This volume included Randolph Quirk's paper "The English language in a global context " in which he stated that there is no purpose in teaching non-standard varieties of English in EFL (English as a foreign language) and ESL (English as a second language) countries" (Seidlhofer 2003: 8).
Braj B. Kachru reacted on Quirk's paper by publishing "Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: the English language in the outer circle " in 1985 in which he focuses on standards of English, meaning that there is more than just one single standard to be taught (Seidlhofer 2003: 8).
The theoretical positions have been labeled by the proponents themselves, as liberation linguistics; that is how Quirk refers to Kachru's position meaning that teachers overvalue the importance of regional, social and ethnic varieties out of idealistic, humanitarian and democratic reasons. But the term liberation linguistics also contains an underlying ideological motivation since, as Quirk himself states, English was the language used by Gandhi and Nehru when liberating India from the British raj and deserves a very special place in such countries. Kachru, on the other hand refers to Quirk's position as deficit linguistics, a term which has been used when describing language learners poor competence in using vocabulary, grammar and phonology of a language. Kachru criticizes Quirk's position and argues that Quirk sees applied linguistics separated from its context (Mesthrie, Bhatt 2008: 201).
3.1 One Global Standard.
Randolph Quirk argues for a global standard in order to maintain comprehensibility among different nations and bases his claim on the so called Kingman Report on Teaching of English in the UK. The results of this report showed that more and more teachers think that children should be exposed to varieties of English, leading to dissatisfying results concerning the language level of these children.
