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ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA: IMPLICATIONS FOR PEDAGOGY AND ASSESSMENT

Paper · 2017 · Fan (Gabriel) Fang

Summary

This is a position paper, not an empirical study. It has no dataset, experiment or new resource. Fang asks whether English teaching and testing built around native-speaker norms still serve most learners. Most of these learners will later use English mainly with other non-native speakers. The paper reviews two frameworks. The first is Kachru's World Englishes (WE) model of inner, outer and expanding circles. The second is English as a lingua franca (ELF), which treats English as fluid, plural and not tied to any nation or codified variety. Fang argues that WE is still nation-based and still leans on norms for the expanding circle. ELF instead centres on how speakers actually communicate and on the strategies they use when communication breaks down. From this, the paper argues that standardized, native-benchmarked paper tests capture only a narrow slice of real language use. It proposes performance-based assessment of task completion and communication strategies, drawing on the author's ToPIC approach. The main contribution is conceptual: it reframes "correct English" as communicative effectiveness among diverse speakers rather than conformity to one native standard.

Key points

  • Two frameworks compared.
    • Kachru's WE (1985, 1992) divides English into ENL (inner), ESL (outer) and EFL (expanding) circles.
    • ELF emerged in the early 2000s with Jenkins (2000) and Seidlhofer (2001).
    • Jenkins (2015) later extended ELF to English as a Multilingua Franca (EMF).
  • Three critiques of WE. The model is nation-based, its three-way split privileges inner-circle English, and it still treats expanding-circle English as dependent on outside norms.
  • ELF is not a variety. It is not codified and has no fixed norm. Seidlhofer (2011) defines it as English chosen as the medium between speakers whose first languages differ.
  • Speaker numbers cited. Roughly one billion people speak English with reasonable competence (Jenkins, 2009). Graddol (2006) projected a peak above two billion.
  • ToPIC as the proposed basis. ToPIC (Teaching of Pronunciation for Intercultural Communication; Fang 2015, 2016) builds on Kumaravadivelu's "postmethod" principles of particularity, practicality and possibility. Fang suggests using it to design performative assessment tasks that target accommodation and communication strategies.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. No single native benchmark. Nativised varieties such as Singapore, Nigerian and Indian English are treated as legitimate, not as error-ridden versions of British or American English.
  • I2. Judge success by the task, not by match to a template. Assessment should check whether the communicative goal was reached, since real lingua franca use is too messy for a fixed form.
  • I3. Communication strategies as an object of study. ELF treats accommodation, repair and negotiation of meaning when understanding breaks down as central competence, not as noise.
  • I4. Standardized tests cover only a narrow slice of real use. Fang argues that tests built on one norm underestimate how diverse actual usage is.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tokens): The lexicon and morphology in crate en could record variety-specific forms as valid variants with a variety tag, rather than flagging or normalizing them away.
  • I2 (answer): Readers and QA tests could score whether the correct answer or world state was reached from non-standard input, not only whether the parse matched a native-style gold analysis.
  • I3 (frames): crate prag could model clarification requests, paraphrase and self-repair as explicit speech acts, so dialogue frames explain how a misunderstanding was resolved.
  • I4 (learn): Evaluation suites, including negative controls, could add held-out text from non-native and outer-circle writers, to reveal parser or reader brittleness that native-only treebanks would hide.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Also on the byline: Shantou University.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksLiterature and Literary Theory · 541 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,379 works

Cite

Cite as Fan (Gabriel) Fang. 2017. ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA: IMPLICATIONS FOR PEDAGOGY AND ASSESSMENT. TEFLIN Journal 28.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.15639/teflinjournal.v28i1/57-70

@article{fang2017english,
  title = {{ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA: IMPLICATIONS FOR PEDAGOGY AND ASSESSMENT}},
  author = {Fan (Gabriel) Fang},
  journal = {TEFLIN Journal 28},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.15639/teflinjournal.v28i1/57-70},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.15639/teflinjournal.v28i1/57-70}
}

References

48 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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