PASIVOS FINANCIEROS

Teaching

The core approaches to EIL take as their starting point the fact that for various reasons, the world’s two prestige accents of English, Received Pronunciation (RP) and General American (GA), no longer provide the best goals for L2 learners (Jenkins, 2003: 125). This is particularly true of RP, whose L1 speakers now constitute less than 3 percent of the British population (Trudgill, 2001). Jenkins (2003: 125) further explains the reasons that explain the dissatisfaction with RP as a reference model, she argues that:

Not only is RP a minority accent, but its origins in the English public school system and a social élite from London and the Home Counties is nowadays more of an embarrassment than an advantage in many parts of the world including Britian. In some countries and some contexts it is even stigmatised. More importantly as far as EIL is concerned, RP is not one of the easiest accents for an L2 learners to acquire either productively, because of its large number of diphthongs, non-rhotic ‘r’, complex word stress rules, and tenuous relationship with spelling, or receptively because of its extensive use of weak forms. In addition, teachers with regional accents have become less willing to adopt RP or GA for teaching purposes.

Another reason is that learners are more frequently expressing their desires to preserve something of their L1 accent as a means of expressing their own identity in English rather than identifying with its NSs (ibid). The proposal of core approaches is hoped to be a realistic alternative which will change the situation. The lingua franca core is the most fully researched and detailed attempt that has as yet been made to provide EIL speakers with a core intended to guarantee the mutual intelligibility of their accents.

In contexts of English as an international language (EIL), the purpose of learning English is ‘international communication rather than for communication with its native speakers NSs’ (Jenkins, 2002: 85). According to her (ibid), the international speakers of EIL target the international community rather than a community of British NSs (or any other NS). Moreover, the speakers have the right to express their L1 regional group identity in English by means of their accent, as long as the accent does not jeopardize international intelligibility (ibid). Consequently, it is important to develop a research-based pedagogy for EIL Non-native speakers - non-native speakers

(NNS-NNS) interaction. Such pedagogy aims at promoting international phonological intelligibility.

According to Trudgill (1998: 29), there is a great fear that English is now used so widely around the world, and is in particular used by so many non-native speakers, that if we are not careful, and very vigilant, the language will quite rapidly break up into a series of increasingly mutually unintelligible dialects, and eventually into different languages. In other words, further phonological divergence may threaten international communication. Trudgill argues that this point of view is ‘perfectly sensible’ for a language that currently has more non- native than native speakers (ibid).

According to Jenkins (1998), the recent growth in the use of

English as an InternationalLanguage (EIL) has led to changes in

learners' pronunciation needs and goals. The acquisition of a

native-like accent is no longer the ultimate objective of the

majority of learners, nor is communication with native speakers

their primary motivationfor learning English (ibid). Instead, what

they need above all is to be able to communicate successfully

with other non-native speakers of English from different L1

backgrounds (ibid). Jenkins (1998) argues that:

With English assuming the position of the world's major lingua franca, a radical rethink is called for in terms of

the role of pronunciation and its aims within the ELT

curriculum. In particular, there is an urgent need to

consider the questionof which pronunciation norms and

models are most appropriate for classes aiming to

prepare learners for interaction in EILcontexts, and to

raise teachers' awareness of the issues involved.

The lingua franca core (LFC for short) provides the basis for a phonological syllabus for EIL learners. It consists of the

phonological and phonetic features which seem to be crucial as safeguards of mutual intelligibility in international language teaching ILT, as argued by Jenkins (2002: 96). Moreover, she argues that concentrating on these items is likely to be more effective than attending to every detail in which an NNS’s pronunciation differs from that of the (standard) pronunciation of an NS (ibid). In addition, it is also more relevant, since the syllabus no longer attempts to address the comprehension needs of an NS listener when, in EIL, the listener is more likely to be an NNS (ibid).

2.11.1 The Core Features

The following is a summary of the main core items which should be maintained (Jenkins, 2003: 126):

1. The consonant inventory with the following provisos:

• _{Some substitutions of /Ө/ and /ð/ are acceptable}

(because they are intelligible in EIL);

• Rhotic ‘r’ rather than non-rhotic varieties of ‘r’;

• British English /t/ between vowels in words such as

‘latter’, ‘water’ rather than American English flapped [r];

• Allophonic variation within phonemes permissible as

long as the pronunciation does not overlap onto another phoneme, for example Spanish pronunciation of /v/ as [β] leads in word-initial positions to its being heard as /b/ can be pronounced ‘facsheet’ but not ‘fatsheet’ or ‘facteet’;

• /nt/ between vowels as in British English ‘winter’ pronounced /wІntƏr/ rather than American English where, by deleting of /t/, it becomes / wІnƏr /;

• Addition is acceptable, for example ‘product’

pronounced [pƏrɒdʌkƱtƆ] was intelligible to NNS interlocutors, whereas omission was not, for example ‘product’ pronounced /pɒdʌk /.

2. Vowel sounds

• Maintenance of contrast between long and short

vowels for example between ‘live’ and ‘leave’;

• L2 regional qualities acceptable if they are

consistent, except substitutions for the sound // as in ‘bird’, which regularly cause problems.

3. Production and placement of tonic (nuclear) stress

• Appropriate use of contrastive stress to signal

meaning. For example the difference in meaning in the utterances ‘I came by TAXi’ and ‘I CAME by taxi’ in which nuclear stress is shown in upper case. The former is a neutral statement of fact, whereas the latter includes an additional meaning such as ‘but I’m going home by ‘bus’.

2.11.2 Non-Core Features

The assumption is that non-core features are excluded from the lingua franca core simply because they are not crucially important to intelligibility in EIL contexts. Therefore, they can be considered as ‘areas in which L1 transfer indicates not ‘error’ but (NNS) regional accent’

(Jenkins, 2002: 97). Some of these features seem to be unteachable. In other words, no matter how much classroom time is dedicated to them, learners do not acquire them (ibid). The non-core areas are as follows:

1. The consonant sounds /Ө/, /ð/, and the allophone [ƚ];

2. Vowel quality, for example the difference between /bʌs/ and /bƱs/ as long as quality is used consistently;

3. Weak forms, that is the use of schwa instead of the full vowel sound in words such as ‘to’, ‘from’, ‘of’, ‘was’, ‘do’; in EIL the full vowel sounds tend to help rather than hinder intelligibility;

4. Other features of connected speech, especially assimilation, for example the assimilation of the sound /d/ at the end of one word to the sound at the beginning of the next, so that /red pent/ (‘red paint’) becomes /reb pent/. 5. The direction of pitch movements whether to

signal attitude or grammatical meaning;

6. The placement of word stress which, in any case, varies considerably across different L1 varieties of English, so that there is a need for receptive flexibility;

7. Stress-timed rhythm.

If learners in the English Department at Damascus University are aiming at intelligible pronunciation, then a syllabus that enhances intelligibility will be proposed (Please see chapter 6,

sections 6.4, 6.5 and 6.6 for the new course book). It will be based on LFC and the core features in particular will be stressed. The next section will deal with the two concepts of convergence and divergence.