Downshifting Discourse: Revitalizing BASIC ENGLISH 850 as a Leaner Lingua Franca in Global Working-Class Literacy

My core postulate is that there is a widening chasm between small islands of privileged middle-class learners of efl across the developing world, the efl haves – and the masses of working-class and ordinary learners, often ‘low achievers’ in school parlance, the efl have-nots. ‘money talks english’, and generates vast topographies of inequity in global discourse. basic human discourse rights within a tesol of equity and solidarity in the 21st century suggests that ideally, all individuals on this planet should have the right to learn an efficient, compact lingua franca for trans-cultural and trans-national communication, in effect ‘reclaiming the commons of discourse’ through pedagogies for plainer talk. i present a vintage model for building solid competence in a simpler, leaner mini-form of elf, adapting ogden/richards’ basic english (850 headwords, www.basic-english.org), developed in the 1930s, as a sustainable foundation and ‘target’ plateau level for l2 english literacy needs for the ‘two-thirds world’ of ordinary workers (finn, 1999), the bottom 4 billion of humanity. basic can also be used for vertical translation, to sensitize native speakers to the ‘meaning of meaning’ in ogden’s classic sense (templer, 2012). and is a power tool for democratizing knowledge, creating a large library of classics and more complex discourse translated vertically into basic 850 for extensive free voluntary reading by the masses. necessary is a research center exploring simplified modes of english for the social majorities (templer, 2011, 2012).