Seven principles for writing materials for English as a lingua franca

Abstract

The unprecedented rise of English to become a global lingua franca has sparked a growing academic interest with numerous research publications on global Englishes, English as a lingua franca, and English as an international language. Although this research has led to numerous informative findings concerning pronunciation, pragmatics, and intercultural communicative skills, many course books still present English as if it was primarily used to communicate with ‘native speakers’. In addition, native speakerism, or the belief that ‘native speakers’ are not only better models but also better teachers of the language, is still widespread in ELT. As a result, this article aims to bridge the gap between the research and materials writing practice by suggesting seven research-based principles which can help materials writers not only write materials that are truly global and authentic, but also contribute to tackling native speakerism by addressing some of the discourses that support it.

Developing English learning materials for computer network engineering students at peripheral Indonesia

“…ESP course centralizes neither on personal needs or general interests but is more on the work or study related needs (Basturkmen, 2010). The development of English learning materials should not be directed toward the native speaker's proximity or correctness but rather to the authentic use of English itself and to the communicative skills (Kiczkowiak, 2019). To develop an effective teaching materials, a developer needs to consider various factors such as teachers' expertise, teachers' training experience, students' cultural background, preferable teaching style, type of study expected by the learner, the students' learning necessities, the readability and motivation of the learner.…”

The Development of ELF-aware Classroom Materials

“…There have been some frameworks or suggestions proposed to help practitioners evaluate and design ELT materials for ELF contexts (e.g. Galloway 2018, Kiczkowiak 2020, Lopriore and Vettorel 2019, Vettorel 2018, Galloway and Rose 2015.…”

“…A shift from the focus on 'native-like' pronunciation and grammatical correctness to intelligibility (e.g. Jenkins 2000, Kiczkowiak 2020) Kiczkowiak (2020) stresses that intelligibility in ELF contexts is more important than native speaker proximity. Successful communication does not seem to be related to speaking with a standard native-like accent.…”

“…Galloway (2018: 476) stresses that exposure to authentic language will help students understand how the language is negotiated and raise their motivation and awareness that in order to communicate successfully, it is not necessary to adhere to 'a strict set of native English speakers norms'. Kiczkowiak (2020) suggests that the English language presented in teaching materials cannot be based on 'native speaker' corpora. He proposes the use of the existing ELF corpora, such as VOICE (Vienna Oxford International Corpus of English), ELFA (English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Contexts), WrELFA (Written English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Contexts), or ACE (Asian Corpus of English) to showcase 'the true diversity of the English language'.…”

Personal and Professional Readiness of In-service Teachers of English for Culturally Responsive Teaching

“…Holding a global status, the English language has already become the medium of interaction among many non-native speakers (Crystal, 2003;McKay, 2002) which has led to diminishing the role of native speakers in ELT pedagogy (Byram, 2008;Graddol, 2000;Matsuda, 2006;McKay, 2002). This paradigm shift has culminated in that one of the ultimate aims of ELT is preparing students to communicate effectively and appropriately in various settings where speakers' world of linguistic and cultural origins are mostly diverse (Deardorff, 2006;Kiczkowiak, 2019;Schreiber, 2019;Seidlhofer, 2011) and "to which each speaker brings their own cultural frames of reference" (Matsuda, 2017, p. xiii). From this standpoint, ELT pedagogy "goes beyond acquisition of linguistic, non-linguistic etc.…”