Teaching English as a Lingua Franca and the Intercultural Communicative Competence in Spanish secondary education: Exploring multimodal textbook contents and student’s perceptions; 1ª ed.

Vivas-Peraza, Ana Cristina

En : En torno al lenguaje: nuevas aportaciones al estudio lingüístico
2023
Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza Zaragoza
ISBN: 978-84-1340-635-0
Pp: 303-312

Resumen: Over the last century, English has become the world’s lingua franca, or the language used as «a means of communication among speakers of different first languages» (Jenkins, 2012: 486). These days, people from a myriad of sociocultural and linguistic backgrounds use the English language to communicate in all kinds of contexts (e.g., business, travelling, science, journalism); and this has led to a substantial growth in the number of speakers and learners of English, as well as to the emergence of new varieties of English, such as Malaysian English, Indian English, and Nigerian English (Kachru et al., 2009). This contextual and linguistic diversity inevitably calls for new approaches for teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) that acknowledge that many communicative exchanges in English are to take place among non-native speakers who adhere to different varieties of English and follow different social norms. Scholars such as Seidlhofer (2004), Kirkpatrick (2007), and Jenkins et al. (2011) encourage English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) instruction in the EFL classroom. According to Seidlhofer (2004: 226), this teaching approach implies «ensuring intelligibility rather than insisting on correctness, helping learners develop interaction strategies that will promote friendly relations, and fostering reading and writing skills for learner-selected purposes». To achieve these goals, she advises sensitivity in the choice of cultural content in materials in order to facilitate the development of the Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) (Byram, 1997), whose relevance in the learning process is acknowledged by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) (Council of Europe, 2001). Unfortunately, previous studies on EFL textbooks distributed around Europe show that their cultural content is predominantly Anglocentric and fails to represent a variety of cultures (Seidlhofer, 2003; Kopperoinen, 2011; Calvo-Benzies, 2017). This is also the case for textbooks commercialised in Spain for secondary students (Méndez-García, 2005; Fernández-Agüero, 2015). The following chapter claims the need for ELF instruction after an empirical study carried out in a Spanish secondary school, involving (i) a multimodal discourse analysis of the sociocultural content of an English course book and (ii) an ethnographically-oriented study to collect information about students’ awareness of ELF. Section 2 explores the rationale of the ICC and how it is addressed in the CEFR, while Section 3 contextualises this research study within the theoretical background that supports both the need for ELF instruction and intercultural approaches for teaching. Section 4 focuses on previous studies on English course books. Section 5 presents the materials collected, the research questions addressed, and the research instruments applied for the analysis. Finally, Section 6 presents and discusses the main findings, and Section 7 summarises the main conclusions gathered from the results.