English as a lingua franca. A new teaching paradigm? (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 1,3, RWTH Aachen University (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Variety in English, language: English, abstract: "If you stay in the mind-set of 15th-century Europe, the future of Latin is extremely bright," predicts Nicholas Ostler, the author of a language history called "Empires of the Word" who wrote a history of Latin. "If you stay in the mind-set of the 20th-century world, the future of English is extremely bright." Indeed, the history and the world-wide distribution of the English language has been a most remarkable and unparalleled one. The language has developed into a global language which "[...] is dominant in a way that no language has ever been before." Yet what makes English so important is its use as a lingua franca.
Today, English is spoken by three times as many non-native speakers as native speakers. This phenomenon raises the question whether a standard should be established and how it should be taught at school. English as a lingua franca - a new teaching paradigm? This question will be discussed in this term paper.
I will begin with a short presentation about the distribution of English and its development into a global language. Kachru's famous three-circle model describing the diversity of English speakers around the world will be examined with a critical eye. The chapter goes on by trying to define the term lingua franca. In chapter 3 the following current research projects will be presented: Lingua Franca Core (LFC) by Jennifer Jenkins, Basic Global English (BGE) by Joachim Grezga and Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) developed by Barbara Seidlhofer.
Chapter 3 deals with the question of teaching English as a lingua franca (ELF). "English has become the second language of everybody. [...] It's gotten to the point where almost in any part of the world to be educated means to know English" says Mark Warschauer, a professor at the University of California I will first of all focus on the status of English at school by looking at the curricula for teaching English in North-Rhine Westphalian grammar schools. Moreover, the difference between teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) vs. English as lingua franca (ELF) will be examined. Research has shown that native speakers and their Englishes have become relatively unimportant in international communication. Hence, does it still make sense to teach native-speaker norms? The concept of teaching Standard English will be critically analyzed. The last part of this chapter deals with objectives in teaching ELF as well its pedagogical implications...