Teaching English as an International/Lingua Franca or Mainstream Standard Language? Unheard Voices from the Classroom

Abstract

Over the last two decades there has been an upsurge in the voices among TESOL/applied linguistics scholars calling for the teaching of English as an International (EIL) and Lingua Franca (ELF) language as opposed to the mainstream Standard English (MSE). These calls seem to be rather theoretical than empirical intellectual debates among those scholars without taking on board the voices of English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers and learners themselves as stakeholders. Focusing on a Sudanese EFL context, the present study therefore duly aims at empirically contributing to this intellectual debate by involving those stakeholders in the debate and by offering a reconciliatory third way forward. The study attempts to address two main research questions: (i) what kind of English(es) do Sudanese EFL teachers and learners want to teach, learn and identify with? And (ii) how do they view EIL and ELF language and to what extent are they willing to teach and learn this variety in the classroom? The study adopted a qualitative interview-based methodology and thirteen EFL teachers and learners took part in the investigation by allowing face-to-face interviews. Results of data analysis showed that both teachers and learners reportedly prefer to teach, learn and identify with the mainstream Standard English. They also showed unawareness of EIL/ELF as an emerging and competing variety to the MSE. Teachers and learners also reported varied views towards the potentials of teaching and learning EIL/ELF in the classroom. The pedagogical implications and insights for TESOL research and pedagogy were discussed. Keywords IntroductionThere has, recently, been an upsurge in the number of voices among TESOL/applied linguistics scholars calling for the teaching and learning of English as an International language (EIL) and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) instead of the mainstream Standard English (MSE). These calls are particularly common in the outer/expanding circles. Many keynote speeches/plenaries and conference presentations have focused on this issue. The underlying arguments behind these calls can broadly be summarised as follows: English is widely used outside the inner circle as a language of communication (Lingua Franca) among speakers from different first-language backgrounds. English is therefore predominantly used among non-native speakers. English nonnative speakers are hugely and steadily outnumbering native speakers. Another factor perhaps is related to the increasing development in the collection and description of the non-stream Englishes. There is a growing body of literature on the nature and description of EIL/ELF. Huge corpora of EIL/ELF are now available such as Voice corpus: Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English jointly developed by Oxford and Vienna universities and which can be accessed at: https://www.univie.ac.at/voice/page/corpus_information. The English non-native speaker teachers are outnumbering the native speaker teachers (see e.g., Graddol, 2006;Graddol et al., 2007). What is chara...

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