We have initiated a column run by Robin Walker, teacher, teacher trainer and an expert in pronunciation. Robin maintained a blog (https://englishglobalcom.wordpress. com/) for many years and fed it regularly until his retirement. He graciously accepted to share his posts with ELT NEWS readers. Terminology is provided in alphabetical order. Enjoy reading!
ELF – English as a lingua franca
There are various options for ‘E’, such as elision or epenthesis. However, since English as a lingua franca (ELF) is the thing put my comfortable little pronunciation teacher’s world totally on its head back in the late 1990s, the other ‘E’s will have to wait.
I’ve written about ELF basics so many times that I’m not going to do it again now. What is probably worth pointing out, however, is that when interest in ELF really took off some twenty years ago, it was referred to as English as an international language (EIL). Formally there are differences between the two terms, but they needn’t worry us here.
What I want to do now, then, is to look at some of the issues that surround an ELF approach to teaching pronunciation. To do this, I’m recovering something I wrote back in 2001 and which I co–authored with Kevin Keyes, a colleague who at the time was teaching applied linguistics at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil. We met in Madrid where I had just given my first ever conference paper on ELF pronunciation, and we decided to join forces against the avalanche of objections that the notion of ELF pronunciation was already generating.
Some questions on the phonology of English as an international language.
- What will happen to pronunciation standards without NS (Native Speakers) models?
In at least one recent study NNS (Non-Native Speakers) teachers admitted to avoiding pronunciation teaching because of a sense of inadequacy with respect to their own accent, and the as yet unattained (and for many unattainable) NS standard. Moreover, negative attitudes towards teaching pronunciation are not limited to NNS teachers.
- Does a ‘strong’ accent give a bad impression?
It is true that our accent, whatever it might be, reveals information about ourselves, and it is tempting to liken a strong accent to turning up to a meeting in shabby clothes – it gives entirely the wrong impression. However, caution needs to be exercised as to exactly what constitutes such an accent, starting with our determining who is defining ‘strong’, and to what end. Precisely because of the shift in the role of English in the world, the L1-user of English can no longer be considered the sole or superior reference. If ‘strong’ means essentially unintelligible regardless of the listener’s background, then we have a problem. Unfortunately, the term ‘strong’ is all too often used by L1-speakers to justify attitudes and behaviours that are not remotely linguistic.
- Is the LFC (Lingua Franca Core) not a justification for mediocrity?
Good teaching has always been about helping learners to explore their limits. There is no attempt with the LFC to prevent teachers from doing this, and were learners to express interest in acquiring a particular L1 accent, be it one of the prestige options or any of the regional or social variants, then the teacher would need to respond accordingly.
- How do you teach an accent that nobody speaks?
Nobody is born with an LFC accent, but this does not impede its use in teaching. There are two main considerations:
- Few teachers genuinely have an RP (Received Pronunciation) or an American accent yet despite this try to teach it, or, worse, get frightened off because they know their NS (Native Speakers) or NNS (Non-Native Speakers) accent is not one of the prestige options.
- Different teachers’ different accents are all perfectly suited to the task in hand provided they contain the core features of the LFC. These varied accents will, of course, also possess a number of non-core features which will identify the individual – i.e. they are themselves as they teach through the LFC, and are not filtering their personal identities through an imposed accent.
- What suggestion is made for an alternative form of approach to the question of mutual intelligibility in international English?
Assuming that there is resistance to the LFC, on whatever grounds, what alternative way exists of approaching the question of mutual intelligibility in the exchanges that take place in English between speakers for whom it is a foreign language? Can British/American norms honestly be relied on in all the varied teaching conditions that exist around the world? If so, the case has to be made as to why and how these norms are to be disseminated, maintained and guaranteed as a means of sustaining communicative efficiency, especially in light of the fact that users of these versions of English are in a minority, and that the norms themselves are unstable.
- Why is it felt that GA (General American) or RP (Received Pronunciation) are appropriate versions for language learners? It cannot be because either ‘accent’ is readily identifiable, both having a range of phonetic settings that indicate complex intralingual variation. Neither accent is necessarily ‘easy’ to understand: indeed, some have argued the case for Standard Scottish English in this regard. It cannot be because we are confident that EFL teachers around the world are all aware of, and competent in, the phonology of both versions, and are therefore reliably transmitting one of them to their students. Nor can it be because every Bilingual English Speaker (BES) teacher whose first language is other than English has satisfactorily eliminated all traces of their L1 from their speech.
- How are we to guarantee, realistically, the homogenous transmission of these accents to learners throughout the world? The truth is that we cannot. Given the exigencies of everyday life and the reality of many teachers’ professional routines, it would cause no hardship for the interlocutor if the maintenance of an imposed phonetic parameter were to be relaxed.
- What is it about pronunciation?
Prescriptive attitudes persist in all fields of teaching, and clearly there is a place for normative criteria. The rejection of CLT (Communicative Language Teaching) that we are too familiar with (‘I don’t want my students to come out with speech that is full of errors’) is one that depresses us. Yet it seems to us that pronunciation and the question of accent provokes a greater storm of non-linguistic arguments than other aspects of learning teaching. While we can talk with a person from Liverpool, England or Atlanta, Georgia and can identify a ‘non-standard’ accent, we are told to be much less tolerant of speakers who are identifiably Latin American or Asian. Our particular concern is that this question of tolerance is so rarely related in a responsible way to matters of intelligibility, and too often allied with preconceptions and prescriptivism that are essentially non-linguistic.
