ENGLISH FOR DAILY LIFE
Find out why the approach of teaching English as a lingua franca introduced by the BNCC points up diversity and the everyday uses of the language, beyond its status as a foreign language.
Observatory for English Language Teaching
Newsroom
Nov. 27, 2020
The BNCC (Base Nacional Comum Curricular in Portuguese, or Common Core Curriculum) offers a new way of thinking about English teaching in Brazilian schools. With a focus on its social and political functions, English starts to be treated in the document no longer as a foreign language, but as a lingua franca. With this change, specialists believe that the way is open for more flexible English teaching, which is capable of promoting interculturality and protagonism. In a context in which communication is the focal point, the student and teacher’s critical capacities are underscored, as the walls between the classroom and daily life come down, stereotypes fade and the meaning of proficiency is rethought.
“Why should education treat English as a foreign language?”, asks the researcher, Telma Gimenez, of the Universidade Estadual de Londrina (UEL). After all, as she points out, most of the students who studied English in Brazil will have to speak with non-native speakers, just like them. English as a lingua franca, or simply ELF, verges on this reality. Contemporary uses of English in multilingual and multicultural contexts require a rethinking of the concepts that have oriented the teaching of English as a foreign language.
The idea of a lingua franca has its origins in Antiquity. However, in relation to English, the concept started to be researched in the 1980s. It went through different phases and reviews, and goes on gaining support among researchers from all over the world. As a lingua franca, English takes on the role of a point of contact, capable of fostering communication between speakers of different places, with different native languages. For this reason, ELF should not be seen as a variety of English to add to those that already exist; it is a status that English acquires as a contact language in the moment of communicating, according to the researcher Ana Paula Martinez Duboc, from the Universidade de São Paulo (USP).
Duboc emphasizes that Brazilian researchers, with their scientific production over the years, have contributed to bringing about the current proposal in the Common Core Curriculum. She calls ELF Made in Brazil the critical outlook regarding the particularities of ELF in the reality of our country (read an article of hers on the subject at the end of this text): “It is necessary to understand the context of these users”, she says. “Here in Brazil, we see this concept from a much more political, ideological viewpoint, according to which you challenge a number of the traditional pillars of English language teaching, which means English as a foreign language”, adds the researcher, Domingos Sávio Siqueira, from the Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA).
According to Siqueira, the concept went through various phases until it arrived at the position of a language instead of a variation, which he argues is well defined in the Common Core Curriculum. Even so, the BNCC seems to open the way for different uses of the concept of ELF that it brings with it. “I think that the interpretation (made about English as a lingua franca in the BNCC) was that of its daily use, in many places around the world”, explains Gimenez. For Duboc, in the document, the presentation of the concept contrasts with the teaching frameworks.
A new posture towards English
Even though the concept of English as a lingua franca can be interpreted in different ways (CLICK HERE), the approach adopted by the BNCC may have a positive impact. Ana Paula believes that ELF may be a way of overcoming the idea of the foreign language as the language of the other, opening the way for a more flexible concept of English, or more “ventilated”, as she puts it. Telma agrees with these new possibilities of opening. “Without doubt, it is a step forward, because it undermines the idea that there is only American or British English”, she stresses.
For Domingos Sávio, the tradition of language teaching is very much grounded on the imitation of the ideal speaker, which is generally stereotyped. Meanwhile, the reality in the classroom is alive, with students bringing more and more their experiences and their linguistic and cultural repertoires. They have contact with this diversity when they watch a series or participate in an online social network, for example. He underlines that with ELF the question of interculturality becomes plain to see, as it is an important component for a language that is not located in a single territory.
As Gimenez explains, questioning the teaching that demands of students a production which is identical to that of an idealized native speaker and then exposing these learners to a real use of the language is important so that they see themselves as protagonists. For example, the student’s pronunciation may be different from what a native speaker would use at a given moment, but they may communicate well even so. In this case, if the teacher recognizes their effort, they help the student to understand that their use of English may be legitimate. “Proficiency is given new meaning as you can be proficient in one context and not in another”, the researcher adds. In this scenario, in which learning until then was based essentially on precision, on proficiency measured by the standards of native speakers, and on linearity, intelligibility is valued, as are differences. Duboc argues that this flexibility is liberating, and that learning English comes to mean learning about oneself and others.
If the prospects are positive, they create challenges, on the other hand, to find a balance between the ELF vision and the more traditional approaches to the teaching of the language. It becomes necessary to rethink aspects such as assessment, for example, which would have to follow the pedagogic teaching vision, as Gimenez points out. For Siqueira, an important question is teaching materials. In them, he says, minority cultures do not normally appear, and the examples are usually restricted to American and British English. In this way, to align interculturality with practical developments for the classroom, the teacher needs to be critically aware, with ‘ELF awareness’ – a concept introduced by the Greek researcher Nicos Sifakis: that is, to be aware of these needs. Thus, the teacher may choose a text that better reflects the reality of a given class, for example; or bring to the class English as it is used by different speakers from around the world, getting away from the linguistic and cultural standardization which is characteristic of English teaching as a foreign language.
Available at: https://www.inglesnasescolas.org/en/headline/english-for-daily-life/. Accessed on January 26, 2021.
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