Traditional ELT Standards: a brief discussion of people’s views toward the two main inner circle varieties (British and American English)

English is used as a lingua franca (ELF) between speakers from different L1 backgrounds, and in fact this type of communication is much more common than communication between a NS and NNS or between two NS. In the past, we usually assumed that the English Language Learner (ELL) was trying to communicate with a native speaker of English, but this is less often the case in today’s society, which encourages mobility and globalization. Nowadays, fewer interactions in English involve native speakers. According to Crystal, the number of native speakers (NS) of English in the world is estimated to be less than 350 million, while non-native speakers (NNS) are estimated to be in the ballpark of 450 to 1350 million (Crystal 1997).

These English as a Native Language (ENL) speakers have been the ones who arbitrated what was right or wrong, what acceptable usage was, and also were the main characters in ELT books, made ELT materials, and wrote tests. In this way, they have been a hegemonic measuring stick and decision makers. Non-native speakers (teachers included) thus often have an inferiority complex because they are told and believe that they can never attain the innate language skills of a native speaker.

Oftentimes, current second language acquisition theories hypothesize that most English language learners aim to develop native speaker standards in terms of grammatical standards, phonological patterns, and discourse competence; however, there are several reasons, according to Sandra McKay, why current bilingual English users may have different goals:

1.They may only need English in certain situations, for example in formal area, in which case they would not need the full range of registers of a native speaker.

2.They may not want to acquire native speaker pronunciation and pragmatics for attitudinal reasons.

3.English as an International Language is owned by those who use it and does not grant more privilege to some speakers.

4.English does not belong to any one culture any more, and therefore should be culturally sensitive to the diverse contexts in which it is used and taught. Instead of using exclusively Western cultural content, as has been done in the past, there are definite advantages to using source culture content, which do not marginalize the learners and embrace the non-native speaker as a knower instead of an interpreter teaching a foreign culture.

5.Westerners often think communicative language teaching (CLT) is one methodology that will work everywhere, but this is not the case as Confucian values in Asia differ greatly, we must reconsider other teaching methodologies that are appropriate in other cultures. (ideas paraphrased from McKay 2003)

Why a new concept of English?

Thus far the default measuring stick for what English is correct has been the native speaker model, usually that of the U.K. or the U.S. Barbara Seidlhofer is leading the pack to fight for a new concept of English, English as a lingua franca which she, among others, is working on its own description and codification. She argues in an English Today article, “the emergence of an endonormative model of lingua franca English which will increasingly derive its norms of correctness and appropriacy from its own usage rather than that on the UK or the US, or an other ‘native speaker’ model.” (Seidlhofer 2001:15)

What is English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)?

Therefore, there is a movement for teaching English as a lingua franca (ELF), whose supporters believe that the way we teach and assess English should reflect the needs and goals of this expanding growth of non-native speakers who use English to communicate with other non-native speakers. How do non-native speakers use English with each other? This is currently a big area of research. Barbara Seidlhofer is heading the first large-scale effort to collect exclusively lingua franca English. The project is called the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE), which is collecting data of mostly face-to-face communication of fairly fluent speakers of English from a wide range of L1 backgrounds in Vienna. Proponents of ELF would like people to reconsider the way English is taught. Although these ideas seem rather radical, Graddol believes that it is likely that some of its ideas will influence mainstream teaching and assessment practices in the future (2006).

What is Euro-English?

Studies are being done now, but from what has already been observed, there are some observations to offer about the lexicogrammar of this emerging Euro-English. Although these characteristics are different from standard English, they usually don’t cause problems in understandings:

· Countable/uncountable nouns, e.g. an advice, advices, an information, informations

· Dropping -s from third person present tense verbs

· Using the relative pronouns who for things (e.g. a book who) and which for people (e.g. a friend which)

· Omitting definite and indefinite articles where they are obligatory in native speaker use

(these points from Murray, 2003:4)

Some features that can cause communication breakdown are:

· ‘unilateral idiomaticity’ (Seidlhofer 2001), i.e. when one speaker uses an idiom from English which the listener doesn’t know, for example, ‘Would you like us to give you a hand?’ as opposed to ‘Can we help you?’

· when one speaker uses words that the other person does not know, which might include correct words in English or English loan words or false friends. An example is handy, which means a cell phone in German. They think it means the same thing in English, but it has a different meaning in English.

Seidlhofer concluded that using communication strategies and the willingness of interlocutors to both try to accommodate is more important for effective communication than “‘correctness’ or idiomaticity in native English terms” (Seidlhofer 2001).

The biggest challenge to the establishment of Euro-English is the tradition that the goal is to be close to native proficiency in either British or American English, an ideology that Modiano claims is waning, but nevertheless still impacts current practices in education as this thinking devalues other varieties of English (Modiano 2003).