The general approaches and teaching objectives to English language teaching are guided by local sociolinguistic conditions. This study concentrates on teachers’ attitudes towards ELF specifically in Finland and the USA because English has a different role in these countries and contrasting them is expected to reveal interesting results. The USA is, in Kachruvian terms, an Inner Circle country which is traditionally seen as one of the norm-providing communities for the English language. In contrast, Finland is an Expanding Circle country in which English is taught as a foreign language, and thus Finland is traditionally labeled a norm-dependent community, meaning that it is guided by the norms set by norm-providing communities like the USA. This section observes how the goals of English
language teaching are formulated in the two countries and how they take the global spread of English and its significance in multilingual communication into account.
In Finland, the general guidelines for basic education and high school education are provided in state-wide curriculums created by the Finnish National Agency for Education (Opetushallitus). The curriculum for basic education was last updated in 2014 and for high school education in 2015. The basic education curriculum contains guidelines for each school subject in grade levels 1-2, 3-6 and 7- 9, English as a foreign language being one of them. Currently, English language teaching in Finland does not usually formally begin until the third grade, and thus the focus here is on grades 3-9 and high school.
In grades 3-6, the first goal listed for English language teaching is to provide the learner with an understanding of the linguacultural pluralism of the world and the position of English as a language of global communication (Opetushallitus 2014, 219). This indicates that the global spread of English is acknowledged in teaching. Another goal is the creation of an open learning environment where the focus is on the communicative message being conveyed (ibid.). This implies that communicative effectiveness is given more value than formal correctness. The above goals are repeated for the grades 7-9 with the addition that the learners’ perception of the global spread of English is advanced through observation of phenomena related to the different varieties of English and attitudes towards them (idem. 349). Furthermore, learners are expected to develop crosscultural skills. It is also directly stated that the learners observe the development of English into a global lingua franca (ibid.). Finally, in the curriculum for high school education, one of the main objectives for English language teaching is that the learner understands the significance and the role of English as a language of global communication (Opetushallitus 2015, 109). In conclusion, the teaching objectives in Finland for English as a foreign language seem to acknowledge the global spread of English, its pluralistic nature, and its role as a lingua franca.
In the USA, English is taught as a second language to inhabitants who do not speak it as their first language, with the goal of providing them an adequate proficiency of English that grants them an equal opportunity to academic success. It is important to acknowledge, that English is taught in the USA for an essentially different purpose than in Finland. English is the most commonly used language of the country, and without an adequate proficiency of English, opportunities for academic achievement are significantly diminished. By contrast, in Finland, English is taught primarily in order to provide the students the opportunity to be able to communicate in multilingual encounters. However, it can be argued that the position of second language learners in the USA is not completely different from those who learn it as a foreign language in Finland; they are essentially in the same position in that they are learning English as an additional language. In other words, even if teaching objectives may be different, the learners in Finland and in the USA all have a personal linguistic background that leads into different personal appropriations on the way they use English, and they all go through the same stages of learning the language.
A majority of the states in the USA (39 out of 50) are members of the WIDA (World-class Instructional Design and Assessment) Consortium, which provides the standards for English language development for multilingual learners. In the 2012 Amplification of the English Language
Development Standards, it is stated that “The WIDA English Language Development Standards
represent the social, instructional, and academic language that students need to engage with peers, educators, and the curriculum in schools” (WIDA 2012, 4). The WIDA Standards Framework includes the WIDA Can Do Philosophy, which acknowledges the students’ varying cultural, experiential and linguistic backgrounds and perceives them as assets that need to be capitalized in teaching (idem. 3). This implies that the learners’ linguacultural differences are taken into account, although it does not assert that these differences would influence teaching objectives. Overall, it can be concluded that the WIDA standards guide English language teaching in the USA to teach the language for the purpose of academic success in the country. There is no specific mention of the
global spread and variation of English or of its role in international communication, but the multiculturalism among the students is acknowledged and respected. On the other hand, it may be that the role of English as the means of communication in multilingual encounters is taken as self- evident, and specific awareness-raising of it among second language learners is considered unnecessary.
The purpose of this section was to shed light on the educational contexts in which the research participants of this study are employed and observe how, if at all, the lingua franca function of English is acknowledged in them. However, these are not the only contexts in which the teachers participating in this study have taught English, as several of them have also worked abroad. Nevertheless, observing the local curricula and standards provides us with an understanding of the local conditions of English language teaching, since they influence the way English is taught and the way teachers perceive the language.