The Politeness and Pragmatics of ELF
Early approaches to politeness in academia, ELT materials and our language classroom have focussed mainly on our learners emulating the native speaker (NS) models of politeness and although non-native speaker interactions (NNS<->NNS) now take prominence in a global world where English is used as the predominant Lingua Franca (ELF), few have attempted to investigate the NNS perceptions of fellow NNSs’ requests. Does the non-native speaker’s choice of language affect the impressions they are creating? Would ELF users evaluate the politeness of these requests in the same way that a native-speaker does? This talk seeks to discuss what and how we choose to teach, and reports on the results of the research I have done on the subject.
Speaker:
Chia Suan Chong is a graduate in Communication Studies and has an MA in Applied Linguistics and ELT from King’s College London. Currently running Business and General English classes, in addition to teacher training (CELTA) courses, at International House London, Chia is passionate about Dogme, Systemic Functional Grammar, Intercultural Pragmatics and Sociolinguistics. She speaks English and Mandarin as her first language, and Japanese, Italian and Spanish as her second. Active on Twitter, Chia loves a good debate and blogs regularly at chiasuanchong.wordpress.com.
Date:
Mike Hogan (Germany)
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good qenutioss.1. It depends. The counter argument could be that students need a model that is closer to the accepted norm, and the norm so far is native-speaking not anymore in numbers of people using the language but still very strong in the mind of those who learn the language. Just see the job ads in Europe, all want native-speaker teachers, when perhaps in some places and for some students an international’ or bilingual teachers would be better. So I’m taking the reason for RP in coursebooks is that it sells. The Business (coursebook) has a number of texts spoken in a French accent. When I use these texts I think the students don’t care what accent it is. And when I use them with French students, it is embarrassing. It sounds a bit like they’re mocking the French with those texts.2. Authentic texts, totally!3. I don’t know. I think that when there’s a book like this I won’t be teaching Business English anymore. Or if I still am, I hope I won’t need to use BE coursebook anymore.
This is a good post on an issue that rlaely makes me mad.There is absolutely no good reason at all why publishers still persist with using RP as the basis for their listenings. A variety of native speaker accents and non-natives would be more realistic and help prepare students better. It is a common complaint that students can do the listening tasks in class, but as soon as they get out into the real world they often fail miserably.The only reason I can come up with is that they want to make it easy for students to get right because that makes them like the teacher and the book more. If they are constantly being challenged the fear might be that students will be turned off the teacher, book or institution.