Presented at the 16th World Congress of Applied Linguistics (AILA), Beijing Foreign Studies University, China, 24 August 2011.
SLA research has long been challenged by the flawed comparison of L2 learners to native speakers (Bley-Vroman Reference Bley-Vroman1983). Since the start of the new millennium, applied linguists have paid increasing attention to studies of English as a lingua franca (ELF), defined as ‘communication in English between speakers with different first languages’ (Seidlhofer Reference Seidlhofer2005: 339). From the ELF perspective, L2 speakers of English are no longer considered as ‘failed native speakers’ who produce problematic talk, but as ‘highly skilled communicators’ (Jenkins, Cogo & Dewey Reference Jenkins, Cogo and Dewey2011: 284) who attempt to use multilingual resources to achieve their communicative goals.
Though still in its infancy, this new research paradigm has made significant contributions over the past decade, including the construction of ELF corpora (e.g. the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English, English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings and the Asian Corpus of English), the publication of numerous books, doctoral/master's theses, journal articles and conference proceedings dedicated to ELF and, most recently, the launch of the Journal of English as a Lingua Franca to provide a dedicated forum for ELF researchers (Jenkins et al. Reference Jenkins, Cogo and Dewey2011). This symposium, organized by D. Victoria Rau (National Chung Cheng University), reflects this paradigmatic shift by presenting research targeted at Chinese speakers of English in terms of phonology, syntax, lexicon and pragmatics. It explores what variations are acceptable and what is teachable at these four linguistic levels, on the premise that mutual intelligibility is the goal of ELF communication.
The first section of the symposium featured the acquisition of English segmental and suprasegmental phonology. Shu-Chen Ou (National Sun Yat-Sen University) reported on a study which examined 12 Chinese speakers’ recordings of six minimal pairs (pérmit vs. permít) before and after a two-week perceptual training session. Both pre- and post-instructional speech samples were evaluated by eight L1 speakers of English in terms of intelligibility and comprehensibility (i.e. the degree of difficulty in understanding a speaker's utterances). The results demonstrated that after instruction, the speakers’ abilities to associate stress placement and intonation patterns with meaning were significantly improved. Furthermore, such improvements also increased the intelligibility and comprehensibility of their utterances, as perceived by L1 speakers of English.
Fu-Hsing Su (National Chiayi University) and Li-Szu Agnes Huang (National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology) reported on their study of the acquisition of English phonology by school children in Taiwan. A group of 44 grade-five primary school children participated in a syllable deletion task (SDT). After hearing 48 disyllabic spoken words they were asked to produce either the initial or final syllable. Analysis of the participants’ oral responses to the SDT showed that syllable boundary significantly affected the participants’ processing of test words, while deletion of target syllables and stress assignments did not. Furthermore, the majority of the participants demonstrated retention of the universally preferred CV structures in consonant reduction, vowel paragoge and consonant truncation. There was also a strong tendency for them to show perceptual confusion in processing sound substitution or conflation. Despite these common features, the participants generated a substantial number of articulatory variations infringing the phonotactic rules of English phonology.
Drawing on Kramsch's (Reference Kramsch, Cook and Li2009) view that language pedagogy should reconsider whether its goal should be native-like performance, Lan-Hsin Chang (National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences) contended that the goal of a pronunciation class is not to achieve a native-like accent in the target language, but to increase L2 speakers’ confidence in sound production by raising their phonemic awareness of the differences between L1 and L2 segments. The study involved 104 college students from a southern university of technology in Taiwan, who were given two discrimination and two production tests before and after the pronunciation class. The results showed that the participants made significant progress in the posttest with respect to the pretest in discriminating the English vowels, particularly /i/–/ɪ/ pairs. In addition, they produced the vowels more accurately in the post-instructional production test. However, there was only a moderate correlation between the perception and production tests, which suggests that L2 speakers may not develop their perception and production of English phonology simultaneously.
The research presented in the first part of the symposium suggests that the ultimate goal in teaching phonology to L2 speakers is not to conform to a native-speaker norm of accuracy, but to prepare them to use English with mutual intelligibility and comprehensibility in a wider circle of communication among ELF users.
Following this line of critical thinking, the second part of the symposium examined acquisitional variation in English syntax and semantics. Ai-Li Hsin (National Kaohsiung Normal University) directed our attention to the situational (in terms of Hymes’ eight-component ‘speaking’ model of Reference Hymes, Bauman and Sherzer1974) and syntactic conditions under which non-moved wh-questions (e.g. The longest day of the year occurs in which month?) could be accepted. Ten L1 speakers of English and 63 L2 speakers of English were given a questionnaire consisting of 42 wh-questions, 28 of which were constrained by situational and 14 by syntactic factors, the participants rating each wh-question on a five-point Likert scale of acceptability. The results showed that L1 speakers of English had clear criteria for situational and syntactic constraints on wh-movement. L2 speakers of English, on the other hand, placed heavy reliance on syntactic constraints and showed less flexibility in the choice between moved/non-moved variants. She concluded by suggesting that L2 speakers of English should be instructed in the situational and syntactic constraints for non-moved wh-questions and that their teaching should be sequenced, starting with argument wh-phrases and moving on to adjunct and complement wh-phrases.
Li-Szu Agnes Huang (National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology) re-examined Chinese English speakers’ lexical variants from an ELF perspective, aiming to show how this perspective treats variants differently and what factors may contribute to their acceptability. First, a total of 1547 lexical errors were retrieved from a pool of written data produced by 12 Taiwanese university English-majors. The acceptability of each token was judged by considering three variables: purpose of writing, source of interlanguage (IL) variation and additional contextual errors. The results revealed that the latter two factors had a significant impact on the acceptability of the tokens. With respect to the source of IL variation, most of the tokens were judged acceptable, except for those similar in phonology or orthography, deviant L1-translated expressions, and idiosyncratic lexical usage. With respect to contextual errors, the unacceptable tokens included lexical errors and the co-existence of lexical and grammatical errors in the neighboring context. The implication is that an ELF pedagogy for the L2 lexicon should emphasize proper, unambiguous use of lexicon and discourage L1 direct translation or idiosyncratic collocations found only in L2 contexts.
The third part of the symposium reassessed pragmatic competence using a subjectivity approach. D. Victoria Rau and Yuan-Shan Chen (National Chin-Yi University of Technology) examined how American English speakers perceived Chinese English speakers’ compliment exchanges. In contrast to a traditional approach that dichotomizes native and non-native speakers’ use of compliment exchanges, this study focused on how Chinese English speakers use a combination of acceptance and non-acceptance strategies to reconstruct their social identity. A discourse completion task (DCT) was designed to elicit responses from groups of American teachers, American students and Chinese students. Using a mixed research design, a log-linear regression analysis was conducted to discover the most parsimonious model for Chinese English speakers’ compliment exchanges. At the end of the presentation, three metaphors were offered to account for the American and Chinese interlocutors’ reconstruction of social identity within this exchange. Giving a compliment can be seen as giving a gift. On the basis of this metaphor, Americans would expect an acknowledgement and start a conversation. Chinese, on the other hand, would expect repeated rejections, to show modesty. When giving a compliment is seen as giving a trophy, or genuine admiration, both Americans and Chinese would receive it with gratitude or deflection. Finally, when giving a compliment is seen as giving a gold ingot, or bribery, discretion is advised for both Americans and Chinese when responding.
This discussion was fleshed out by Yuan-Shan Chen's development of a rating scale based on empirical underpinnings to assess ELF members’ pragmatic performance. Stage 1 specified the scalar categories by gathering American raters’ comments on Chinese speakers’ apology, request and compliment exchanges in terms of social appropriateness. A total of 285 pragmatic errors were identified in the rater comments. These errors fundamentally violated Grice's (Reference Grice, Cole and Morgan1975) Conversational Maxims (Quantity, Quality, Relation, Manner) and Brown & Levinson's (Reference Brown and Levinson1987) Politeness Principles. Based on the findings of Stage 1, a speech act rating scale was drafted. To test the validity and reliability of the scale, three Chinese graduate students majoring in linguistics were asked to evaluate 104 request emails written by 26 English majors recruited from a university of technology in Taiwan. A rigorous set of scoring procedures was presented to the raters. After the training, the raters reached a high level of inter-rater reliability, as indicated by the Pearson coefficient of correlation. This scale could be used in the teaching, learning and assessing of pragmatics in an ELF community.
Following these presentations there were lively discussions concerning the design and implications of the studies themselves, particularly at the phonological and pragmatic levels. We hope that our efforts, as presented in the symposium, can serve the community in that ‘the more that information becomes available, . . . the more ELF researchers will be able to improve the quality of their analyses’ (Jenkins et al. Reference Jenkins, Cogo and Dewey2011: 309). The nurture of this newborn, yet rapidly growing, research paradigm requires long-term commitment and strong dedication by applied linguists and language teachers worldwide.
