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Demystifying standards in English language classroom

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2 years ago

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Image courtesy UNOPS (United Nations Office for Project Services)

by Ruth Surenthiraraj

In her Kuppi Talk article “The dispossession of a voice through English in Sri Lanka” (6 February 2024), Selvaraj Vishvika delves into the myriad troubles that accompany the imposition of standards on the English language learner in Sri Lanka. Chief among her reflections is the sordid reality every ELT (English language teaching) practitioner must face at some point: that we do in fact disallow for learners’ expression of ideas when we get myopic about maintaining ‘standards’. Extending this argument further, Maduranga Kalugampitiya (“Positioning the idea of Sri Lankan English in the field of English language teaching in Sri Lanka”, published 2 April 2024) argues that a realistic standard should necessarily be one that contextualises itself to its locality, allowing for users to adapt it to their circumstances. For the purposes of this article, ‘standards’ refer to the expectations we often attach to the production of language, especially with regard to learners. For instance, we might bemoan the inaccuracy of their expression or their inability to spell accurately. These inevitably hark back to some abstract level of competency that we have recognized as being a ‘valid’ form of expression.

Both authors are clear in their prioritisation of the learners/users of the language. To put things bluntly, standards are extremely problematic because they are not simply harmless hierarchies to organise and label parts of a language. They are often steeped in particular histories and privilege certain cultures or classed lifestyles. They draw very clear battle lines and demand that we pick sides. And if we are honest with ourselves, ELT practitioners will always err on the side of perfection. Ensuring that our learners remain at the center of our teaching, however, gives us a chance to carefully navigate the murky waters of standards with due caution.

I will not, in this short piece, pretend to add anything out of the ordinary to decades-long academic and popular debate. In fact, I am keenly aware that we constantly inhabit the paradox of having to give our learners the space to explore their own usage of the English language while being acutely aware of external standards that are being constantly imposed on our students. It is frankly irresponsible and escapist to adopt the position that anything goes when we are painfully aware of the fact that producing particular types of utterances could decide whether our students stand a chance at getting a job or not. So, I think it is important to acknowledge and accept that most of the time, ELT practitioners will need to wrestle with the paradoxical world of standards. What I will try to reflect on are some practices I routinely engage in to ensure that I do not sacrifice my students on the altar of perfection.

Acknowledging teacher subjectivities in the classroom

Over the past couple of decades, qualitative research in humanities and social sciences disciplines has surfaced even more clearly the need for researchers to acknowledge their own subjective positions in the act of studying a phenomenon. For instance, a researcher might assume that they are studying a phenomenon by objectively observing it. However, awareness of their subjectivity might force them to question how their upbringing or economic status impacts how they interpret a particular phenomenon and its significance to the observed community. ELT has also benefited from this increased awareness of teacher identities because it compels us to acknowledge how we position ourselves when we are in the classroom. For example, our individual journeys of learning the language have a very strong influence over how we expect our learners to engage with the language. However, ELT classrooms still tend to be sanitised of any chance to interrogate standards or reflect on teacher subjectivities, due mostly to perceived time constraints and assumed lack of student interest/engagement with anything other than a demonstrably ‘correct’ answer.

Some of this is most certainly rooted in our refusal to put ourselves in positions of vulnerability. In this, we inherit a long and pervasive tradition of the teacher needing to be the fount of all knowledge – which in this day and age of generative artificial intelligence and increased access to assistive tools is, quite frankly, hilarious. So, as difficult as it is, I try to explain to students why I say what I do, and how I might be influenced by my middle class, urban upbringing in preferring certain standards over others. This allows the students to know that although they may regard me as the expert, I too have my own deep-seated biases. It alerts them to the fact that they need not necessarily adopt my stances uncritically, and it opens up the space for me to be challenged if they wish to do so.

Drawing attention to multiple standards

Perhaps a related struggle that ELT practitioners encounter is the reality that there are a variety of competing (and occasionally contradictory) standards floating around. If language is constantly evolving, then it is undeniably shaped by the context it is located in. Take for instance how each ‘generation’ seems to have made certain expressions their own. The slang that each generation uses becomes particularly steeped in their contemporary circumstances and becomes almost unintelligible to the preceding/following generation. Add to this the fact that this ‘lingo’ is also liable to change or become unintelligible when it shifts across regions or even social media platforms. But this is how language has always functioned – and English is an evolutionary monstrosity that keeps feeding on multiple cultures.

In my classroom, this reality compels me to alert my students to as many available standards that they might encounter. These standards may be straightforward – like how certain words are pronounced – or they may be extralinguistic – like how your pronunciation can decide whether you might be accepted into certain circles. However, it is an uphill task to maintain this kind of nuance consistently, particularly when faced with severe time constraints. Nuance may also be counterproductive if it overwhelms rather than encourages the learner. So, highlighting the existence of multiple standards must be maintained, but being attuned to learner needs and responses is also crucially important in making this work.

Engaging dialogically with assessment standards

Assessments like TOEFL and IELTS have long been criticized for their perceived bias against those who use English in countries like ours. You could have been born spouting the King’s English, but you will still have to prove that you know your way around a subordinating clause if you want to study or work in an English-speaking country. Whereas there is really no guarantee that the apparent ‘native’ speaker of English can match your knowledge of and proficiency in the language. Debates around this issue have served to unmask how arbitrary some language standards can be and how problematic they are when applied uncritically across the board. But this could be true of any standard, so it becomes important to be in constant dialogue with what we assume is the standard.

One way I practice this in my own classroom is by making marking rubrics available for student feedback well ahead of the assessment. At the first stage, I introduce a simplified rubric that we discuss, modify, and use for peer feedback. In the process of giving their peers feedback, they need to engage with how they will interpret the standards present in the rubrics. This often leads to some interesting conversations in class and functions as a way for students to see that language and the expectations it sets up are very contextual. We then go on to discuss the rubric I will use for their continuous or final assessment, and students are now in a better position to voice their concerns on rubrics and assessment expectations because they have engaged in a similar practice before. The key is to ensure that learners never feel threatened by a standard but are instead confident to interrogate it even as they are familiarising themselves with it.

Some final considerations

A nuanced understanding of a language in its contextual habitat requires time and a willingness to be transparent about the agendas that seem to drive the standards we communicate to learners. It is also an invitation to us as ELT practitioners to revisit our own subjectivities in order to truly engage our learners in a holistic and dialogic process of language learning. In doing this, we give learners the ability to spot multiple standards at play and make reasonably informed choices that allow them to position themselves in the way that reflects them best. Knowing that they can choose how to adapt to, accommodate, or subvert standards, I would argue, allows learners to make their second languages fully their own.

(Ruth is a teacher of English as a second language at a state university.)

Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.


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Features

Ranking public services with AI — A roadmap to reviving institutions like SriLankan Airlines

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24 hours ago

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2026/03/13

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Efficacy measures an organisation’s capacity to achieve its mission and intended outcomes under planned or optimal conditions. It differs from efficiency, which focuses on achieving objectives with minimal resources, and effectiveness, which evaluates results in real-world conditions. Today, modern AI tools, using publicly available data, enable objective assessment of the efficacy of Sri Lanka’s government institutions.

Among key public bodies, the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka emerges as the most efficacious, outperforming the Department of Inland Revenue, Sri Lanka Customs, the Election Commission, and Parliament. In the financial and regulatory sector, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) ranks highest, ahead of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, the Insurance Regulatory Commission, and the Sri Lanka Standards Institution.

Among state-owned enterprises, the Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) leads in efficacy, followed by Bank of Ceylon and People’s Bank. Other institutions assessed included the State Pharmaceuticals Corporation, the National Water Supply and Drainage Board, the Ceylon Electricity Board, the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, and the Sri Lanka Transport Board. At the lower end of the spectrum were Lanka Sathosa and Sri Lankan Airlines, highlighting a critical challenge for the national economy.

Sri Lankan Airlines, consistently ranked at the bottom, has long been a financial drain. Despite successive governments’ reform attempts, sustainable solutions remain elusive.

Globally, the most profitable airlines operate as highly integrated, technology-enabled ecosystems rather than as fragmented departments. Operations, finance, fleet management, route planning, engineering, marketing, and customer service are closely coordinated, sharing real-time data to maximise efficiency, safety, and profitability.

The challenge for Sri Lankan Airlines is structural. Its operations are fragmented, overly hierarchical, and poorly aligned. Simply replacing the CEO or senior leadership will not address these deep-seated weaknesses. What the airline needs is a cohesive, integrated organisational ecosystem that leverages technology for cross-functional planning and real-time decision-making.

The government must urgently consider restructuring Sri Lankan Airlines to encourage:

=Joint planning across operational divisions

=Data-driven, evidence-based decision-making

=Continuous cross-functional consultation

=Collaborative strategic decisions on route rationalisation, fleet renewal, partnerships, and cost management, rather than exclusive top-down mandates

Sustainable reform requires systemic change. Without modernised organisational structures, stronger accountability, and aligned incentives across divisions, financial recovery will remain out of reach. An integrated, performance-oriented model offers the most realistic path to operational efficiency and long-term viability.

Reforming loss-making institutions like Sri Lankan Airlines is not merely a matter of leadership change — it is a structural overhaul essential to ensuring these entities contribute productively to the national economy rather than remain perpetual burdens.

By Chula Goonasekera – Citizen Analyst

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Features

Why Pi Day?

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24 hours ago

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2026/03/13

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International Day of Mathematics falls tomorrow

The approximate value of Pi (π) is 3.14 in mathematics. Therefore, the day 14 March is celebrated as the Pi Day. In 2019, UNESCO proclaimed 14 March as the International Day of Mathematics.

Ancient Babylonians and Egyptians figured out that the circumference of a circle is slightly more than three times its diameter. But they could not come up with an exact value for this ratio although they knew that it is a constant. This constant was later named as π which is a letter in the Greek alphabet.

Archimedes

It was the Greek mathematician Archimedes (250 BC) who was able to find an upper bound and a lower bound for this constant. He drew a circle of diameter one unit and drew hexagons inside and outside the circle such that the sides of each hexagon touch the sides of the circle. In mathematics the circle passing through all vertices of a polygon is called a ‘circumcircle’ and the largest circle that fits inside a polygon tangent to all its sides is called an ‘incircle’. The total length of the smaller hexagon then becomes the lower bound of π and the length of the hexagon outside the circle is the upper bound. He realised that by increasing the number of sides of the polygon can make the bounds get closer to the value of Pi and increased the number of sides to 12,24,48 and 60. He argued that by increasing the number of sides will ultimately result in obtaining the original circle, thereby laying the foundation for the theory of limits. He ended up with the lower bound as 22/7 and the upper bound 223/71. He could not continue his research as his hometown Syracuse was invaded by Romans and was killed by one of the soldiers. His last words were ‘do not disturb my circles’, perhaps a reference to his continuing efforts to find the value of π to a greater accuracy.

Archimedes can be considered as the father of geometry. His contributions revolutionised geometry and his methods anticipated integral calculus. He invented the pulley and the hydraulic screw for drawing water from a well. He also discovered the law of hydrostatics. He formulated the law of levers which states that a smaller weight placed farther from a pivot can balance a much heavier weight closer to it. He famously said “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the earth”.

Mathematicians have found many expressions for π as a sum of infinite series that converge to its value. One such famous series is the Leibniz Series found in 1674 by the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, which is given below.

π = 4 ( 1 – 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + 1/9 – ………….)

The Indian mathematical genius Ramanujan came up with a magnificent formula in 1910. The short form of the formula is as follows.

π = 9801/(1103 √8)

For practical applications an approximation is sufficient. Even NASA uses only the approximation 3.141592653589793 for its interplanetary navigation calculations.

It is not just an interesting and curious number. It is used for calculations in navigation, encryption, space exploration, video game development and even in medicine. As π is fundamental to spherical geometry, it is at the heart of positioning systems in GPS navigations. It also contributes significantly to cybersecurity. As it is an irrational number it is an excellent foundation for generating randomness required in encryption and securing communications. In the medical field, it helps to calculate blood flow rates and pressure differentials. In diagnostic tools such as CT scans and MRI, pi is an important component in mathematical algorithms and signal processing techniques.

This elegant, never-ending number demonstrates how mathematics transforms into practical applications that shape our world. The possibilities of what it can do are infinite as the number itself. It has become a symbol of beauty and complexity in mathematics. “It matters little who first arrives at an idea, rather what is significant is how far that idea can go.” said Sophie Germain.

Mathematics fans are intrigued by this irrational number and attempt to calculate it as far as they can. In March 2022, Emma Haruka Iwao of Japan calculated it to 100 trillion decimal places in Google Cloud. It had taken 157 days. The Guinness World Record for reciting the number from memory is held by Rajveer Meena of India for 70000 decimal places over 10 hours.

Happy Pi Day!

The author is a senior examiner of the International Baccalaureate in the UK and an educational consultant at the Overseas School of Colombo.

by R N A de Silva

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Features

Sheer rise of Realpolitik making the world see the brink

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2 days ago

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2026/03/12

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A combined US-Israel attack on Iran.(BBC)

The recent humanly costly torpedoing of an Iranian naval vessel in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone by a US submarine has raised a number of issues of great importance to international political discourse and law that call for elucidation. It is best that enlightened commentary is brought to bear in such discussions because at present misleading and uninformed speculation on questions arising from the incident are being aired by particularly jingoistic politicians of Sri Lanka’s South which could prove deleterious.

As matters stand, there seems to be no credible evidence that the Indian state was aware of the impending torpedoing of the Iranian vessel but these acerbic-tongued politicians of Sri Lanka’s South would have the local public believe that the tragedy was triggered with India’s connivance. Likewise, India is accused of ‘embroiling’ Sri Lanka in the incident on account of seemingly having prior knowledge of it and not warning Sri Lanka about the impending disaster.

It is plain that a process is once again afoot to raise anti-India hysteria in Sri Lanka. An obligation is cast on the Sri Lankan government to ensure that incendiary speculation of the above kind is defeated and India-Sri Lanka relations are prevented from being in any way harmed. Proactive measures are needed by the Sri Lankan government and well meaning quarters to ensure that public discourse in such matters have a factual and rational basis. ‘Knowledge gaps’ could prove hazardous.

Meanwhile, there could be no doubt that Sri Lanka’s sovereignty was violated by the US because the sinking of the Iranian vessel took place in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone. While there is no international decrying of the incident, and this is to be regretted, Sri Lanka’s helplessness and small player status would enable the US to ‘get away with it’.

Could anything be done by the international community to hold the US to account over the act of lawlessness in question? None is the answer at present. This is because in the current ‘Global Disorder’ major powers could commit the gravest international irregularities with impunity. As the threadbare cliché declares, ‘Might is Right’….. or so it seems.

Unfortunately, the UN could only merely verbally denounce any violations of International Law by the world’s foremost powers. It cannot use countervailing force against violators of the law, for example, on account of the divided nature of the UN Security Council, whose permanent members have shown incapability of seeing eye-to-eye on grave matters relating to International Law and order over the decades.

The foregoing considerations could force the conclusion on uncritical sections that Political Realism or Realpolitik has won out in the end. A basic premise of the school of thought known as Political Realism is that power or force wielded by states and international actors determine the shape, direction and substance of international relations. This school stands in marked contrast to political idealists who essentially proclaim that moral norms and values determine the nature of local and international politics.

While, British political scientist Thomas Hobbes, for instance, was a proponent of Political Realism, political idealism has its roots in the teachings of Socrates, Plato and latterly Friedrich Hegel of Germany, to name just few such notables.

On the face of it, therefore, there is no getting way from the conclusion that coercive force is the deciding factor in international politics. If this were not so, US President Donald Trump in collaboration with Israeli Rightist Premier Benjamin Natanyahu could not have wielded the ‘big stick’, so to speak, on Iran, killed its Supreme Head of State, terrorized the Iranian public and gone ‘scot-free’. That is, currently, the US’ impunity seems to be limitless.

Moreover, the evidence is that the Western bloc is reuniting in the face of Iran’s threats to stymie the flow of oil from West Asia to the rest of the world. The recent G7 summit witnessed a coming together of the foremost powers of the global North to ensure that the West does not suffer grave negative consequences from any future blocking of western oil supplies.

Meanwhile, Israel is having a ‘free run’ of the Middle East, so to speak, picking out perceived adversarial powers, such as Lebanon, and militarily neutralizing them; once again with impunity. On the other hand, Iran has been bringing under assault, with no questions asked, Gulf states that are seen as allying with the US and Israel. West Asia is facing a compounded crisis and International Law seems to be helplessly silent.

Wittingly or unwittingly, matters at the heart of International Law and peace are being obfuscated by some pro-Trump administration commentators meanwhile. For example, retired US Navy Captain Brent Sadler has cited Article 51 of the UN Charter, which provides for the right to self or collective self-defence of UN member states in the face of armed attacks, as justifying the US sinking of the Iranian vessel (See page 2 of The Island of March 10, 2026). But the Article makes it clear that such measures could be resorted to by UN members only ‘ if an armed attack occurs’ against them and under no other circumstances. But no such thing happened in the incident in question and the US acted under a sheer threat perception.

Clearly, the US has violated the Article through its action and has once again demonstrated its tendency to arbitrarily use military might. The general drift of Sadler’s thinking is that in the face of pressing national priorities, obligations of a state under International Law could be side-stepped. This is a sure recipe for international anarchy because in such a policy environment states could pursue their national interests, irrespective of their merits, disregarding in the process their obligations towards the international community.

Moreover, Article 51 repeatedly reiterates the authority of the UN Security Council and the obligation of those states that act in self-defence to report to the Council and be guided by it. Sadler, therefore, could be said to have cited the Article very selectively, whereas, right along member states’ commitments to the UNSC are stressed.

However, it is beyond doubt that international anarchy has strengthened its grip over the world. While the US set destabilizing precedents after the crumbling of the Cold War that paved the way for the current anarchic situation, Russia further aggravated these degenerative trends through its invasion of Ukraine. Stepping back from anarchy has thus emerged as the prime challenge for the world community.

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