possible
only when they know that their identities will not be disclosed to anyone. In
the current study, observation and interview are the methods seem as the best
tools to proceed.
References
Fowls, P. C. (2006). The Routledge Dictionary of
Literary Terms. New York: Routledge .
HEC. (2014, Nov 23). HEC
Recognized Universities and Degree Awarding Institutes . Retrieved
November 23, 2014, from www.hec.edu.pk: http://www.hec.gov.pk/OurInstitutes/Pages/Default.aspx
Kachru, B. B. (1992).
The Other Tongue: English across Cultures (2nd Ed.). Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.
Mehboob, A. (2013).
Pakistani English. In B. K. Lunkenheimer, The Mouton World Atlas of
Variation in English (pp. 531-539). Berlin: De-Gruyter Mouton.
Mehboob, A. (2004).
Pakistani English: morphology and syntax. In E. S.-r. Bernd Kortmann, A
Hand-book of Varieties of English (pp. 1045-1056). Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Rehman, T. (2011). Pakistani
English: The Linguistic Description of a Non-Native Variety of English.
Islamabad: National Institute of Pakistan Studies Quaid-i-Azam University.
Sartre, J.-P.
(2001-03). Colonialism and neo-colonialims. New York: Routledge.
Wikipedia. (2014,
November 18). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonialism. Retrieved
November 23, 2014, from http://en.wikipedia.org:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonialism
