It’s so long since I last published anything on this blog (since the end of my A–Z of pronunciation, in fact), that I’ve more or less forgotten how to do it. But things have happened since I retired at the end of 2021 that seem to warrant one more sally into the world of blogging. […]
Tag Archives: Teaching English as a Lingua Franca
This should have been the easiest post so far – after all, I do know a thing or two about the Lingua Franca Core (LFC) – but it’s been driving me crazy for days. The problem is you. Who are you? What do you already know about the LFC? And what don’t you know? So […]
In concluding ‘A’ is for accent (2), my second post in this pronunciation blog, I argued that ‘[a]ccent has given way to intelligibility as the main focus of pronunciation teaching in the 21st century’. A couple of weeks later, I ended the post on comprehensibility by tying accent and comprehensibility to a third term, intelligibility, […]
When I arrived in Spain back in 1981, I quickly became fascinated by one of my colleagues at the university. Born and raised in Birmingham, he had faultless Spanish, accent included. – Born in the UK? – Yes. – So he lived in Spain as a child? – No. – So has a Spanish mother? […]
I’m coming towards the end of a series of articles on the globalization of English, and ELF (English as a lingua franca). They’re being published in Modern English Teacher, and there are five already out there, plus one more to round the series off. The five that are out there are: The globalization of English: implications […]
Those of you who follow me (both of you!) know that I blog on a highly irregular basis. I last blogged, in fact, back in July (summer is great for switching off), and wrote then about whether or not to correct learner English, especially if it is publically displayed. Staying with the same theme, I came […]
Last Friday I was travelling home by train. As we approached the mountains that separate Asturias from the great plains of Central Spain, I struck up a conversation with the man sitting next to me, who I’d seen using English in a message he’d been writing on his phone. He turned out to be an American […]
International flights are a great opportunity to see English working as a lingua franca. When you take off from Zurich to Madrid as I did the other day, the safety demonstration and other standard messages that you get over the speakers are not aimed at native speakers, and usually aren’t given by native speakers. It was interesting […]
In my post of December 6 I drew attention to ELF Pronunciation, the blog that Katy Davies and Laura Patsko run. Both women are practising teachers in Dubia and London, respectively, where they work with multilingual classes. Many of the students in these classes use English in ELF contexts, i.e. for international communication usually in the […]
englishglobalcom 