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.)

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. [...]