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Fostering awareness of the pedagogical implications of World Englishes and ELF in teacher education in Italy

Paper · 2016 · Paola Vettorel and Sara Corrizzato

Summary

The paper asks whether teacher training can shift how future English teachers think about the language. Today English is spoken in many varieties (World Englishes, WE), and it is used mostly between non-native speakers as a lingua franca (ELF). Classroom practice, however, still centres on standard British or American norms and the native-speaker ideal. At the University of Verona, a module on WE and ELF (Module 1) was built into the English courses of the Italian pre-service programmes TFA and PAS. The authors followed trainees across academic years 2012-13 to 2014-15. They combined several kinds of evidence: questionnaires, posts in e-learning forums, interviews, and final reports. Trainees became more aware of variation, intelligibility and communication strategies. They began to judge textbooks critically and wrote their own WE/ELF-informed lesson plans and activities. The study matters because it suggests that initial teacher education is a realistic first step toward more inclusive, communication-oriented teaching. The authors stress that this means adapting existing materials, not throwing them away.

Key points

  • Setting: the University of Verona, in its department devoted to the study of foreign languages and literatures. The courses were the TFA and PAS teacher qualification programmes, academic years 2012-13 to 2014-15.
  • Data were triangulated from four sources: questionnaires, e-learning discussion forums, interviews, and trainees' final reports.
  • Resistance to plural-English teaching is summed up by the PESTS acronym (Marlina, 2014): Practicality, Efficiency, Standards, Simplicity. Earlier studies show teachers often know the term WE but rarely apply it in class.
  • WE/Global Englishes/ELF topics have appeared in the Cambridge ESOL DELTA since 2008. They also appear in the Italian Ministry (MIUR) teacher entry papers of 2013 and 2014.
  • Outcome: trainees critically evaluated ELT textbooks and produced adapted, WE- and ELF-aware lesson plans. The authors present teachers as agents of change who treat materials as resources to adapt.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Treat non-standard varieties as different rather than deficient, so that variation is described instead of flagged as error.
  • I2. A language model or standard is an abstraction, while real interaction is variable, so the reference norm should be explicit and swappable.
  • I3. Judge a change by triangulating several independent evidence types (surveys, forum posts, interviews, reports) rather than trusting one.
  • I4. Adapt existing materials rather than discarding them, extending a standard-based resource with variety-aware examples.
  • I5. Name the typical objections (PESTS) up front and use them as a checklist when introducing a less monolithic approach.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (tokens): The tagger and lemmatizer could map Outer-Circle and ELF forms (e.g. dropped third-person -s, non-standard plurals) to their lemma and features without marking the sentence as broken.
  • I2 (tree): UD dialect conversion could make the target convention a declared parameter, keeping parses of variable learner/ELF English apart from the idealised treebank norm.
  • I3 (learn): Silver data and repair rules could be accepted only when independent witnesses agree, mirroring multi-source qualitative validation.
  • I4 (answer): School-course test sets could be extended with paraphrased variants in other Englishes to check that readers answer correctly regardless of variety.
  • I5 (learn): Evaluation design could list expected failure arguments (impractical, inefficient, non-standard, confusing) as negative controls to test explicitly.

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

🎓University of VeronaVerona · Italy3 works · 38 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 3The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksLiterature and Literary Theory · 519 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2,263 works

Cite

Cite as Paola Vettorel and Sara Corrizzato. 2016. Fostering awareness of the pedagogical implications of World Englishes and ELF in teacher education in Italy. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching 6.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.3.6

@article{vettorel2016fostering,
  title = {{Fostering awareness of the pedagogical implications of World Englishes and ELF in teacher education in Italy}},
  author = {Paola Vettorel and Sara Corrizzato},
  journal = {Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching 6},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.3.6},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2016.6.3.6}
}

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