EFL ESOL TEFL multicompetence

This study addresses two topics that are relevant to me as a non-native English speaker teacher (NNEST) who was most recently teaching English for Academic Purposes (EAP). I set out to investigate the dichotomy
present between native speaker (NS) and non-native speaker (NNS), as well as design sets of materials for academic writing (cohesion and coherence). These issues and problems are closely related to my own teaching experience and have impacted my teaching practices.

NS has been studied, however, no simple or clear definition is forthcoming. Research also reveals an additional societal aspect, as gender, ethnicity and mother tongue are also part of the Teaching English for Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) context. At all levels there has been a certain level of discrimination towards NNESTs; universities across the UK and abroad offer TESOL courses to NNSs and NNESTs knowing that they may be discriminated against in the job market.

Just as qualification does not necessarily equate to competence, neither does being a NS; NESTs and NNESTs can instead strengthen their teaching practices by complementing one another. Learners, be it from general English or academic courses, can better relate to NNESTs, as they had similar experience of learning the language.

Further studies on gender and discrimination in TESOL will benefit both sides of this dichotomy. It would be interesting to assess the effects of a differentiated teacher professional development model designed especially for NNESTs. Another possible area of future research would be to investigate professional credentials and linguistic inheritance. Ultimately, being part of Kachru’s inner circle (native speaker) is not, in itself, a qualification for teaching English.

The scope of this article is Prescriptive Grammar.
Any English user may need a quick reference concerning conditionals in general. However, many users have an incorrect idea that, when we use past perfect in the if clause, it is ALWAYS incorrect to use “would or would not + base form of verb” in the main clause.
Therefore, the objective of this article is:
1. to define CONDITIONAL (IF) sentences in general and their BASICs; and
2. to correct the incorrect idea that, when we use past perfect in the if clause, it is ALWAYS incorrect to use “would or would not + base form of verb” in the main clause. We use this pattern in MIXED CONDITIONAL.
Whether we use “would/wouldn’t + have + past participle” or “would/wouldn’t + base form of verb” depends on whether the event is a Third Conditional or Mixed Conditional event.

It is a heavily debated issue: To define language, which one is the controlling authority between the Descriptive Grammar (DG) and Prescriptive Grammar (PG)?

Observing those debates, it seems like the debaters make it unnecessarily complex. I think the logic in favor of the DG is pretty straightforward. And the objective of this paper is to explain in simple manner the reason that the DG is the dominating authority.

The PG is just a guideline that is unrelated to or merely coincides with the time of use. And it is the DG that defines exactly what the language is. In other words, simple is that, to evaluate a linguistic item for its current validity, we must inquire how the native speakers naturally (meaning popularly and consistently) use it at the time of the inquiry.

RaPAL Journal Autumn 2007
In this study I investigate a new problem associated with the presence of speakers of English as a second language in ESOL classes in Ireland.  ESOL tutors, coordinators, and learners from countries where English is not used as a lingua franca, are specifically opposed to the attendance of students from Nigeria at ESOL classes, basing this perspective on the alleged disruption of classrooms due to alleged increased noise level, different turn-taking strategies and lexicogrammatical deviations.  The specific question I will address here is whether the impact of Nigerian speakers of English is as problematical and negative as tutors and non-Nigerian learners suggest.

One has the right to say, "Well, this version is my personal preference" but no one has any authority to define any certain version as more or less acceptable in terms of general or universal acceptability.

Because English is the global koiné language or the lingua franca of the world, there exists no such thing that one version is more acceptable than other.

The issue of personal preference is quite different from the issue of universal acceptability.

ALL versions including the versions used by both all native and non-native speakers are equally acceptable and fine as long as they are grammatically correct and understandable.

In this chapter I will invite the reader to consider the concepts and perspectives which signify the relatively recent shift in traditional norms of viewing language speakers, language acquisition and use. The concept of Dominant Language Constellations (DLC) will be described in some detail with the aim of demonstrating how multi-competence is expressed, and can be studied via DLCs.

This paper derives from a comprehensive study of the communication of a community of speakers of other languages living in an asylum seeker centre in Ireland. The specific focus is on the corpus-based investigation of 48,000 words of lingua franca English extracted from a larger corpus of 98,000 words which were transcribed from recordings of interaction between residents of the centre and native-English-speaking staff and amongst residents themselves over a three year period.

Other corpus-based studies have investigated the use of English as a lingua franca in communities of speakers of other languages, but this study is unique in that the speakers are not EFL students, English is not the lingua franca of choice, and the speakers are ‘inmates’ in a ‘total institution’.

Following McCarthy (1999), the basic core spoken vocabulary of the community was gauged by identifying the point in a computer-based frequency count at which frequency dropped off sharply. The presence in the corpus of McCarthy’s ‘nine broad categories of a basic spoken vocabulary’ was also calibrated, as were expressions of past time, the use of third person morphemes and multiword clusters.

The results, which bear evidence of a vastly limited language system, especially as far as lexis is concerned, raise questions with regard to the notion of vocabulary thresholds in the context of communicative habituation and communicative strategy in atypical speech communities. These results will be presented and the questions will be discussed.