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English is
not English
Arthur van Essen
Groningen
Cet article discute des conséquences
du développement de l’anglais comme lingua franca
pour la profession d’enseignant d’anglais. Après
une discussion de la politique linguistique de la Communauté
européenne, l’auteur mentionne les facteurs-clés
qui ont contribué à la montée de l’anglais
comme langue mondiale. Il considère dès lors que
l’enseignement de l’anglais, aujourd’hui, n’a
plus pour but principal de préparer les apprenants aux
interactions avec des locuteurs natifs d’un pays voisin,
mais de leur donner accès à une communauté
globale. Ainsi, plutôt que d’enseigner les connaissances
culturelles traditionnellement proposées à l’école,
il s’agirait plutôt d’amener les apprenants à
acquérir une compétence de communication sans relation
de dominance.
Avec le développement de plusieurs variétés
d’anglais “non-natif”, la question s’est posée
de la possibilité d’établir un standard commun.
Ainsi, pour que l’anglais puisse bien fonctionner en tant
que lingua franca, il est avant tout nécessaire qu’une
intelligibilité mutuelle soit assurée. Pour l’anglais
écrit, cela ne semble pas constituer un problème.
La grammaire et le vocabulaire sont enseignés pour ainsi
dire sans tenir compte des variations à travers le monde.
C’est au niveau de la prononciation que des problèmes
risquent de surgir. Néanmoins, un modèle international
de prononciation a récemment été développé:
le Jenkin’s Lingua Franca Core. (Réd.)
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Preamble
Many non-native speakers (NNSs) associate ‘English’
with native-speaker (NS) English and culture, as they were taught
to do at school. But many more NNSs the world over use English
to interact with other NNSs without giving a single thought to
anything related to the English of England or the language and
cultures of English native-speaking nations. For such language
users (and their numbers are growing by the day) English is not
‘English’ in the restricted sense of ‘relating
to England or its people or language’ (New Oxford Dictionary
of English, 1998), but just a useful tool for communication between
people of varying linguistic and cultural backgrounds in a variety
of communicative contexts.
The rise of English as a lingua franca and the resultant status
of English as a medium for global communication (predicted by
Sapir as long ago as 1931; Sapir 1931:66) poses new challenges
to the English Language Teaching (ELT) profession. It is my purpose
in the following sections to outline some of these challenges
in relation to the various roles of English in the world and to
suggest ways in which each of these challenges could be met.
English in Europe
Over the last thirty years or so it has become received opinion
in Europe that foreign-language instruction should be aimed at
(primarily) spoken interaction between NSs and NNSs across the
frontiers of the nation states. Underlying this view is the ideal
of European citizenship, which requires learners to familiarise
themselves not just with the other language but also with the
culture concerned (often involving extensive literary studies).
The target language and culture are viewed as potential sources
of enrichment which supposedly contribute to the formation of
an ‘open and multiple identity’ (Sheils 2001:16). This
ideal has a long tradition in Europe. Over the past decades it
has received support from different quarters: linguistic, psycholinguistic,
and anthropological ones. Thus it has been assumed for years now
that all languages have a universal base that is largely genetically
determined, and a culture-specific superstructure (probably the
bigger part), which is fully integrated with the base. So much
of what is transmitted through language, whether this has a referential
or a social/expressive function is therefore not so much universal
as culture-bound (cf. Lyons 1981). It is considerations like these
which have legitimised the existence of a Landeskunde component
in European foreign-language education, even if Landeskunde and
the cultural referents of a language need not be co-extensive.
No one would blame European language teachers for wanting to continue
to cherish this ideal (after all to them English is just another
national language of just another European state), had not the
unprecendented growth of English as a lingua franca (ELF) upset
the apple cart. This I shall take up in the following sections.
But as we go along we shall have to keep in mind that our discussion
is ineluctably bound up with European language policy as a whole.
[...]
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