ELF #4: Orienting your class to ELF

Finally then, my eagerly awaited (by at least three people) post on how I believe one could go about orienting one’s classroom to English as a lingua franca (ELF). If you’re interested you can read parts 1, 2 and 3 too.

In order to write this post I read a fair bit of literature with titles that refer to teaching ELF or an ELF pedagogy, only to find that they deal with culture in rather broad terms (McKay 2002), critique methodology  (Holliday 2005), or provide rough frameworks for teaching (Dewey 2012). So far it seems that in 12 or so years of intensive research, the ELF field has produced one book aimed at the practical teaching of ELF, Robin Walker’s (2010) Teaching the Pronunciation of English as a Lingua Franca. While Dewey (2012) may rightly decry the devotion to norms and interlanguage still present in the Delta syllabus, this is perhaps partly a product of the lack of any practical help for teachers who would like to prepare  their students for ELF communication, and researchers themselves should perhaps bear some of the blame. I strongly suspect that the take up of ELF would be helped as much by a book of decent classroom techniques and activities as by advocating for its inclusion in in-service training programs. It is with a toe in the researcher camp, and the other 9 in the teacher camp, that I write this post.

It might be helpful here to state a few things that I believe, and that the suggestions that follow rest on:

• There is a thing that people do called English as a lingua franca, that involves communication between speakers of different L1s in English (leaving aside native speakers (NS*) and same L1 non-native speakers (NNS) for the sake of simplicity).
• This ELF communication will be different from communication between NSs in grammatical, phonological, syntactical and lexical forms. In addition these forms will vary between individuals and contexts. This variation is natural, and not deficient in terms of native speaker norms.
• This variation means that there is no such thing, nor will there likely ever be, as an ELF model or variety.
• A student’s own conception of the language is more important than a model is anyway. Students are exposed to multiple models in every class.
• We can’t teach ELF, but we can help to prepare students for meeting English in this kind of context (and others) by simulating it in our classrooms. 
• The decision to orient, or not, your classroom to ELF should be taken as part of a reflection of your students’ needs (the macro-context).

It might also be helpful to say here that these suggestions are things that I have done, try to do now, or may try to do in future in my classroom. For those not familiar with this blog, that means groups of first year engineering and design students at a university in South Korea.

Decentering Intelligibilty

If ELF can be said to have an ideology (and for the record, I would say that it does), it could be viewed as one of decentralization. This is in the sense of removing native-speaker English from the center of (often criticised) models such as Kachru’s. From a teaching point of view it means removing yourself from the center of the classroom. The change in role of a teacher from a dispenser of knowledge to a co-constructor has long been a tenet of CLT in general, but where ELF is concerned this is especially relevant in matters of intelligibility.

In an ELF oriented classroom, a native speaker teacher simply cannot be the sole judge of students’ intelligibility. Firstly, a native-speaker tends to approach meaning-making from the top down rather than the bottom up (Jenkins 2000). While Jenkins talks in relation to phonology only, I would argue that it applies in general. In other words, NSs try to match the whole of a student utterance to a range of possible meanings, before working back to the constituent parts. NNSs, on the other had, tackling individual signals (words, sounds) first, building them into utterances, and finally looking for meaning**. Secondly, in a lot of English teaching, intelligibility is bound up with native speaker norms, with the inference that learning these norms will make the student intelligible to native speakers. For students who will use English as a lingua franca, this seems untenable.

So the big question then. What can I do about it? Well, it’s pretty simple. Your students are better judges of intelligibility to other NNS than you are. This means getting them involved in judging it at every level, and by every level I mean the one that really matters (in Korea at least), testing. My classes loosely follow the Willis & Willis conception of TBLT, which means each week ends with students presenting a “polished” version of whatever task I set them for that week. This is evaluated to give their weekly quiz score, as required by our program. During one group/person’s performance, other students listen and grade them on their intelligibility.

I am aware that grades are important, and the concept of students giving each other grades may well be a new one. In general however, my students have taken to this quite well. Here are some reasons why I think it might be so:

• I explain the reasoning for doing<span style="ages or my preferred path of numbers of breakdowns in misunderstanding.
• I always have a good number of students evaluating so that an average can be taken and no one person can inflate or deflate a grade too much.
• I make sure the teacher and performing students have a right to ask why a certain grade was given.
• I don’t ask for examples of misunderstanding. While this would be useful, it tends to drive students down the path of least resistance, which is to tick 100% so they don’t have to provide examples.  

This also has the extra bonus of freeing up time and attention for me to concentrate on grading other things.

As I said, this works well for me, but it tends to happen in well-structured groups using institutionalized processes. This minimizes the face-threatening nature of evaluating misunderstanding. However, no such neat and sanitized methods for signalling non-comprehension exist in more open pair or group work, and students are fond of adopting the “let it pass” strategy. This is definitely an unresolved problem in my class, so this solution falls into the things I might try in future category mentioned above.

My solution would be to try to partly institutionalize and sanitize the process of signalling non-comprehension. One unrealized ambition of mine is to introduce a load of “classroom chunks” for functions such as giving an opinion, politely disagreeing and showing that you don’t understand. NS-like chunks could simply be given, but a truly ELF-oriented approach to this would probably involve negotiating the chunks with input given in the form of NNS examples drawn from corpora such as VOICE. I suspect that some of the face threat involved in showing that you don’t understand is exacerbated by being stripped of L1 based politeness strategies. Having a recognized and validated (by the students) system for situations like this may go some way to restoring these strategies, as well as perhaps legitimizing misunderstanding as a natural part of classroom life (something which may have been drummed out of the students through their previous experience of English at high school). My other solution for sanitizing the process slightly is to change the medium, and have students complete written feedback forms for each other. In theory removing the need to give face to face feedback removes some of the potential for that face to be threatened. I’d hope that employing one or both of these strategies might help miscommunication to be signalled more often and more easily.

It might seem that I am getting slightly distracted from ELF here. After all, signalling non-comprehension is pretty crucial to any classroom, and presumably is the first stage in Long’s (1983) Interaction Hypothesis, a fairly important concept in second language acquisition. However, in a ELF classroom, it’s perhaps the most important thing. Here’s why. I said in a previous post that ELF draws it’s standards/ideals from people, not norms.*** What this might mean in practice then, is that your students should be the sole arbiters of intelligibility in a ELF oriented activity. In other words, if it works, it stays, if it doesn’t, it goes. I’m sensing that there may be gnashing of teeth and throwing of toys out the pram here, but stay with me for the rest of this post at least. Your role  as a teacher during this then, is to decenter yourself completely, and I mean go sit in the corner – I do, and WATCH! Note here, I say watch, not listen, not monitor (hearing is ok though). Let them get on with it, and intervene only in the following cases:

• Students are not doing the task. It’s probably best to politely ask why this is so. Perhaps they didn’t understand the instructions?
• Students are using the L1 to discuss. In this case, I usually ask them what they’re trying to say and we look at how it could be done in English.
• Students are looking a word up in a dictionary. At the very least, this becomes useful vocabulary/teachable moment for later. It’s also a good chance to help them choose the most understandable word and understand the usage.
• Student understanding breaks down, and is not being repaired by the students.

I put the last bullet in boldface as it is the most important part one, and the one where intervention may be most necessary. Firstly, figuring out why understanding broke down is important, but tricky. My suggestion, in a monolingual class,would be to let the students talk about it in L1. This has the advantage of speed, so students can get back on task, and exactness, as well as being able to deploy L1 politeness strategies in a high face-threat situation. Once the students understand where the misunderstanding occurred, the first thing to do is try to get them to figure out a repair strategy themselves. If they really can’t, then I suggest at least negotiating a strategy with them. The idea is to get them to rely on their own communicative resources. “This is how I’d say it” should be your very last resort.

Outside of the above cases, however, your role as a teacher is not to interfere. This means not monitoring, not taking notes, not recasting. The students, and you should tell them this, are responsible for deciding what is intelligible and what is not. Go make a cup of tea and let them get on with it.

Right then teeth grinders, it’s proviso time. Firstly, the ideal situation for this is a multi-lingual class. Not a reality for most of us in Korea. Still, I think it has value even with a mono-lingual class. It still gets students considering their interlocutors and levelling their language accordingly, especially with a range of levels in one class. This is an incredibly important ELF skill. However, there is the potential for language that follows L1 syntactic patterns to be more understandable to a fellow L1 speaker than a speaker of a different L1, plus there is the possibility of Korean English loan words appearing that would be unintelligible to a non-Korean resident (including, potentially, an NS of English). My solution to this would be to have the students record themselves, and then listen back and try to identify parts that sound especially Korean, or include loanwords. More on this reflexive approach to stuff in further posts.

Finally, addressing the toy chuckers again, I want to make very clear what I am not saying here. Note that I am talking about ELF oriented activities above, by which I might mean giving instructions in pairs about how to do something (perhaps topically engineering or computer based). This means:

• I am not saying that you should do this all of the time. In fact, I think I’d say that you should NOT do this all of the time. You may have noticed that this provides little in the way of pushing (norm-based) accuracy, nor much in the way of complexity. In monolingual classes you’re also probably running the risk of reinforcing L1 phonology transfer errors****.
• I do not do this all of the time (for reasons stated above).
• In general Standard English norms provide a useful reference point for teaching. The imperative, for example, would provide the basis for the activity above. However there has to be some tolerance of variation in these norms.
• There is no reason why you can’t/shouldn’t teach the norms in an ELF classroom, but you might want to think about how rigorously you insist on accuracy in producing them.
• I am not saying that this approach is suitable, appropriate or useful for everyone. Many students want/need to acquire native speaker norms. I’d also say that it’s perhaps not the best use of the qualities that a native speaker can bring to the classroom, and if that’s what students have paid for then they may be disappointed with this approach.

That said, I’ll finish this post by going back to my students. They come into my class fresh out of high school, where they have spent three years learning fairly insignificant native speaker norms in order to pass the most significant exam of their lives, and wind up apologising to me if I recast one of their utterances. This cannot possibly be a good attitude for someone who wishes to speak a language, and so an approach that relaxes attitudes to NS norms, gets the NS out of the way for a bit, and allows students to get on with making meaning with each other, can surely only be empowering.

More ELF orientation to come. Cheers,

Alex

* I’ll acknowledge here that “native-speaker” is a problematic term. As this post largely concerns teaching in Korea, I’m taking the Korean immigration definition of someone who holds a passport and a degree from one of the “big seven” English speaking countries.

** Actually, in writing this, I’m not sure that’s quite how it works. I would say that my L2 listening process worked on a whole range of levels depending on the situation.

*** This is not to say that there is no room for people in the meaning-making of English as a native language.

**** This will happen in almost any meaning-focused activity with a monolingual class, regardless of orientation.

References

Dewey, M. (2012). “Towards a post-normative approach: learning the pedagogy of ELF.” Journal of English as a Lingua Franca. 1(1) 141-170.

Holliday, A. (2005). The struggle to teach English as an international language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jenkins, J. (2000). The phonology of English as an international language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Long, M. H. (1983) ‘Native speaker/non native speaker conversation and the negotiation of comprehensible input’. Applied Linguistics. 4(2) pp. 126–141.

McKay, S. L. (2002). Teaching English as an International Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Walker, R. (2010). Teaching the pronunciation of English as a lingua franca.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

English as a lingua franca #3: Should I? Could I?

This is the third piece in a series I’ve been working on about English as a lingua franca. I’m focusing on this area in my MA dissertation, so it’s good to think these things out. So far I’ve had a go at defining ELF, and describing it, and now I’d like first like to look at if it’s appropriate, and second if it’s even possible to teach ELF. I’ve a feeling that this one might go long, so I’ll get straight to it.

Should I teach ELF?

I’ve talked before of the “plot” view, in which ELF is perceived as a threat to the English currently being taught in classrooms, about to sweep in and replace Standard English with something ugly, reduced and devoid of culture.  Regardless of the fact that a revolution like this would be entirely impossible, it also doesn’t hold water in the light of ELF literature. Most of my reading (Jenkins 2012, McKay 2002) leaves this decision in the hands of local educators, and quite rightly so. A decision as to whether to teach ELF should be based on the language needs of the students.

In the case of my class things are not exactly clear cut. I’ll start with some stats though. According to Beneke (1991), 80% of exchanges in English involve no native speakers. I’ll admit I’m quoting this without having seen the research (no intellectual rigour on this blog I’m afraid), and I’m curious as to how this figure was arrived at, but it at least seems to be accepted that non-native speakers now outnumber native speakers (see Crystal 1997, Graddol 1997) . Thus the balance of probabilities would suggest that my students are more likely to converse with a NNSE than a native one. Further to that, the US makes up 10% and 9% of Korea’s export and import trade, whereas China, Japan, Saudia Arabia and Singapore make up a combined 35% and 40% respectively (source). Chances are then that if my students are using English for business purposes it’s going to be with non-native English speakers from one of those countries. It’s my view that at least some of my teaching should be directed towards preparing them for this.

On the other hand, there are solid arguments for not teaching ELF. Perhaps the principal one of these is that probably the most important use of English that my students will make is in taking the TOEIC exam (a point echoed by Wang & Hill 2011), which remains resolutely native speaker centred despite the “international” in its name. However, my students already study TOEIC in a separate class, and my class is supposed to be the more communication centered, “conversation” class. Having spoken to my students, I don’t get the impression that they are exactly crying out for more TOEIC.

Another reason against ELF would be that the students would prefer to learn a native variety, for reasons of identification with the culture, or because they see it as a prestige form. They may also simply not be aware that English can take other forms, as the English taught (and more importantly examined) in schools is based almost entirely on imitating native speaker norms, what Sifakis (2004) would call N(orm)-bound usage.  To these students I would say that there would still be plenty of opportunity to pick up native-like features from me, and that while they may wish to speak native-like English, not everyone will, or can, so being receptive to other varieties is at least as important, and probably more so, than speaking them.

There is a further reason that strikes me as actually quite a convincing reason not to teach ELF, and that is that it seems to have done pretty well so far without being taught. Despite Mckay’s (2002:103) claim that the teaching of ELF is widespread, there seems to be very little literature on exactly how to go about teaching it, and very few commercially published materials to support teachers. All of this would suggest that there is no concerted effort currently being made to teach ELF, though I am prepared to be wrong here. Regardless of this lack of teaching, as we saw earlier, the global dominance of English and the number of lingua franca interactions only seems to be increasing, and on the evidence of what I have read, people are generally managing to cope without having been taught. So do we actually need to “teach” ELF, or can we just keep teaching “English” and leave it to our students to figure out how to use it? My answer to this is that the classroom often provides a safe practice space for real-life situations. If we can simulate some ELF-like positions in class, surely it will help students to approach them with more confidence and understanding if they have to do it for real.

In this section I have, I hope, established that ELF might at least be an option for my classes, and perhaps others in Korea. However, that is only half of the battle. It is not, to me at least, especially clear about how one would go about teaching ELF. However, the next section will explore some reasons that I think do make it possible.

Could I teach ELF?

In my previous two posts I looked at the problems with defining ELF and in describing and codifying its features. In general ELF tends to work in terms of language variation and localised communities of practice. The lack of a model seems to be the main criticism of ELF from a teaching point of view – back to our old friend Sowden (2012:5) who says “seeking to derive artificial norms from these ad hoc procedures is inappropriate”. I actually agree with him here, and in my view even a pedagogic ELF core is not likely to happen (with the exception of phonology). This makes life hard for curriculum designers and textbook writers, who need some kind of framework on which to hang everything, as well as teachers of course.

However, rejecting ELF on the basis of the lack of a model perhaps assumes that there is a clear model to replace it. The alternative would be, I guess, “Standard English”, or “Native Speaker” English. Trying to define these terms is just as fraught with difficulty as defining ELF is, and working out what constitutes a model is also an interesting one because they are, to a degree, abstractions. As a very obvious example, most of the materials that I have to teach are American English, and I am a Brit. What implications does this have for the model in my classroom, and what my students should be aspiring to? The truth is probably very few implications at all. What my students bring to the classroom, and how they use it to make meaning are far more important than either the materials or models that I can provide. The truth is that, as intermediate students, they are nowhere near close enough to any model of English for it to make much difference.

This may fit with a different view of standards and models in the classroom. I mentioned above Sifakis’s (2004) categorization of classes where imitating native speaker norms is the only goal as N-bound. This is, fairly sensibly, one end of a continuum. Fairly sensible because if you took this to its literal extreme, you’d have to correct students every time that they said something even slightly removed from what a native speaker would say. This is providing, of course, you could figure out what a native speaker was in the first place. Anyway, at the other end of this continuum is the C-bound classroom, the C standing for communication, comprehensibility and culture, and the goals of this classroom are sharing of backgrounds and mutual intelligibility. Perhaps this end of the continuum would represent the “semiotic bricolage” that Scott Thornbury talked about in a recent post.

As hinted at above, every classroom has a degree of C-boundedness. For example, my “teacher-speak” is not really a native-speaker model. It’s much slower, less idiomatic and much less playful. In the same way, I’d much prefer my students to be comprehensible than “accurate”, so if I, and more importantly their classmates, understand what they’re saying, then it’s all good. Finally, culture-wise, it’s more about what each person brings to the class than trying to teach culture too much, though there is an element of cultural comparison going on, for instance when I introduced Labov’s Western Narrative Structure I tried to get students to think of how they told stories in Korean. All of this, in the end, means that in our classroom we have our own little culture, with jokes, chunks, experiences, personalities and cultures all contributing to a discourse, which could be called learning English. Given that’s what the students are there to do, we could probably call ourselves a community of practice.

And all of a sudden we’re back at the kind of terms that are, rightly or wrongly,  used to define ELF communication: community of practice, intelligibility and variation. The kind of communication that probably happens in your classroom every day when your students talk to you and to each other, especially if you have a multilingual class. Does this mean that there is no need to teach it? Doesn’t it just happen anyway? I’d actually answer “yes” to the first question, but “no” to the second. Here’s why.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about how I would define ELF, and in my view the system/model/variety view just doesn’t hold up, especially on an individual basis. I believe that there is at least some kind of language system contained within the individual, and ELF is a different way of deploying it according to the situation.  While I’m not sure that this deployment can be “taught” as such, the conditions in which it can be practised can be created quite easily. In this way, I want to suggest that while teaching ELF as we currently understand it may not be possible, it is very possible to simply orient your classroom towards it. I have gone on long enough in this post, but in the next one I will be making some suggestions for how teachers might go about this.

Cheers,

Alex

PS I’m indebted to Kurt Kohn’s comment on my previous post for developing some of my thinking, especially in the latter parts of this post. If you haven’t read it yet, it comes highly recommended.

References

Beneke, J. (1991) Englisch als lingua franca oder als Medium interkultureller
Kommunication. In: Grebing, R. (ed.) Grenzenloses Sprachenlernen. Berlin:
Cornelsen. 54-66.

Crystal, D. (1997) English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press

Graddol, D. (1997) The Future of English? London: British Council.

Jenkins, J. (2012) English as a Lingua Franca from the classroom to the classroom. ELT journal, 66(4), 486-494.

McKay, S. 2002, Teaching English as an International Language. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Sifakis, N. C. (2004) Teaching EIL – Teaching International or Intercultural  English? What Teachers Should Know. System, 32(2), 237-250.

Sowden, C. (2012) ELF on a mushroom: the overnight growth in English as a Lingua Franca. ELT journal, 66(1), 89-96.

Wang, H., & Hill, C. (2011) A paradigm shift for English language teaching in Asia: From imposition to accommodation. The Journal of Asia TEFL, 8, 231-258.

What does (an) ELF look like?

This post is essentially part two of my beginner’s guide to ELF. The beginner referred to here may be someone with a newly minted interest in the field, but also refers to me as someone just dipping their toes into the cool pond of ELF. If you’re in a position of expertise, please feel free to correct me on any of my half-baked ideas.

In the previous post I talked of the difficulty of defining ELF as a concept. Any degree of conceptualization requires a commensurate degree of reduction, and it is this reduction that robs ELF of the plurality, variation and contextuality that characterizes it in practice. Cogo & Dewey (2006) make a claim for the E of ELF to be interpreted as Englishes, rather than just English (and you thought the title was an elf joke, shame on you). Nevertheless, in this post  I’m going to try to define what an ELF, or some elves (OK that was an elf joke, with a hat tip to @languagebubble), might look like in the areas of phonology, pragmatics and lexico-grammar.

Phonology

The earliest serious attempt at identifying and codifying features of ELF communication was Jenkins’s (2000) The Phonology of English as an International Language. A self-confessedly prescriptive document, it attempted to outline the most important phonological features of English for intelligibility in international contexts, and recommended that these be taught first. It’s my feeling that it is misreadings of this book contribute to the “plot” view of ELF that I talked about last time. In fact, Jenkins only recommended that these features should be taught first, rather than exclusively, in order to make a more efficient use of limited time. However, given the boldness of her claims, including that the /θ/ & /ð/ (th) sounds made no difference to intelligibility, it’s not surprising that they drew some criticism. Jenkins’ other recommendations included not teaching allophones of /l/, fully aspirating fortis (unvoiced) consonants all the time, and where necessary even adding consonant sounds where confusion may arise. All of these are quite radical alterations to a NS model.

While she considered “teachability” of features in the core, most of Jenkins’ empirical data came from intelligibility studies, and her suggestions are based on  making speakers maximally intelligible to other L2 speakers of English. Perhaps the key theory in her work is that of accommodation, and she found that students would vary their pronunciation towards NS norms in order to aid intelligibility of their speech to a speaker of a different L1. In a dyad with a speaker of the same or similar L1, less variation of this kind was observed. This then is the defining feature of ELF – instead of orienting to norms, it orients to people. Therefore rather than examining the phonemes that speakers produce in terms of whether it meets an externally imposed standard, ELF research examines them in terms of the contribution they make to situational meaning making.

Pragmatics

Accommodation, in terms of aligning oneself with one’s interlocutor, also features heavily in the study of ELF pragmatics.  In general speakers will orient towards each other’s language, in a type of accommodation often known as convergence.  Studies such as Cogo & Dewey (2006) show one way in which this happens is through repetition. Chunks of language will be repeated, along with their variations. One Chinese speaker who generally uses a third person ‘s’ repeats a chunk including a third person ’0′, seemingly in order to positively align her speech with her interlocutor’s.

ELF conversations seem to contain a high degree of mutual co-operation, using other pragmatic strategies such as utterance completions and latching (one utterance following directly on from another). While these are demonstrably features of ELF communication, what this study fails to do is demonstrate that this is significantly different to what NSs do. It reminds me of studies of gender differences in styles of talk, in which women were shown to be far more co-operative communicators, as evidenced by the same kinds of features mentioned above (see Coates 1993: 135-139 for a review of these).

Where ELF does certainly does differ is in it’s greater acceptance of pluralingualism and pluraculturalism. Again, this is shown in Cogo and Dewey’s study, where speakers of different L1s shared idioms from their own first languages when they found the English adjective “cheesy” didn’t communicate the exact meaning that they required. Idiom works differently in ELF seemingly, as it is unbound from culture. This allows for a much greater use of invention and adaptation in use of idiom, as well as the use of L1 culturally bound idioms in English.  I suspect, however, that this kind of communication happens more between European ELF speakers whose L1s are more similar than ELF speakers in Asia, as the L1 terms in the example above were “fleur bleue” from French and “kitchig” from German. Both of these are intelligible to me as an English speaker with little knowledge of French or German.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the exchange described above, is the way that “fleur bleue” is introduced into the conversation. The speaker alerts his audience to the fact that there is a potential for misunderstanding approaching by saying “We say….”. This again shows the interlocutor orientation of ELF and may also lead to the fact that most studies find very little evidence of misunderstanding in ELF (eg Mauranen 2006).

Lexico-grammar

The final area that ELF research tends to look at is that of lexico-grammar. Cogo and Dewey (yep, them again) make the point that this is still strongly linked to pragmatics and accommodation, as in the example above where a variation such as using a zero article is repeated by a speaker who would ordinarily use an article. Nevertheless, there would seem to be some fairly systematic features common to most ELFs. The classic hypothesis of ELF variants was proposed by Seidlhofer (2004):

• Use of 3rd person zero form (not adding an s)
• Use of which as a relative pronoun to describe people.
• Article deletion or insertion
• Fixed or “ungrammatical” (by NS standards) question tags
• Innovative verb-pronoun collocation
• Higher frequency of semantically general verbs (take, have)
• Preference for the infinitive over the gerund form
• Explicitness (“black colour” as opposed to just “black”)

These tend to be the areas in which research is concentrated. However, it’s important to note that the above is in no way a grammatical core for ELF. Firstly, while the above all feature, they usually feature alongside the NS standard variant (see Breiteneder 2009). Secondly, the focus of ELF study tends to be more about how ELF communicators make use of the linguistic resources available to them in the process of building a discourse. For instance, Jenkins (2011:21) points to the greater use of progressive forms in ELF as a way of drawing attention to a past point in time, possibly to make the structure of the discourse clearer. In other words, it’s not so much the feature themselves that are of interest, but the reasons for using them. In this way lexico-grammatical studies in ELF are often really pragmatic studies anyway.

The great question then is whether the features and variants mentioned above are really part of a linguistic system or whether they are “errors”. Given ELF’s critical stance towards NS models of English, but the lack of an ELF model in its stead, it’s hard to label anything as an error with reference to any standard. Nevertheless, there is little doubt in my mind that sometimes variations stem from a lack of language control; performance problems if you will, and these should not be counted in ELF data. Dewey (2007) suggest four criteria for ELF variants:

• They must be systematic (according to corpus studies)
• Occur frequently and with speakers of different linguacultural backgrounds.
• They are communicatively effective (perhaps more so than an equivalent NS from)
• Considered a variant, not an error, when contrasted with an ENL form (but no mention of who is doing the considering).

If non-standard forms meet these standards, rather than being seen as errors, or deficient, they become what Cogo & Dewey would see as “innovative forms”.

Conclusion

While the variations above are in some ways systematic, they are often bound by geographical context and different speakers. The call for plurality in ELF is no doubt driven by the fact that research in ELF is very much concentrated in two different fields: Europe and Asia, and evidence suggests that  the kinds of English used in these areas are quite distinct. I believe this makes it unlikely that an ELF core could ever be produced; I also think that such a core would go somewhat against the kind of principles that ELF research tends to espouse.

This comes back to the point I made in my previous piece, that in dealing with a phenomenon as unprecedented as ELF, traditional frameworks and nomenclature may not be sufficient for the needs of ELF researchers or English teachers. What the above should show though, is that there is a collection of somethings that we can refer to as ELF communication, and that it may be a good idea to prepare our students for this kind of communication. In next week’s post, I will try to examine some of the ways that we as teachers can do this.

Cheers,

Alex

References

Breiteneder, A. (2009). English as a lingua franca in Europe: An empirical perspective. World Englishes, 28.2, 256–269.

Coates, J. (1993). Women, men, and language: A sociolinguistic account of gender differences in language.

Cogo, A., & Dewey, M. (2006). Efficiency in ELF communication: from pragmatic motives to lexico-grammatical innovation. Nordic Journal of English Studies, 5.2, 59-93.

Dewey, M. (2007). English as a lingua franca: An empirical study of innovation in lexis and grammar. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, King’s College London.

Jenkins, J. (2000). The phonology of English as an international language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jenkins, J., Cogo, A., & Dewey, M. (2011). Review of Developments in Research into English as a Lingua Franca. Language Teaching, 44.3, 281-315.

Mauranen, A. (2006). Signalling and preventingmisunderstanding in ELF communication. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 177, 123–150.

Seidlhofer, B. (2004). Research perspectives on teaching English as a Lingua Franca. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 24, 209–239.

A beginner (me)’s guide to English as a lingua franca

August 16th. This date is heavily circled with red ink on my desktop calendar. It’s probably not far from having “FREEDOM!” scribbled on the days that come after it either. Regular readers may have guessed that this is the date by which I must submit my MA dissertation. Suddenly it seems very close indeed – in less than 5 months I have to electronically plonk 15-20,000 words of research into our course administrator’s inbox. The problem is I’m still not totally sure what I’m going to write about.

However, it seems increasingly likely that I’m going to be writing on something at least involving English as a lingua franca, or ELF if you’re acronymically inclined. This post is my first attempt to get to grips with the concept of ELF based on the pathetic amount of reading I’ve done so far. My hope is that some of the ELF brainiacs out there can put me right on any misconceptions I have, and that it might provide a useful resource for other people in my situation.

What is ELF?

 A bit like a weasel with a jetpack, ELF is a hard one to pin down. Not just for me, but for the people who research it for a living. Jennifer Jenkins, who pretty much is ELF, describes defining ELF as a “thorny issue” (2011:1). Given that even the pros are having trouble figuring out exactly what it is, let’s start with what it isn’t, viewed through the lens of some people’s misconceptions.

One of the most common misconceptions seems to be that ELF is a variety of English. People either see it as a simplified or reduced English, shorn of idiom and unnecessary features such as the third person “s” (Sowden 2012:3), or some kind of monolithic world English which is the same no matter where you go. The inference that follows from this is that there is some kind of plot by bed-wetting lefty language liberals to impose these models on everyone in the world, “The ELF Project” (Sowden 2012:3 again!). While it’s true that where English is used for communication in an international setting (and presumably in an exchange involving at least one non-native speaker) the third person “s” is often omitted, ELF prescriptivists don’t froth at the mouth if it isn’t.

This brings us neatly to the next thing that ELF isn’t, and one thing that it and I have in common. It’s not a model (there’s a reason I keep photos off this blog). There is no ELF canon of literature or Swan’s guide to Practical ELF Usage. It’s also not a norm, against which nervous utterances will be deemed either “ELF!” or “NOT ELF!” by expert ELF speakers, because there isn’t really any such thing. In fact, ELF research in general tends to take a critical perspective on any kind of prescriptivism. This makes it wary of the concept of interlanguage, suggesting something unfinished, and more accommodating to theories of evolution and contact (Jenkins 2011: 5). This might be an extreme view, but at times it can seem that there are no mistakes in ELF, only misunderstandings.

The final thing that ELF is not is tied to a particular geography, culture, identity or setting. It’s also, as previously mentioned, not a uniform world language. In my view one of the biggest problems in describing ELF is the lack of lexical and conceptual apparatus within Applied Linguistics to describe such a new phenomenon (the field is barely 15 years old). If it’s not a language variety or a speech community, what is it? “Community of practice” seems to be the preferred term (Jenkins 2011:18), but to my mind this term is much more of a discourse analysis term which groups people by what they are doing with language. For the range of possible uses for ELF, this term seems inadequate, as communities using ELF are constructed and disbanded continuously. Although there have been lingua francas before, there has never been one such as English, and perhaps some new terms in the sociolinguistic lexicon are required.

Having hacked off great chunks of what ELF could possibly be, it’s time to see what’s left. Not much, it would seem. ELF, despite the name, is neither a language, nor a language variety, nor anything that has really been seen before. The terms that get thrown about a lot are “contact language” and “natural language”. Of these I prefer the first – it captures some of the fluidity, and more importantly the fleetingness, or ELF. It’s what to me makes it an interesting study, it lasts only as long as the conversation or community does, then it may very well disappear. ELF, to me, seems to be the attempt to map the shoreline by taking thousands of photos of the waves breaking. It’s quite romantic if you think about it, but also rather difficult to get a good idea of the big picture.

Who speaks ELF?

As far as English goes, ELF is Woodstock. Everyone’s invited and free to do what they want to do, with no interference from “The Man”, man. At least that’s how I see it. According to Jenkins (2011:4) a small number of researchers would deny that a native speaker can speak ELF, but for most ELF is open to anyone who can speak English with any kind of communicative success (though it seems that most research is conducted with speakers who are at least at an intermediate kind of proficiency by ENL (English as a native language) standards). You’ll notice that I use the term speaker repeatedly in this paragraph, as ELF speakers are not necessarily English learners. They may be satisfied with the English they speak and have no desire to conform to a native speaker model. ELF is fine with this. The only people excluded would appear to be those who speak no English, or whose proficiency is low enough to preclude communication. Free love for almost everyone, I think you’d agree.

In this world of tolerance and (occasional mis-) understanding, we presume that ELF could even be used between two native speakers of English (NSEs). I suspect that this may well take place at ELF conferences, though Sewell (2013) disputes this claim. No free love for him. This presumption is based on the definition on the VOICE corpus website which tells us that ELF is an “additionally acquired language system…”. I’m conveniently ignoring the second part that says “…which serves as a common means of communication for speakers of different first languages”*. Presumably, if it’s acquirable, it’s acquirable by an NSE or an non-NSE, and thus could conceivably be used between two NSEs. Were the situation to be one in which many non-NSEs were present, such as a panel discussion, I’d imagine this would be quite helpful. I could of course have this horribly wrong, so I’d be really interested to hear people’s opinions on whether this is possible.

A con cl/f usion

There would however, seem to be a paradoxical element in the definition above, no doubt caused by what a pain defining ELF is. Nevertheless, it’s illuminative of the kind of problems that ELF research looks to solve. The paradox is in the claim the ELF is acquired. This is problematic because it suggests that one must have experience of speaking ELF to be able to speak ELF. However, I’d suggest that someone speaking English with another NNSE for the very first time is using English as a lingua franca.  This seems to be a bit of a chicken/egg affair. We saw above that ELF is a natural language, which springs up from a communicative need, and if this is the case, what’s the need to acquire it, and where would one acquire it from? Is there such a thing as a proficient ELF speaker?

Perhaps two different things are happening here: the communicative event, and the kind of communicative features that one might find within that event. These features will come about naturally through communicative necessity, but may also be picked up in other communicative events. Both events and features currently fall under a single ELF acronym, but perhaps would be more helpfully labelled ELF communication and ELF strategies. I suspect that other, quicker people may already have made this distinction. Nevertheless, this approach would make clear that ELF is more about studying how people use English to communicate when there is little other choice, and how to help them to do it better. It may held to deflect some of the ire that is, I believe, unfairly directed at ELF.

*This was quoted in Jenkins (2011) but may now have been removed from the VOICE site.

References

The following articles informed the view of ELF given in this article, and come highly recommended as a starting point in the field.

Cogo, A. (2012) ‘English as a Lingua Franca: concepts, use and implications’. ELT Journal 66/1 97-105

Jenkins, J. (2011) ‘Review of developments in research into English as a lingua franca’. Language Teaching 44/3 281-315

Sewell, A. (2013) ‘English as a lingua franca: ontology and ideology’ ELT Journal 67/1 3-10

Sowden, C. (2012) ‘ELF on a mushroom: the overnight growth in English as a Lingua Franca’ ELT Journal 66/1 89-96

Thinking big, making small changes

My bedtime reading for the past couple of weeks has been Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku. In between revealing to me that people have actually teleported stuff,  the book is a reasonably easy introduction to quantum mechanics. To my rather squishy brain, these steely-minded scientists attempt to figure out the very small (subatomic particles) and the very large (the universe(s)) and the connections between them. Not much room for the inbetweeners (us humans) in there you might think, but actually the role of consciousness is an important factor in quantum theory, and provides one resolution for Schrödinger’s cat.

To draw a heavy-handed parallel between stuff that I don’t really understand (quantum physics), and stuff that I like to think I understand (teaching), recently I’ve been able to change some of the small things that I do by consciously examining the much bigger picture. I mentioned in my moan a few weeks ago that I was studying curriculum design for my previous module and that it had helped me a lot to see approaches and methods in terms of the bigger picture of a course. I’ve realized now it’s also made me think on a wider scale about where a course might fit into a person’s language learning over a lifetime, and so what small changes a teacher/course designer (often the same person) can make at the micro level in order to best influence this.

For a lot of Korean learners English will be a lifelong pursuit, and not always one that that they desire to undertake, beginning in elementary school or even before and extending well into their career where proficiency test scores mean better career opportunities. At the moment at least, most of the high-stakes achievement testing (and therefore the teaching) is based on reading and vocabulary memorization, well past the tertiary education stage. All of this is not news to people working here. It does however mean that we can make some useful generalizations about our learners in the process of designing courses, like they will probably be incredibly sick of memorizing lists of vocabulary.

A question that I have asked myself as a less experienced teacher is “How can I teach this student English?” In asking this question I was making a few assumptions. Firstly that students learning path was linear and straight. Secondly, that my job was to teach English as a whole, with no thought to the interaction of the content with past learning or current learning in other situations. Thirdly, I naively assumed that I could teach students’ English this way when a lot of other teachers had already tried with not great results. Writing that third point was incredibly uncomfortable, as it really highlights the arrogance of that viewpoint. Hopefully I have learned a little since then, and I have adjusted my question so that it is now more like “How can I best make a contribution to the learners’ overall English development?”

It was not just an inexperienced I that made these assumptions though. The same assumptions seem to underpin most coursebooks, most of which are attempting to be the sole source of language learning for learners, and whose courses assume a fairly linear progression in every area of language learning, from vocabulary to speaking. This seems a necessary assumption in order to try to meet the needs of a world of paying customers, but also one based on an outmoded paradigm where the book and the teacher actually were the only access to the language. In the internet age this is no longer really valid, as the language learning world is much smaller in terms of accessing the language, and much larger in terms of the amount that there is to access. I also feel like this assumption rather devalues the role of school education, especially of the kind found in Asian cultures. It is this kind of assumption that leads to Long’s (2005:3) claim that “general English courses almost always try to teach too much”.

In Language Curriculum Design, Nation and Macalister (2009) provide a useful suggestion for making sure that a course is providing a good balance of activities. They call this the “four stands” of curriculum design, and suggest that learners should have an equal balance of meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output,  language-based instruction and fluency development. I think this is a nice way to impose some checks and balances if you’re designing a complete language course from beginner to advanced, but not of much use to me in deciding what to teach in about 40 hours of contact time.

Where it is useful, however, is applied to the learning lives of students as a whole, and when I examine them I find that there has been a surfeit of language-based instruction and a fair bit of meaning-focused input (mostly as a vehicle for more language instruction). It’s no surprise that most of the level one students that pitch up in my classes struggle to put a spoken sentence together but readily identify almost any word that I write on the board. In Widdowsonian/Hymesian terms, there’s a lot of knowledge about use and not a whole lot of ability for use.

While these insights are not exactly revelatory for anyone with experience of Korea, studying curriculum design has allowed me to develop them into a much clearer framework in my own mind, and has given me the confidence to make some small (and not so small) changes to what I do. This semester I’m attempting not to teach too much in the way of new language, giving one day out of three entirely over to meaning and fluency based work (with almost no teacher interference), and where I am focusing on language it will mostly be in the form of trying to automaticize some chunks, do some rudimentary pronunciation work, and do a lot more text-level work like dictogloss and reconstructing texts. I’m hoping that the students will learn a bit more implicitly and not so much explicitly, and I’m working on some tricks to try to encourage this.

I’m calling these small changes as they are things that I have been trying to do before, but the key factor this semester is that I feel a bit like I am working with my institution rather than against it. Having been uncharacteristically vocal at a few of our planning meetings this year, and finding that my similarly quiet colleagues felt mostly the same way, we successfully lobbied for a change to the exams. We now have a 50% speaking examination, and the written section is a free choice of questions. No longer will I have to write disastrous grammar questions that all the students get wrong, nor include reading passages well below their level that they all get right.

All in all then, I’m feeling pretty cosmic about this semester. I’m a lot more secure in what I’m doing, and where I fit with my students and my institution. This has made me feel a lot more confident in the classroom too. While I recognize that institutions need a degree of control, giving teachers their head is important. Those small changes that they make might just lead to big differences.

Cheers,

Alex

References

Long, M. H. (2005) Second Language Needs Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nation, I. S. P. & Macalister, J. (2009) Language Curriculum Design. New York: Routledge.

Winter Pronunciation Camp Reflections: Student Feedback

Back to the pronunciation camp posts then, as there may still be one or two left to grind out. I’ve been thinking a lot about whether I want to keep running these courses, out of a sneaking suspicion that this one wasn’t especially useful for the students. I’ll make an effort to publish my own personal reflections on the camp in a later post, but for now, here’s what my students thought.

The method wasn’t especially scientific, as I put this together in about 5 minutes, and as it turned out one or two of the questions were horribly written, but it did give the students an opportunity to give me a bit of feedback. If you want to see the survey in all it’s glory, click the link below.

Post course reflective questions

I issued the survey with a plea for honesty and constructive criticism, and assurances that it was anonymous and had no effect on student grades. Still, it’s incredibly hard to get objective views in Korea for reasons of saving face, so I’m taking these with an unhealthy pinch of salt. Nevertheless, here are the results.

Q1: This course had four goals. How well did it achieve them?

As a reminder, my four goals were:

1. Teach students how to learn pronunciation.
2. Increase students’ communicative power through intonation and stress.
3. Increase students’ fluency and show them how to measure it.
4. Encourage students’ to reflect on their own learning.

This was one of the aforementioned questions that was horribly written, and so most students answered it in terms of meeting their own goals. However from those who did understand, the comments were generally positive for the first two, and negative for the second two. My fluency methods were deemed useful, but the course too short (I agree). Interestingly, one student said “I don’t care about reflection”. This leads me to wonder if reflection should have a role in the course, and if it does, how I can better facilitate it without taking up too much more time.

Q2: How did you feel about pronunciation before the course? Did this change during the course?

A quite overwhelmingly positive response to this question. For many students this was the first time that they had experienced a pronunciation class. There were a lot of comments relating to a change in attitude, seeing pronunciation as much more important, and taking much greater care over it. There was also an increase in depth of knowledge of the system, especially stress and intonation, as well as understanding of the students own pronunciation. All this also led to students feeling more confident. The only negatives were the criticism that the course was a bit impractical (again, I agree), and one student who discovered that he’d overestimated his level.

Overall, even allowing for a bit of teacher pleasing, I’m pretty heartened by all of these comments. They actually show that the course met at least some of its goals much better than the responses to the first question did. I’d set out to set students up for the long term, and the responses seem to confirm the awareness raising aim of the course.

Q3: What were the most and least useful things that you learned on the course?

Again, the responses to this question were really enlightening. By far the most useful thing listed was the teaching of intonation and stress features to the students. As hinted at above, this was the first time that many students had encountered them, at least in an explicit way. This makes me feel like I am filling an important gap in their continuing English education with this course. Other popular elements were the introduction of technology like Audacity and Anki for practising, with shadowing being by far the most popular activity. The teaching of intonational chunks was also popular, as was, somewhat surprisingly, making the students learn IPA.

On the negative side were the fluency activities related to tracking reading and writing fluency. I’ll admit that these were a bit tacked on, somewhat due to the fluency of the course which was foisted on me when I first asked to teach pronunciation. Strangely enough, one student found the work on “tongue location” not useful. I’m going to suppress my giggles and file this under “There’s always one”.

Q4: How would you rate your pronunciation (/10) before the course and now?

This question was entirely unscientific, and I gave no score definitions except that 10 was high and 0 was low. One student actually gave himself a 0 before the course (I’d like to meet a student with 0 pronunciation ability!). Anyway, this was about what I expected, and I guess what I set out to do. Most students reported a two to three point improvement in their pronunciation. This is about as good as I can hope for over a five week course I think, and it’s what I tell the students at the beginning of the course, but I frequently fail to heed my own words and get disappointed when they actually come true. At least nobody claimed to have got worse!

Q5:   Do you think you will continue to try improving your pronunciation?

Again some very positive results, 1 ‘no’ and two ‘maybes’ out of 30 respondents, the remainder of which said ‘yes’. I’m not sure that I totally believe that all 30 will actually go on and work on their pronunciation, but putting a positive spin on this, they do at least feel confident that they can at this point. One negative was a student that said they were worried about lack of opportunity. I tried at each point to provide ways in which they could continue to practice alone or in groups. Still, I’m quite pleased with this too.

Q6:  How do you think you should sound when speaking English?

My final two questions were a bit more sociolinguistic in their line of enquiry. Sadly I managed to word this one in a way to make it completely impenetrable to students, even with further explanation. From the useful answers I got, it was notable that not one of them mentioned a Korean (or any other “non-inner circle”) accent. Most were aiming for me (flattered!) or a generic British or American, or even just a mythical “native speaker”, with the justification that “this era is globalized”. On this course I generally shied away from a discussion of models, on the basis that I found on a previous course that students didn’t have the knowledge to choose one, and modelling two or three different pronunciations was hard work on me. However, these results make me wonder if I should be encouraging a bit more confidence and pride in Korean accents, and if my using just a British model contributes to their thinking that they should sound like native speakers.

More promisingly, a few said simply “more confident” or “more fluent”, and one claimed that one should “forget grammar”. I’m not totally sure I can fully endorse this idea, tempting as it is.

Q7: Do you think it’s possible to improve your pronunciation? How? Is it best to do this inside the classroom or outside?

As a bit of a reaction to this post by Scott Thornbury, I wanted to get my students views on the possibility of improving their pronunciation, and how they might go about it.

Most students were convinced that they could improve, not surprising given that I’d spent the past five weeks telling them that they could, and that they believed, given the data above, that they had really improved. There weren’t any negative responses to this question, though several left it blank.

Preferred methods for improving were very general, and not especially helpful. TV shows was the most suggested method (though what one would do with them remains a mystery), and then the general categories of talking, listening and repetition. Several said that they would continue to use Anki, a program with which I’ve had some success with Korean pronunciation practice.

Conclusion

Having taken the time to read these through, finally, I’m a lot more enthused about teaching it again. At least from student feedback it seems to have been a useful endeavour. I think I perhaps overlooked the value it might have in their overall education, and the lack of any experience of this kind of course in their lives previously. However, the comments about the practicality, or lack of, are spot on, and something I need to tackle. Having just nudged over 1,400 words though, I’ll save that for another day.

Cheers,

Alex

Winter Pronunciation Camp Reflections Week 4 (Part 2)

This post is the latest in a long series. The usual disclaimers about not being a real camp and rambling apply.

Thursday

I wanted to keep working with the poem that we had started on Wednesday, but get students speaking and listening much more. I’d been concentrating hard on unstressed syllables and rhythm the previous day, and I wanted to see if the students were capable of hearing, and reproducing these features. Having read an interesting article on using speaking speed as a measure of natural pronunciation (the thinking being that unstressed syllables and assimilation and elision should lead to utterances being delivered faster), I wondered if it would be possible to do the same with the poem.

Shadowing is the method of trying to reproduce a piece of spoken text as accurately as possible. You can read Arizio Sweeting’s description of it here. In the old days this would have just been a case of listen and repeat, but technology makes this process a lot easier and a lot more autonomous. The idea is that students can record a piece of speech, listen back to it and figure out where it differs, and then have another go at recording any difficult sections.

One problem I faced with this was it took an awful long time to set up. We don’t have a language lab here, so I had the students bring their computers to class. I tend to prefer this anyway as students then have the software on their computers. However, this means factoring in time for lateness, forgetting and setting it all up (answers on a postcard as to why you’d pay a load of money for an “intensive” English camp, and then spend the entire time moaning, shirking and generally doing anything to avoid speaking English). This then led to having less time to do what I really wanted, which was to step them through a process of listening, recording and editing, and largely resulting in them doing a series of one shot recordings and not doing that much in the way of comparison. Still, there were one or two really excellent attempts, and again this is something that I’d really like to incorporate into the course more next time, especially with shorter pieces of language like the chunks I have been teaching. I’m also wishing for a simple way to show pitch change in Audacity.

Friday

One of the students final projects in my colleague’s class is to make a short film in English. By Friday the scripts had been written and the students were ready to start filming. Ever on the lookout for ways in which I can apply what we do in class to other things, Friday’s class was a read through of the script from each movie. The class started with each student reading their lines to themself, with me helping with questions and modelling. We then moved on to a full reading. This was a really enjoyable class to teach, but it would have been nice to make it a bit more student centered, and to find a way of having them figure things out for themselves. This is something that I can definitely improve in general I think. Anyhow, probably the best part for me was trying to teach my students to swear. Whenever we do anything like plays or films, the students are always keen to include some effing and blinding, which would be fine if they could do it properly, but it usually just ends up sounding awkward and forced. When it came up in the script then, I spent a good deal of time trying to coach them into getting it a bit more natural (and more committed). I am someone who is generally fairly reserved and serious in class, so my students were rather shocked to hear it. I don’t generally use it in class, as you never really know who might be offended by bad language, but the students brought it up, and if you’re going to do something, you may as well do it properly.

This brings me to the end of this post, and probably the end of the weekly updates. This final week has been more about testing and feedback, so expect two or three posts looking at that process. I’d like to thank everyone who has been reading these posts, and especially those whose comments have kept me interested in writing them (I think I’m over 8,000 words now!). Expect more soon.

Cheers,

Alex