European English in the EFL classroom

PDF #171 – European English in the EFL classroom?

European English in the EFL classroom

The UK is facing important changes in the near future, with Brexit, i.e. the UK leaving the European Union (EU), looming ever more closely on the horizon. These important political and economic changes will certainly have an influence on Europe as a whole, and have had linguistic consequences for the English language, such as Brexit-related neologisms (Lalić-Krstin & Silaški, 2018).

As Modiano (2017a) suggests, Brexit might also have an influence on the status of the English language in the EU, in particular with regard to the dominance of native speaker varieties. In this article, we discuss the possibility of the use of a neutral European English variety in the EFL classrooms of two EU member states, i.e. Sweden and Germany. Based on a survey among 80 practitioners in secondary schools (first results were presented in Forsberg, Mohr & Jansen, 2019), the study investigates attitudes towards target varieties of English in general, and European English or ‘Euro-English’ (cf. Jenkins, Modiano & Seidlhofer, 2001; Modiano 2003) in particular, after the referendum in June 2016.

In light of the views expressed in our study, it does not seem as if German and Swedish teachers would very much welcome the use of a unified European English variety in their teaching at this point in time. This is due to ideological as well as practical reasons which might, however, be influenced by such large-scale political events as Brexit. Some teachers, especially in Sweden, already use more ideologically neutral varieties of English than the traditional native target varieties BrE and AmE, thus emphasising the idea of communicative competence as teaching goal. Individual European Englishes seem very well suited for (international) communication and time will tell whether they can and will substitute native targets in European EFL classrooms.

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