Text 1-24. Bringing Europe's lingua franca into the classroom

(After an editorial published on guardian.co.uk on Thursday 19 April 2001)

 

Jennifer Jenkins and Barbara Seidlhofer suggest how the results of new research into how 'non-native' speakers of English use the language must change the way it is taught

A Finnish scientist coming to Vienna for a conference on human genetics; an Italian designer negotiating with prospective clients in Stockholm; a Polish tourist chatting with local restaurateurs in Crete: they all communicate successfully in "English", but which "English"? Well, chances are that it is not the language you hear in chat shows and soaps on British or American television, but rather a range of "Englishes", with enough of a common core so as to make it viable as a means of communication.

In fact, it is even claimed that a European variety of English, sometimes labelled "Euro-English", is in the process of evolving to serve as a European lingua franca. As yet, however, this new variety of English has not been described, largely because it is at such an embryonic stage in its evolution. All we can say with any degree of certainty is that English as a lingua franca in Europe (ELFE) is likely to be some kind of European-English hybrid which, as it develops, will increasingly look to continental Europe rather than to Britain or the United States for its norms of correctness and appropriateness.

However, as long as there is no sound empirical basis for a description of how the language is actually used, the forms ELFE will take will remain an object of speculation.

This is why we decided to record interactions among "non-native" speakers of English from a wide variety of first-language backgrounds, and to investigate what happens linguistically when English is used as a lingua franca. The focus of our research to date has been on pronunciation and lexicogrammar (vocabulary plus grammar), and it has enabled us to make a number of educated guesses at emerging characteristics of ELFE.

Jennifer Jenkins gathered data from interactions among non-native speakers of English in order to establish which aspects of pronunciation cause intelligibility problems when English is spoken as an International Language. This enabled her to draw up a pronunciation core, the Lingua Franca Core, and certain of the features she designates core and non-core provide evidence as to the likely development of ELFE pronunciation.

The features of the Lingua Franca Core are those which were found to be crucial for intelligibility. They include:

• consonant sounds except for "th" (both voiceless as in "think" and voiced as in 'this') and dark 'l' (as, for example, in the word 'hotel');

• vowel length contrasts (e.g. the difference in length between the vowel sounds in the words "live" and "leave");

• nuclear (tonic) stress (eg the stress indicated by capital letters in the following: "I come from FRANCE. Where are YOU from?").

Most other areas of pronunciation are then designated non-core, and these include many features on which teachers and learners often spend a great deal of time and effort, such as the exact quality of vowel sounds, word stress, or the "typical rhythm of British English", with lots of "little" words such as articles and prepositions pronounced so weakly as to be hardly audible.

Taking the Lingua Franca Core as our starting point, we predict that the pronunciation of ELFE will, over time, develop certain characteristics. For example, it is unlikely that "th" will be a feature of ELFE accents since nearly all continental Europeans other than those from Spain and Greece have a problem in producing it. What is not clear at this stage is whether the ELFE substitute will be "s" and "z" (as used, for example, by many French- and German-English speakers) or "t" and "d" (as used, for example, by many Italian- and Scandinavian-English speakers), or whether there will be scope for regional variation. Given that users of "s" and "z" outnumber users of "t" and "d", however, we predict that ultimately the former will become the accepted ELFE variant.

Similarly, because of difficulties of many Europeans with dark "l", we predict that this sound will not be included in the ELFE pronunciation inventory, but will probably be substituted with clear "l" (a development which will run counter to that in British English, where dark "l" is increasingly being substituted with l-vocalisation, such that "bill" sounds more like "biw").

On the other hand, the British-English distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants is likely to be maintained in ELFE since the loss of this distinction proved to be a frequent cause of intelligibility problems in the research. For example, a German-English speaker's devoicing of the final sound on the word "mug" so that it sounded like "muck" rendered the word unintelligible to an Italian-English speaker.

The phenomena which can be observed in the area of ELFE lexicogrammar are the research focus of Seidlhofer's current work. For this purpose, she has been compiling a corpus of interactions in English among fairly fluent speakers from a variety of first-language backgrounds. This corpus, supported by Oxford University Press, is called the Vienna-Oxford ELF Corpus and is housed at the University of Vienna.

The findings emerging from it are similar to Jenkins' research into pronunciation in that they also involve many of those features often regarded, and taught, as particularly "typical" of (native) English. In our analyses of a variety of interactions such as casual conversations and academic discussions, no major disruptions in communication happened when speakers committed one or more of the following deadly "grammatical sins":
• using the same form for all present tense verbs, as in 'you look very sad' and 'he look very sad';
• not putting a definite or indefinite article in front of nouns, as in "our countries have signed agreement about this";

• treating "who" and "which" as interchangeable relative pronouns, as in "the picture who..." or "a person which";

• using just the verb stem in constructions such as "I look forward to see you tomorrow";
• using "isn't it?" as a universal tag question (i.e. instead of "haven't they?" and "shouldn't he?"), as in "They've finished their dinner now, isn't it?".

These characteristics, it will be noted, are described in a neutral way here, i.e. we are not talking about "dropping the third person -s" or "leaving out the -ing ending of the gerund", but this is not the way these "mistakes" are usually treated in English classrooms around Europe. As many teachers of English as a foreign language will know, the time and effort spent on such features as the "third person -s", the use of articles and the "gerund" is often considerable, and nevertheless many learners still fail to use them "correctly" after years of instruction, especially in spontaneous speech.

What our analyses of ELF interactions suggest is that the time needed to teach and learn these constructions bears very little relationship to their actual usefulness, as successful communication is obviously possible without them. It seems, in fact, that there is a very good reason for many students' observed resistance to learning these characteristics of native-speaker English: like the th-sounds discussed above, they are not communicatively crucial. Rather, speakers tend to tune into them only when they use English in a native-speaker community and wish to "blend in" (which, for certain learners, obviously remains a desirable objective) while they seem to be redundant in much lingua franca communication.

As far as the implications for teaching are concerned we would like to make two general suggestions. The first and most important point to emphasise is, in our view, the need to encourage both teachers and students to adjust their attitudes towards ELFE. Even those who strongly support the development of a continental European hybrid variety of English that does not look to Britain or America for its standards of correctness, reveal a degree of schizophrenia in this respect. For example Charlotte Hoffman has described the English of European learners as spanning "the whole range from non-fluent to native-like", as though fluency in English were not a possibility for those whose speech does not mimic that of a native speaker.

Similarly, Theo van Els pointed out in a lecture given last year in the Netherlands that the ownership of a lingua franca transfers from its native speakers to its non-native speakers. Yet he went on to argue paradoxically that the Dutch should not be complacent about their English because "only very few are able to achieve a level of proficiency that approximates the native or native-like level".

Our second point is that it is crucial for English language teaching in Europe to focus on contexts of use that are relevant to European speakers of English. In particular, descriptions of spoken English offered to these learners should not be grounded in British or American uses of English but in ELFE or other non-native contexts (depending on where the particular learners intend to use their English in future).

In this respect it is disappointing that so-called "authentic" materials offered to learners continue to be based only on corpora of native speaker use. For example, Helen Basturkmen's recent contribution to the ELT Journal argues in favour of "highlighting general strategies of talk, and encouraging learners to become active observers of language use in settings relevant to them". This would be admirable were it not the conclusion to an article in which she cites examples taken exclusively from data of native speaker interactions. ELFE learners (along with all other learners of English as an International Language) need descriptions drawn from interactions between non-native speakers in the contexts in which they, too, will later participate. To some, our proposal may seem to be a recipe for "permissiveness" and decline in "standards". But what we are essentially seeking to do is to carry through the implications of the fact that English is an international language and as such no longer the preserve of its native speakers. If English is indeed a lingua franca, then it should be possible to describe it as such without prejudice. And that may well be the biggest challenge for ELFE in the 21st Century.

 

 

TOPICS FOR THE FINAL DISCUSSION OF ELF/ESP IN EUROPEAN AS WELL AS UKRAINIAN EDUCAION

The language of teaching

University education in Europe is given in a limited number of official national languages. In countries with a federal structure, or regional autonomy, it is given in the regional language. In addition there are universities that teach in a language from outside the nation/region: in most cases in English. (German-language higher education in eastern Europe, for instance, disappeared after 1945). Similarly, within each university, if a course is given in a non-national language, that is almost always English. Universities in England are the only fully monolingual universities in Europe. (British universities in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales are partly bilingual). In the EU, language is an area reserved to national policy, although some minority languages are protected by European and international instruments. There is no legal status anywhere, for multilingualism as such.

 

Issues:

Should multilingualism be enforced as a goal in itself?
Should entirely monolingual higher education be effectively forbidden (or left to the private sector)?
Should all European languages be given the protected status, given to some minority languages?
Should courses offered in one language be given in parallel, in other languages?
Should all courses be given in a fixed minimum of languages?
Should international courses especially, be multilingual, or available in parallel versions?
Should there be a maximum on the share of English-language courses?
Should visiting staff be required to speak a minimum of European languages?