ELF Teaching and EFL Teachers in the Global Expansion of English

Working Papers in Educational Linguistics (WPEL) Volume 16 Number 2 Fall 2000 10-1-2000 ELF Teaching and EFL Teachers in the Global Expansion of English Oleg Tarnopolsky Dnepropetrovsk State Technical University of Railway Transport, Ukraine This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. http://repository.upenn.edu/wpel/vol16/iss2/2 For more information, please contact . Article 2 ELF Teaching and EFL Teachers in the Global Expansion of English This article is available in Working Papers in Educational Linguistics (WPEL): http://repository.upenn.edu/wpel/vol16/iss2/2 EFL Teaching and EFL Teachers in the Global Expansion of English Oleg Tarnopolsky Dnepropetrovsk State Technical University of Railway Transport, Ukraine (Visiting scholar at Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania) This article draws a distinction between teaching English as a second and foreign language, demonstrating that in the latter case, teaching should be modified towards greater emphasis on formal grammar instruction and on developing learners’ interlingual and intercultural awareness. Advantages of EFL teachers who are non-native speakers of English are shown for some EFL teaching conditions. The advantages are tied to the fact that such EFL teachers are those who, as a rule, share their students’ mother tongue and culture and are, therefore, better prepared for coping with the specific problems that originate from incompatibilities or differences in target and native languages and/or cultures. Some ways of eliminating such teachers’ natural disadvantages as non-native speakers of English are advocated. ith the global expansion of English as the language of international communication, another expansion is taking place that of teach ing and learning English as a foreign language (EFL), i.e., outside the countries where it is spoken and where it has internal communicative functions and sociopolitical status (on this issue see Nayar, 1997). This second expansion puts two questions to the forefront of professional discussion. The first of them is whether EFL can and should be taught in the same way as English as a second language (ESL) is taught when it is acquired by speakers of other languages in the countries where English is the mother tongue of the majority of the population1. The second question is tied to the fact that in EFL teaching situations the majority of teachers of English are not native speakers due to obvious reasons. It is enough to mention only one of them - the most apparent. With the global expansion of English and the quickly growing need of learning the language felt by millions of people, there never will be enough professional teachers of English who are native speakers to meet the demand of the world over. In EFL, native speakers of English will inevitably be in the minority as teachers. Hence, the question is W 1 Nayar (1997) has shown that ESL/EFL dichotomy is not full as there are marginal situations, but they are irrelevant for the purposes of this article and will not be discussed further. WORKING PAPERS IN E DUCATIONAL L INGUISTICS whether a professional teacher of English who is not a native speaker of the language s/he teaches is always at a disadvantage as compared to his or her colleague who had been lucky enough to be born in the UK, the USA, Canada, or Australia. Is it possible that in EFL situations the former may have some advantages over the latter? Which are those advantages that she or he can reasonably hope to enjoy and can the obvious disadvantages of such a teacher’s position be somehow softened and avoided? The purpose of this article is to discuss some answers to these questions. ESL/EFL Dichotomy in Teaching - Theoretical and Practical Implications Researchers’ opinions differ as to the answer to the first question above because some of them deny the existence of any difference in the way EFL should be taught in comparison with ESL. On the contrary, other authors emphasize the difference analyzing its underlying reasons. Those authors who do not see the necessity of a clear differentiation between ESL and EFL teaching base this opinion on the assumption that second language acquisition data are fully applicable to foreign language learning (Savignon 1990; VanPatten 1990). Yet, many others support the notion that the two processes do not coincide. For instance, Seliger (1988: 27) points out that, despite the universality of manner and order of acquiring an L2 by speakers of different first languages, there are no data to disprove the possibility of different effects for first language transfer in contexts where learners have little or no exposure to the second language outside the classroom, and where all the other students speak the same first language. Wildner-Bassett (1990) sees a clear-cut distinction between a second language setting where native and non-native speakers communicate for real communication purposes and a foreign language setting where only artificial communication is possible. Though Bassett ascribes different discourse patterns more to classroom - non-classroom differences than to FL/SL differences, these dissimilar patterns are quite real and objective. That is why Kramsch (1990) is justified in saying that a separate agenda is necessary in foreign language learning research as distinct from second language acquisition research. All in all, it may be said that there is no unanimous opinion concerning the relationship between second language acquisition and foreign language learning (VanPatten & Lee 1990). But the opinion that the two processes are different at least in some respects and therefore should be treated differently is quite well founded and matches much of the empirical data. Two principal differences can be pinpointed that will hardly evoke any objections on the part of researchers and practical teachers. The first of these differences becomes clear from the very definition of what foreign language learning is as distinct from second language acquisition. Foreign language teaching/learning means that L2 is not used as one of the primary means of communication in the country where it is learned, i.e., there is reference to the speech community outside this country (Berns 1990b; Paulston 1992). In 2 6 TEACHERS AND THE GLOBAL EXPANSION OF ENGLISH other words, we speak about EFL when English, as it has already been mentioned above, is taught in countries where it has little or no internal communicative function or sociopolitical status (Nayar 1997: 31); it is just a school subject with no recognized status or function at all (Richards, Platt, & Weber 1985). This means that EFL learners, unlike ESL learners, get in touch with English only in the classroom, and hardly anywhere else outside it. And class hours in EFL conditions are inevitably limited. If English is learned at school or university, there are many other subjects to study; therefore, classes of English cannot be held more fr (...truncated)