What is English?

Author(s):

Ulrikke Rindal(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

27. Didactics - Learning and Teaching

Format:

Paper

Session Information

27 SES 13 A, Teaching English as a Second Language

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-11

11:00-12:30

Room:

201.Oktatóterem [C]

Chair:

Meinert Arnd Meyer

Contribution

This paper reports a study which investigates English pronunciation choices as reported by 70 Norwegian adolescents who study English in school, assessing how their reported language choices relate to their attitudes towards native-speaker English accents. The results show that beliefs about the English language in the Norwegian classroom reflect global circumstances related to the status of English, leading to major implications for English as a discipline in lower and higher education.

English has become the foremost global language of communication, functioning as a lingua franca for people all over the world with different first languages for different purposes, across nations and across domains. Because of this function as a transnational lingua franca, the majority of English interactions in the world today involve only non-native speakers of English (Crystal 2003, Graddol 2006), and so the status of English in the world is not only characterised by its native speakers, but increasingly by those who use it as a second or later language (Kirkpatrick 2010). This developing status of English has immense educational implications for learners who will need to relate to increased variation and diversity in spoken English, while at the same time contributing to this variation and diversity.

In Norway, as in most European countries, English has traditionally been labelled a foreign language; taught at scheduled hours in the classroom, and acknowledged for its significance to education, business and mobility. However, Norway has seen an increase in English language access, proficiency and domain use, and is alongside Sweden, Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands considered to “lead Europe and the world when it comes to practical competence in English” (Linn & Hadjidemetriou 2014: 258). It as indeed been suggested that the status of English in these countries no longer can be characterised as a foreign language (e.g., Wang, 2013). However, English is not an official language in these countries, and Rindal (2013) and Rindal and Piercy (2013) argue that the status of English in Norway is in transition between a foreign and second language.

It is in this transitional second or later language (L2) context that Norwegian adolescents learn and practice English, both in and out of school. The study reported here explores ideologies related to English pronunciation among Norwegian adolescent learners by investigating motivations for English accent choices. The paper discusses the following research question: How do L2 choices among young Norwegians relate to the diversity and multiplicity of globalised English?

Method

Seventy participants from three different schools in Oslo participated in the study. They were 17 years old and in their second year of upper secondary school, which is their twelfth year of a total of 13 years of primary and secondary public schooling. Since the participants had concluded the 11 mandatory years of English teaching, they can be regarded as at least as proficient as Norway’s general adult population, who are characterised by the EF English Proficiency Index (2013) as “Very High proficiency” (or CEFR level B2). In a questionnaire, the participants were asked to report their accent aim in the following questionnaire item: “Which accent/pronunciation are you aiming at when you speak English?”. They were given six alternatives which were defined and labelled following a pilot study: British, American, Norwegian, ‘Neutral’, Other, I don’t care. The item alternative ‘Neutral’ refers to an L2 accent which is not geographically recognisable. From a sociolinguistic view there is, of course, no such thing as a “neutral accent”, but this response alternative represents a wish to not aim towards any of the well-known native accents such as American English or British English. The participants were also asked to give reasons for their accent aims with the following questionnaire item: “If you answered American English on the previous question, why do you not aim at British English? If you answered British English on the previous question, why do you not aim at American English?” From the 70 participants, seven students (three from one school and two from each of the other two schools) were asked to take part in an interview to talk more about their evaluations of English. The seven interviewees were chosen because they represented the three most common accent aims emerging from the questionnaire results (American, British, and ‘Neutral’). Since the questionnaire disregarded participants’ reasoning for a neutral accent aim, the interview paid particular attention to this topic. The L2 accent aims were counted, and the reasons for their accents aims were counted and sorted according to content. Interviews were used to elaborate on questionnaire results or to challenge these.

Expected Outcomes

Questionnaire reports of accent aims and motivations for these, combined with interview commentary about the meanings attached to English accents, show that English pronunciation is socially evaluated by learners, not only when spoken by native speakers, but also when chosen as an L2 target by the learners themselves. Consequently, learners avoid well-known native accents of English as target pronunciations, because imitating a native accent to a certain extent means signalling the cultures and qualities indexed by these accents. The participants refer to English as a personal language, suggesting that English language use is a social endeavour in this language community. The attitudes towards own L2 use of English pronunciation reflect the spread of English as a global language and the developing local view of English primarily as an international language of communication. Based on these results, the paper suggests that research on the developing global and local status of English should be made available to current and future teachers of English in Norway and other European countries with high proficiency learners. It is also suggested that future research on ideologies related to English spoken language should focus on L1-accented pronunciation.

References

Crystal, David. 2003. English as a global language, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Education First. 2013. EF English Proficiency Index. http.//www.ef.com/epi Graddol, David. 2006. English next. London: The British Council. Kirkpatrick, Andy. 2010. Introduction. In Andy Kirkpatrick (ed.), The Routledge handbook of World Englishes, 1-14. London: Routledge. Linn, Andrew & Hadjidemetriou, Chryso. 2014. Introduction. In Andrew Linn & Chryso Hadjidemetriou (eds.). English in the language ecology of “high proficiency” European countries. [Special issue]. Multilingua 33(3-4). 257-265. Rindal, Ulrikke. 2013. Meaning in English: L2 attitudes, choices and pronunciation in Norway. Oslo: University of Oslo dissertation. Rindal, Ulrikke & Piercy, Caroline. 2013. Being ‘neutral’? English pronunciation among Norwegian learners. World Englishes 32(2). 211-229. Wang, H. Samuel. 2013. Global English as a trend in English teaching. Intercultural Communication Studies 22(1). 26-32.

Author Information

Ulrikke Rindal (presenting / submitting)

University of Oslo

Department of Teacher Education and School Research

Fall

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