English as a Lingua Franca:

Challenging the ‘standard’

English as a Lingua Franca:

Challenging the ‘standard’

Jennifer JenkinsTESOL Annual Convention

New Orleans, 17 March 2011

Jennifer JenkinsTESOL Annual Convention

New Orleans, 17 March 2011

Challenging the ‘standard‘standard’’

Common meanings of the adj. ‘standard’: • Average/normal/usual: e.g. the standard

women’s shoe size in the UK is 6; televisions are a standard feature of most hotel rooms.

• Widely used: e.g. the standard text for teachers on the pronunciation of American English is Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Goodwin (2007 15th printing, 2010 2nd ed.).

When it comes to languagelanguage ….

‘standard’ means “regarded as correct or acceptable by the majority of educated speakers of or authorities on a language” (Encarta World English Dictionary).

The Prince of Wales …. described American English as “very corrupting” and emphasized the need to maintain the quality of language after giving his backing to the British Council’s English 2000 project… Speaking after the launch, Prince Charles elaborated on his view of the American influence. “People tend to invent all sorts of nouns and verbs, and make words that shouldn’t be”.(The Times, 24 March 1995)

Change over timetime

Those who spoke the language of Beowulf did not view themselves as speaking “old English”. They did not view their language [8th-11th Centuries] as a developmental stage of some future language, any more than we do so today. (Brutt-Griffler 2002, World English. A study of its development, p. 3)

Standard English = sacred commandments?

With the exception of orthodox religious observance, language use is the only form of behaviour I can think of where intelligent and highly educated people still defer without question to ancient authorities, treating arbitrary pronouncements on subjunctives and semi-colons, their origins long forgotten and their logic obscure, as sacred commandments or unbreakable natural laws. (Deborah Cameron, review of Hitchings, The Language Wars, in the Guardian Review, 12 February 2011)

Kachru’s three circle model of English

EXPANDING CIRCLE

OUTER CIRCLE

INNER CIRCLE

Statistically, native speakers are in a minority for [English] language use, and thus for language change, for language maintenance, and for the ideologies and beliefs associated with the language (Brumfit 2001, Individual Freedom in Language Teaching, p. 116)

Universities develop academic skills in the the global standard formglobal standard form, so far as written English is concerned, in order to generate graduates with international competence… In spoken academic English too, learning must be based on the lexis, grammar and much of the pragmatics of the global form the global form … (Phillipson 2010, Linguistic Imperialism Continued, p. 206)

Which brings me to ELF

Defining ELF communicationELF is English as it is used as a contact language among speakers from different first languages (Jenkins J. 2009, World Englishes 2nd ed. Routledge)

Native English speakers are not excluded from definitions of ELF communication, but are considered to participate on an equal footing, not as norm providers.

ELF and EFL

ELF EFL1.Part of Global Englishes paradigm Part of Foreign Languages

paradigm

2.Difference perspective Deficit perspective

3.Metaphors of contact/change Metaphors of interference/fossilization

4.Code-switching seen as a Code-switching seen as errorsbilingual resource resulting from gaps in knowledge

5. Goal is successful use of skills and Goal is mimicking native English asstrategies (e.g. accommodation) closely as possible

ELF empirical research findings

• pronunciation• lexicogrammar • morphology• idioms• pragmatics

ELF pronunciation

The Lingua Franca Core (LFC):• most consonants except voiced/voiceless th• vowel length distinctions• tonic (nuclear) stress placement • NNS variants acceptable in other areasBUT:• not seen as definitive – replications needed• accommodation skills crucial(Jenkins 2000, The Phonology of English as an International Language , OUP)

ELF lexicogrammar/morphologyObserved regularities

(or ‘deadly grammatical sins’)

• uncountable nouns to countable, e.g. informations, advices, fundings, softwares

• zero marking of 3rd person –s in present simple tense e.g. she think, he suggest

• merging of who and which, e.g. a paper who will be published, it’s the content who is important

• use of an all-purpose question tag, e.g. isn’t it? is it?• use of greater explicitness, e.g. black colour, how long time…?• morphemes, e.g. forsify, boringdom, discriminization, levelize

Similar regularization processes in native Englishes

• uncountable to countable, e.g. teas, coffees, beers, etc., more recently accommodations, evidences, etc.

• all-purpose (BrEng) question tag innit?• plural to singular, e.g. an agenda, a phenomena, a

criteria, this data.

But it’s not quite so simple…• On the one hand, we have actual descriptions of certain

“observed regularities”• But on the other hand, ELF use is also inherently fluid:

“ELF users exploit the potential of the language, they are fully involved in the interactions, whether for work or play. They are focused on the purpose of the talk and on their interlocutors as people … absorbed in the ad hoc, situated negotiation of meaning” (Seidlhofer 2009, ‘Common ground and different realities’, World Englishes 28/2: 242).

ELF pragmatic skills

• Code-switching especially to promote solidarity and project cultural identity

• Accommodating to promote solidarity and intelligibility, even if resulting in forms that would be errors in ENL, including so-called ‘false friends’ (Hülmbauer: ‘true friends’)

Code-switching to promote solidarity

S1 (Japanese) Anna …. galletas (biscuits/cookies)S2 (Italian) mhm, niceS1 take twoS2 no, one is enough (S1 signals to take two, S2 takes two)S2 ah, with nutsS1 nuts and chocolateS2 mhm, niceS1 te gusta?S2 mucho

(Cogo & Dewey 2011, in press)

Code-switching to project cultural identity

Jean: pictures of them in Australia,in Katmandu, in TibetAnna: they sent pictures ... on the internet?Jean: it’s nice but it’sAnna: too much, eh?Jean: cheesyAnna & Karen yeahKaren: yeah, a bit too much I thinkJean: so ... blue flower we say ... fleur bleueAnna: why? ... to say that it’s cheesy?Jean: yeah, fleur bleue means ... you know when you have

these pictures with little angelsKaren & Anna: ah, yeahKaren: kitschig

(Cogo & Dewey 2011, in press)

To sum up so far: ELF speakers ….

• make extensive use of accommodation strategies• code-switch for a range of communicative purposes• innovate in English, regularising the virtual language

and making use of their multilingual resources to create their own preferred forms

• in all of these, prioritise communicative effectiveness over narrow definitions of ‘correctness’ according to the rules of ‘standard’ native English.

… the crucial terms ‘community’ and ‘variety’ are, by and large, still used in the same way as they were long before the days of mass international air travel, let alone electronic communication … at a time of pervasive and widespread global communication, the old notion of community, based purely on frequent face-to-face contact among people living in close proximity to each other, clearly does not hold any more…

An alternative

A much more appropriate concept is that of communities of practice characterized by ‘mutual engagement’ in shared practices, taking part in some jointly negotiated ‘enterprise’, and making use of members’ ‘shared repertoire’ (Wenger 1998:72ff.)

(Seidlhofer 2009, p. 238)

Shared but changing repertoire

Members of ELF communities of practice make “use of a shared repertoire which is jointly developed …. to suit the particular purposes of their common endeavour. In other words, ELF speakers with their individual backgrounds and resources contribute to a situational resource pool which changes as speaker constellations change.”

(Hülmbauer 2009, in Mauranen & Ranta (eds) 2009, p. 325).

The notion that English varieties can only develop in intra (vs inter) group communication “looks back to the nation state past and to the construction of identity rooted in territory. Henceforth, it may well be that identity will derive from the transnational networks that are interest and work based and which cross territorial frontiers” (Wright 2004, Language Policy and Language Planning, p. 177)

English is a translocal language, a language of fluidity and fixity that moves across, while becoming embedded in, the materiality of localities and social relations. English is bound up with transcultural flows, a language of imagined communities and refashioning identities. (Pennycook 2007, Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows, pp. 5-6)

Misinterpretations of ELF from two main ideologies:

One group argue that ELF is unitary and monolithic The other group argue that ELF means ‘anything goes’ and that NNSEs should conform to native English.ELF is neither of these things.

Even a sociolinguist

… some French and German speakers have invented English words which do not exist in English … The true repository of English is its native speakers, and there are so many of them that they can afford to let non-native speakers do what they like with it so long as what they do is confined to a few words here and there.

(Trudgill 2002, Sociolinguistic Variation and Change, pp. 150-151)

A few years later: begrudging acceptance (for the wrong reason)

... it has been suggested that it may not make too much sense always to insist on close adherence to native-speaker models, especially where these cause difficulty. Why should Italians spend hours of effort mastering the English th sounds if they are going to be speaking English to Russians who cannot pronounce these sounds either? Does it matter if Polish people say The possibility to solve this problem (rather than The possibility of solving this problem as ENL speakers would), if they are talking to Finns who would probably make the same mistake themselves?(Trudgill & Hannah 2008, International English 5th ed., pp. 7-8)

Testing of English

Global Englishes = NS Englishes?E.g. the new Pearson Test of English: “to create an international exam we started by hiring item writers from the UK, the US and Australia …” “The first thing we look for is comprehensibility – are they [non-native speakers] understandable to the native speaker?”(Interview in EL Gazette Sept 2008, p.10)

A Malaysian student’s IELTS experience

…[the IELTS] listening is really classic British voice, er British accents that we never heard it beFORE. And then they talk about the er lunchbox. When I reach HERE, then I know what is lunchbox that the children bring to school [all laugh]. I never heard about lunchbox, I never heard about all those things ….

(Jenkins & Maringe, focus group data)

A Chinese academic’s experienceof publishing in an academic journal

… it will no longer be necessary (as is the case with the author of this article who, incidentally, has never set foot in an English-speaking country) to have her China English adapted to one of the two standard varieties by a member of the Inner Circle, in order to ensure its acceptance at an international level. We need one circle, not three.

(Hu 2004, ‘Why China English should stand alongside British, American, and the other ‘world Englishes’ ‘, English Today 20/2: 32)

Implications for English languageteaching practices (for now)

Having an ELF approach involves:• developing accommodation skills even when they result in

‘non-standard’ forms (ie. a focus on successful communication vs ‘correctness’ in the narrow sense)

• not discouraging codeswitching/creativity• accepting vs correcting the observed regularities• familiarising learners with a wide range of kinds of Englishes see the key literature on all this, especially:

Walker 2010, Teaching the Pronunciation of ELF (OUP)Seidlhofer 2011, in press, Understanding ELF (OUP)

• Not forgetting implications for native English speakers too!

The native speaker disadvantage?

… in many international fora, competent speakers of English as a second language are more comprehensible than native speakers, because they can be better at adjusting their language for people from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

(Phillipson 2003, English-Only Europe? p. 167)

An Erasmus student’s view

I see that if I’m in the middle of people that are not English and they’re speaking English and so there is no problem understanding them. Probably my obstacle was to understand like really English people talking(Italian student, in LINEE Project, Work Package 7)

What next?

English next: The new language which is rapidly ousting the language of Shakespeare as the world’s lingua franca is English itself [i.e. not Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic etc.]. But this is not English as we have known it, and have taught it in the past as a foreign language. It is a new phenomenon …

(Graddol D. 2006, English Next, London: British Council, p. 11)

…an international lingua franca

But the point is that it is only international to the extent that it is not [native English speakers’] language… Other people actually own it.

H.G. Widdowson at the 27th Annual TESOL Convention in Atlanta, 1993, and in ‘The Ownership of English’, TESOL Quarterly 28/2, 1994 p. 385.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you for listening.

Key ELF corpora

ACE (Asian Corpus of English): www.ied.edu.hk/rcleams/view.php?secid=227

ELFA (English as a Lingua Franca in Academicsettings):

www.eng.helsinki.fi/elfa/elfcorpus.htm

VOICE (Vienna-Oxford International Corpus ofEnglish): www.univie.ac.at/voice

Key Readings in ELF

Archibald, A. , A. Cogo & J. Jenkins (eds.) 2011, in press. Latest Trends in ELF Research. (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing).

Baker W. 2009. The cultures of English as a Lingua Franca. TESOL Quarterly 43/4: 567-92.Cogo A. & M. Dewey 2011, in press. Analysing English as a Lingua Franca: A corpus-driven

investigation (London: Continuum).Jenkins J., M. Dewey & A. Cogo in press. Review of developments in research into English as a

Lingua Franca. Language Teaching 44/3 July 2011.Jenkins J. 2007. English as a Lingua Franca: Attitude and Identity (Oxford: Oxford University

Press).Kirkpatrick A. 2010. English as a Lingua Franca in ASEAN (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong

Press).Journal of English as a Lingua Franca from 2012 (Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton).Mauranen A. & E. Ranta (eds.) 2009. English as a Lingua Franca. Studies and Findings (Newcastle-

upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing).Seidlhofer B. 2011 in press. Understanding English as a Lingua Franca (Oxford: Oxford University

Press).Walker R. 2010. Teaching the Pronunciation of English as a Lingua Franca (Oxford: Oxford

University Press).