Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Box 10.13 ELF (English as lingua franca)
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The status of English is now peculiar in that it has become a lingua franca
hypercentral language largely spoken between non-native speakers.
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A main motive for many learners is to be able to speak with fellow L2 users,
not native speakers.
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The target for learners in grammatical and phonological terms will need to be
based on successful ELF English, not native speaker English or student English.
Discussion topics
1
Devise a classroom communicative activity depending on use of both
languages (other than translation).
2
What do you now believe about the status of the native speaker in language
teaching?
3
How would you define a successful L2 learner?
4
When should codeswitching not occur in the classroom?
5
How much L1 is the maximum for the L2 classroom? 0 per cent? 10 per
cent? 20 per cent? 50 per cent? More?
6
Will the public’s demand for native speakers to teach them the second
language ever change?
Further reading
The key texts in this area are: Myers-Scotton (2005) in Handbook of Bilingualism;
Macaro (1997) Target Language, Collaborative Learning and Autonomy; de Swaan
(2001) Words of the World: The Global Language System; and Llurda (2005) Non-
native Teachers.

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11
The goals of language 
teaching
This chapter looks at language as the possession of a group and at the L2 user as a
member of a specific group. It describes some of the roles that second languages play
in people’s lives and sees how they can be translated into goals of language teach-
ing. It raises the fundamental questions of why we are teaching a second language
and of what students want to be and what groups they want to belong to, things
which teachers often neglect to think about in their absorbing teaching lives.
To some people, acquiring a second language is a difficult feat; to others, it is
ordinary and unexceptionable. Take the real-life history of a boy in Tanzania who
spoke Kihaya at home; he needed Kiswahili in elementary school and English in
secondary school; he trained to be a priest, for which he needed Latin, but he also
learnt French out of curiosity at the same time. Then he went as a priest to Uganda
and Kenya, where he needed Rukiga and Kikamba, and he is now in Illinois, where
he needs Spanish to communicate with his parishioners. To most monolingual
English speakers, this seems a mind-boggling life story. It is extraordinary to us that
someone can use more than one language in their everyday life.
Or take a country like Cameroon, which has 2 official languages, 4 lingua fran-
cas and 285 native languages (Koenig et al., 1983); most people use four or five lan-
guages in the course of a day. Probably more people in the world are like the typical
Cameroonian than the typical Englishman. Harding and Riley (1986) point out
that ‘there are 3000–5000 languages in the world but only about 150 countries to
fit them all into’. Even in Europe, 56 per cent of the citizens of the EU know at least
one foreign language (EuroBarometer, 2006). Knowing a second language is a nor-
mal part of human existence; it may well be unusual to know only one.
A starting point is to look at what a language is. Conventionally, one meaning of
‘language’ is political in the Lang
2
sense of Chapter 1, ‘an abstract entity’: a language
belongs to a nation, whether German, French, English or Chinese. An aphorism
attributed to Ulrich Weinreich is that a language is a dialect with an army and a
navy. This definition in terms of a nation works when the everyday use of a lan-
guage effectively stops at the borders of a country, say Japanese in Japan or Korean
in Korea. In these cases, the native speakers of the language are born and live within
the country. They are local languages spoken within the same area, whether a coun-
try or a section of a country. They usually have a single standard form based on a
particular region or social class, regardless of dialects: standard Japanese derives
from Tokyo, standard Korean from Seoul. The logical target of teaching for those
local languages may indeed be the language and culture of the native speaker.
Languages, however, may have native speakers spread across neighbouring coun-
tries, not just confined to a single country – supercentral languages in de Swaan’s
terms, like Swahili, Arabic and Chinese. Some languages do not even have nation
homes in that they spread across several countries without being recognized in any

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of them, say, Romany in many countries of Europe, or Kurdish spread across several
frontiers. Other languages spoken within the boundaries of one country may not be
the official language of the state, such as Basque and Catalan in Spain or Scottish
Gaelic in Scotland. Often this may be a major plank in arguments for political inde-
pendence, as is the case of Catalonia in Spain. Languages, then, may have very dif-
ferent statuses, as seen in Chapter 10.