This paper compares teaching practices of English as a foreign language in Sweden and Germany based on a questionnaire targeted at investigating teachers’ experiences and views on language use, giving a snapshot of teaching practices in classrooms in the two countries. In this regard, the focus is on the following questions: Which target varieties are used in TEFL, and to what extent? What is the status of different target varieties among teachers of English in the two countries? The results show that the use of target varieties is still in play in the TEFL classroom, despite the recent move towards communicative competence as the goal. The main target varieties used are AmE, BrE, a mixture of the two, and some neutral variety; with a slight preference among German teachers for BrE and among Swedish for the neutral variety alongside AmE or BrE. Further, teachers are in conflict between two ideals: learned (where they teach an English belonging to the native speakers) and didactic (where the goal is communicative fluency). In application, this conflict should be addressed by teacher training programmes in order to make (future) teachers aware of it and provide possible ways to cope with it.
In this article, I demonstrate that goose-fronting is taking place in Carlisle, a city in the north-west of England, and I provide detailed information about this change. The results show that similarly strong linguistic constraints are found in this variety and other varieties. A second point of discussion is the dynamics between goose and other back vowels, i.e. goat and foot, in this community. I argue that we also need to study the most adjacent back vowels in order to understand the complexity of this vowel change and the influence on nearby vowels. The data stem from interviews conducted in Carlisle between 2007 and 2010 and show that while goose is fronting across apparent time, for goat and foot no change in progress is observable. These dynamics seem to be geographically restricted to the north-west of England. While a parallel shift of goose and goat is very common in US and southern English varieties, the fronting of goat is not found in this northern variety. This lack of change is due to the monophthongal realisation of the goat vowel which prevents a parallel shift. Similarly, the fronting of foot seems to be blocked due to the lack of the foot–strut split.
The UK is facing important changes in the near future, with Brexit, i.e. the UK leaving the European Union (EU), looming ever more closely on the horizon. These important political and economic changes will certainly have an influence on Europe as a whole, and have had linguistic consequences for the English language, such as Brexit-related neologisms (Lalić-Krstin & Silaški, 2018). As Modiano (2017a) suggests, Brexit might also have an influence on the status of the English language in the EU, in particular with regard to the dominance of native speaker varieties. In this article, we discuss the possibility of the use of a neutral European English variety in the EFL classrooms of two EU member states, i.e. Sweden and Germany. Based on a survey among 80 practitioners in secondary schools (first results were presented in Forsberg, Mohr & Jansen, 2019), the study investigates attitudes towards target varieties of English in general, and European English or ‘Euro-English’ (cf. Jenkins, Modiano & Seidlhofer, 2001; Modiano 2003) in particular, after the referendum in June 2016.
This article investigates the status of the foot–strut split in the counties of Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in the East Midlands of England. The East Midlands area is a linguistic transition zone between northern English varieties with a phoneme inventory of five short vowels, where foot and strut are represented by the same phoneme, and southern English varieties which have the foot–strut split and therefore six short vowels. However, a lack of research on the distribution of the foot and strut vowels in the East Midlands exists and to fill that gap, this article examines the possible diffusion of the split northwards as predicted by Trudgill (1986). Reading-passage data, stratified by age group, sex and location is used to provide an apparent time, multilocal view on the distribution of the two vowel categories. Surprisingly, the changes that we notice do not concern the increasing distance between foot and strut but mainly foot-fronting in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire and strut-retraction in Derbyshire which leads to an increase in overlap between foot and strut in all three counties.
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