Session 3 Teaching English as a Global Language

Warm Up Activity 1

Watch the video of Ana Botella, the former Mayor of Madrid addressing the International Olympic Committee in September 2013 to put forward the candidature of Madrid for the 2020 Games: 

Do you find her speech easy or difficult to understand? 

Read this comment on Botella’s speech posted in the EnglishGlobalCommunication blog:

“Botella’s speech caused a scandal at the time, and her English was the butt of many jokes and much sharp criticism. However, when I ask people to simply transcribe what she said, they are usually very successful. In my own attempt, I failed to transcribe Lausanne, but that’s more to do with my lack of knowledge of the workings of the IOC than with her pronunciation. In fact, Botella is a very good example of a speaker who despite her clearly limited English and very marked Spanish accent, is more than just intelligible. Intelligibility and accent are not the same thing!”

Which of the statements above (if any) resonate with you? 

Pre workshop activity

Mispronunciation in International English Communication

The majority of misunderstandings between speakers of English with different first languages come down to pronunciation differences. This was established by Jenkins, 2002. She points out the following irony: only learners of English are still expected to learn RP or general standard American pronunciation. In the UK and the US, everyone knows and accepts that speakers have regional accents. All L2’ English users are marked by their L1, and when English is used for international communication, L1 influenced pronunciations can lead to misunderstandings. How to avoid this and best prepare our learners ? 

Trudgill (1998) favours the approach of holding on to some internationally accepted standards, informed by British or American standard pronunciation. He argues that if we do not pursue this, English will break up into dialects. 

Jenkins favours the approach of teaching mutual intelligibility. She argues that this approach is more realistic, and native speaker pronunciation is much much rarer than non native, globally, and that it is also pedagogically most useful for learners.

Which one do you agree with?

• Post your reflections in the Discussion forum 

You may read the full works cited by the authors if you like. Just click on the hot links below.

Jenkins, J. (2002). A sociolinguistically based, empirically researched pronunciation syllabus for English as an international language. Applied linguistics, 23(1), 83-103.

Jenkins, J. (2005). Teaching pronunciation for English as a lingua franca: A sociopolitical perspective. The globalisation of English and the English language classroom, 145-158.

Trudgill, P. (1998). The chaos before the order: New Zealand English and the second stage of new-dialect formation. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS STUDIES AND MONOGRAPHS, 114, 197-208.

Discussion forum: a reminder to post at least twice this week in our discussion forum