Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Peripheral languages are used within a given territory by native speakers to
each other, such as Welsh spoken in some regions of Wales, or Japanese spoken
in the whole of Japan.
●
Central languages are used within a single territory by people who are both
native speakers and non-native speakers, for purposes of education and govern-
ment, say, English in India used by native speakers of many languages.
●
Supercentral languages are used across several parts of the world by natives
and non-natives, with specialized function, say, Arabic or Latin for religious
ceremonies. Often their spread reflects previous colonial empires, French,
Spanish, and so on.
●
Hypercentral languages are used chiefly by non-native speakers across the
globe for a variety of purposes. At the moment only one hypercentral language
exists, namely English.
To de Swaan (2001), languages exist in ‘constellations’. India, for example, has
Hindi and English as two supercentral languages, plus 18 central languages, such
as Gujarati and Sindhi, nearly all of which have official status within a state; the
remaining 780-odd languages are peripheral.
Society as a whole depends on the interlocking of these languages and so is
based on multilinguals who can plug the gaps between one level and another,
whether within one territory or internationally. According to de Swaan (2001),
the learning of second languages usually goes up the hierarchy rather than down:
people learn a language that is the next level up. Speakers of a peripheral language
The L2 user and the native speaker
190
(1 language) English
(12 languages) Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German,
Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish,
Swahili
(about 100 languages)
(all the rest; 98% of the world’s languages)
The hypercentral
language
The central
languages
The supercentral
languages
The peripheral
languages
Figure 10.2 The hierarchy of languages (de Swaan, 2001)

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have to learn a central language to function in their own society, such as speakers
of Catalan learning Spanish in Spain. Speakers of a central language need to learn a
supercentral language to function within their region, say speakers of Persian learn-
ing Arabic. Speakers of a supercentral language need the hypercentral language to
function globally; anybody but a native speaker of English needs to learn English
(and even they may need to learn ELF).
The main reason why people learn a local language (to adopt a slightly more
neutral term than de Swaan’s ‘peripheral’) like Finnish as a second language may
be to meet Finnish people and take part in life in Finland; the emphasis is on
native speakers in their native habitat. The reason for learning a central language
is to interact with the rest of the population in multilingual societies: speakers of
Ladin need Italian to go to Italian universities outside the South Tyrol. Some of the
time users of central languages are dealing with native speakers, some of the time
with fellow non-native users with different L1s, within the same country or geo-
graphical region. The reasons for acquiring supercentral languages depend on the
uses of languages, such as Hebrew for the Jewish faith and Arabic for Islam; the
native speaker is of marginal relevance; the location may be anywhere where the
language is used in this way, say synagogues or mosques across the globe. The rea-
sons for acquiring the hypercentral language are the global demands of work; inter-
national business becomes difficult without English and the native speaker is only
one of the types of people that need to be communicated with.
The reasons why languages have got to these particular levels are complex and
controversial. Some see the dark side of the dominance of English, regarding it as
a way of retaining an empire through deliberate political actions (Phillipson,
1992), and inevitably leading to the death of local languages. Others see the use of
English as an assertion of local rights to deal with the rest of the world in their
own way rather than as domination (Canagarajah, 2005).
Some of these issues are considered in Chapter 11 in the context of the goals of lan-
guage teaching. This section concentrates on English, which is unique in that it can
be used for any of these levels, from monolingual local to global hypercentral; the
closest previous analogues were Latin and Chinese in the empires of Rome and China
respectively. Some languages have become global in extremely limited uses, like
Japanese for karate. Others have seen their vocabulary adapted to international use –
try asking for the Starbucks coffee called ‘venti’ in a coffee bar in Italy – it actually
means ‘twenty’, rather than ‘large’. But English has extended its scope way outside
the previous boundaries of the British Empire to a considerable range of functions.
English, then, may be acquired for any or all of the above reasons. Other lan-
guages are limited to those appropriate to their position on the hierarchy. The
demand for Finnish as an international language is probably small, though it may
have some central role for the Finnish-speaking minority in Sweden. Various terms
have been proposed for this peculiar status of English, whether ‘international
English’, ‘global English’ or ‘world English’. Recent discussion has preferred the
term ‘English as lingua franca’ (ELF) – English as a means of communication
between native speakers of other languages. In this context, ‘lingua franca’ does
not have its historic negative meaning of a mixed language, but means a commu-
nication language used by speakers of other languages.
Throughout this chapter, the question that has been posed repeatedly is the sta-
tus of the native speaker. At one time, native speakers were unquestionably the
only true speakers of the language; non-native speakers could only aspire to
become like them. The grammars, dictionaries and pronunciation depended on
International languages: English as Lingua Franca (ELF) 191

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one form or another of native English. Social interaction was assumed to take place
between native speakers and non-native speakers.
Nowadays much use of English takes place between fellow non-native speakers;
74 per cent of English in tourism does not involve a native speaker (Graddol,
2006). Many jobs like professional footballers, merchant seamen, call centre work-
ers or airplane pilots require L2 user-to-L2 user interaction. Sometimes indeed the
native speaker may find it difficult to join in. L2 users of ELF need primarily to be
able to talk to each other rather than to native speakers.
Yet the Chinese person talking to the Brazilian in English, or the German
speaker talking to the Arabic speaker in English, do need to share some common
form of English or they will not understand each other. While most arguments for
the native speaker version of the language are based on ownership and linguistic
power, native speaker language at least provides a common standard of reference,
so that the Chinese and the Brazilian are sharing the same English. Native speaker
English has been extensively studied and described for a hundred years, so a great
amount is known about it; we know the sort of grammatical patterns and vocab-
ulary that native speakers use.
But suppose that the English used by non-natives is the target. Compared to the
wealth of information on native language, comparatively little is known about
non-native English by L2 users; mostly it has been investigated in terms of devia-
tions from native speech rather than in its own right. Chapter 4 discusses Jenny
Jenkins’ (2002) proposals for an ELF pronunciation syllabus based on students’
difficulties with each other’s speech, for instance, not bothering with teaching
/
ð⬃θ/, but paying particular attention to where the sentence stress occurs. While
this severs the link to the native speaker, the phonology is based on students
learning language in classrooms rather than on L2 users using language in the
world outside education; what students accept or reject may not be the same as
what experienced L2 users might feel.
Currently, considerable research is taking place into the characteristics of ELF,
for example in the VOICE research at the University of Vienna, based on a variety
of L2 users. From this comes the list in Box 10.12, compiled by Barbara Seidlhofer
(2004). Characteristics of ELF are different usage of articles from native English,
The L2 user and the native speaker