YT YouTube2Text

YouTube2Text → Transcripts → 1-2. ELF Awareness

1-2. ELF Awareness — Transcript

by 蘇瑩珊 Su, Ying-Shan 9608035 · 2,962 words · 329 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

Open in transcriber Summarize with AI Download SRT/VTT

Full transcript

0:00Hello, I'm Nicos Sifakis.
0:03In this presentation, I'm going to be talking about integrating English as a lingua Franca in English language teaching
0:12and in particular, I'm going to be discussing the concept of ELF awareness.
0:18I'd like to start by pointing out that ELF is defined as any interaction predominantly on the spoken domain, involving non-native speakers.
0:30The basic assumption here is that English is not a foreign language in the sense that ELF speakers are familiar with English
0:40throughout the biggest part of the lives and they use English as their own language outside of the context of English language teaching.
0:49We looked at the special role of English
0:52in kachru’s concentric circles, and we distinguish between the inner, outer and expanding circles.
1:00And we also looked at the importance of communicative efficiency and proficiency in communicating in
1:07context involving non-native speakers.
1:10So kachru’s Circles present a very interesting, but very simplistic orientation of English.
1:18One way of looking at it in the traditional way of looking at it,
1:22it’s the geographical orientation where you have the geographical description of an inner circle,
1:29with reference to specific countries, like the UK, the USA, Australia, Canada and so on.
1:35And of course, the native speaker varieties come from this specific Inner Circle,
1:40and it's more or less the same simplistic orientation goes with the other two circles the Outer Circle and the Expanding Circle.
1:49With the Expanding Circle describing typically EFL context.
1:54When you look at the teaching or orientation, however,
1:57you see that things become more and more complex.
2:01In other words,
2:01this is not geographically oriented.
2:03You can imagine a situation in the UK,
2:07a UK class with only non-native students of English learning English.
2:14So in this case,
2:15you will have a very typical International and Intercultural learning context with an expanding Circle context,
2:23but in an inner circle teaching geographical context in the UK.
2:28So things are much much more complicated
2:30when we're dealing with the teaching orientation of kachru’s circles.
2:35And of course,
2:36when you talk about the communication orientation,
2:38things become more and more complicated
2:41because in this case,
2:43you have a very shifting situations,
2:45native speakers and non-native speakers can communicate anywhere.
2:50It doesn't matter where you are
2:51geographically.
2:53So the geographical orientation of the Inner, Outer and Expanding Circle are normal relevant,
2:59or even appropriate as defining model.
3:03And this brings us to the first discussion topic for this presentation.
3:06I'm asking you to think about the complexity in kachru’s descriptions of English geographical
3:16with teaching and the communicational orientation.
3:20And think about your own teaching context with reference to these circles.
3:25Ask yourself the following questions.
3:28To what extent,
3:29do you experience this complexity in your own teaching?
3:33Do you figure out it's not as simple as that,
3:35especially when you teach
3:37bilingual students in a very specific CLIL environment.
3:42Now, to address this question,
3:44you have to be as specific as possible
3:45and refer to characteristics of your teaching context,
3:50like the curricular orientation,
3:51textbooks that you use
3:53and whether they are EFL oriented and how much EFL oriented they are or not,
3:59also very importantly you have to refer to assessment and testing methods.
4:04And I think that this would raise some very interesting discussions
4:09with regard to the status of English in your own teaching context.
4:14So when we think about ELF as any interaction involving non-native speakers,
4:20the question is what can the teachers of English learn from this reality?
4:27And how they can incorporate the ELF reality in their own teaching context?
4:35Well, that’s lots of discussions about that,
4:39but one of the predominant models that attempt to do that
4:44is the model or theory or framework of ELF awareness.
4:49And this is what we're going to be talking about in this presentation.
4:52So what are the prerequisites to understanding ELF awareness?
4:58The first prerequisite is that
5:01you have to understand that ELF is not a language,
5:05ELF is not a linguistic variety that can be taught.
5:07You cannot teach ELF,
5:09precisely because of its fluidity and flexibility.
5:12It's nothing like standard English.
5:15There are no textbooks.
5:16There are no dictionaries.
5:18There are no really no course books.
5:22So the thing to think about with your tutor here,
5:27is to what extent does ELF have native speakers like EFL?
5:34ELF does have native speakers,
5:37so there are models of English language usage in the presence of a native speaker of English.
5:45What about ELF?
5:47How can we replace the notion of a native speaker and EFL construct in an ELF environment?
5:57Let me give you a hint.
5:59As Seidlhofer has mentioned,
6:01ELF doesn't have native speakers,
6:03but it does have a discourse community.
6:06So I urge you to think about this notion of a discourse community
6:10and try to reach a conclusion with your tutor.
6:14We know how ELF speakers behave in successful ELF interactions
6:20and we can study the linguistic, discourse and pragmatic elements of such interactions,
6:26but we should never forget that
6:28these data would never amount to becoming a model for the teaching of ELF
6:37because the defining characteristic of ELF is that
6:40it is something that is very real.
6:42It is out there.
6:44It exists, we all know that,
6:45but it is fluid and intangible.
6:47In other words,
6:48ELF is not a thing,
6:49it's not a language or one single variety,
6:52but is a way,
6:54a way of communicating successfully,
6:58communication skills and strategies.
7:00The fact that it is a way adds further to its fluidity.
7:04So it's very difficult to talk about the ideal ELF speaking
7:10precisely because there are so many different communicational contexts.
7:14You may be a successful and efficient ELF speaker in one context,
7:19but in another context you may have problems being understood.
7:23So, as far as teaching is concerned,
7:26a question to ask is,
7:28well, we have the established way of teaching in an EFL context
7:34is of course the communicative language teaching orientation.
7:38The question is to what extent does the CLT model?
7:43Feasible or possible or even desirable,
7:47but without the native speaker at the core of its essence,
7:53think about that with your tutor.
7:55And further prerequisite to understanding of awareness is that
7:58many EFL Learners are ELF users to some extent outside of the EFL classroom.
8:06So there is a mismatch
8:07a disconnect between what is going on in typically ELF classroom
8:12and perhaps your own CLIL classroom and out of the classroom,
8:18what the Learners do with English outside of the classroom?
8:20The key thing here to remember
8:24is the importance of bringing the Learners ELF reality.
8:29That was how they understand and how they use English outside of the EFL classroom,
8:35how to bring that inside the EFL classroom?
8:39However, if you remember from the first presentation on the defining ELF,
8:44a key characteristic here is attitudes.
8:49The Learners have to be open
8:51and favorable towards such a link
8:55between EFL and ELF
8:58because sometimes Learners may consider this integration of ELF within EFL
9:04to be unworthy of the EFL formal teaching environment,
9:09or even inappropriate and perhaps immoral.
9:12It has to do with attitudes.
9:15You have to engage your learners,
9:17approach the learners before you open up,
9:19before you make the link,
9:21at least explicitly and invite them to think about their preconceptions about EFL
9:30and the importance of incorporating ELF in the classroom.
9:35But still, no matter what we do,
9:37it's certain that progressively more and more today,
9:42we move towards a post EFL environment
9:45in which
9:45we move away from the linear
9:49or one-dimensional orientation of looking at a student's life being identical
9:55with that of a user's life.
9:57In the sense that,
9:58in EFL, students in the classroom are striving to become native speakers,
10:04that the attitude here,
10:06that's the target is to try to reach the native Speaker aim,
10:12and they do that by sitting at exams,
10:15standardized exams.
10:16And this is the same with the user’s life.
10:19They only use English in the EFL classroom.
10:23In other words,
10:24they don't have an independent life as a user of English,
10:29or at least this is not acknowledged by the teacher in a typical EFL context.
10:35On the other hand,
10:36in the post EFL,
10:38or if you like in the ELF context,
10:41English is not viewed as a foreign language.
10:44This is not a linear orientation,
10:47but a non-linear and a two dimensional orientation,
10:51in other words, students’ life is different from a user's life.
10:54Students are still striving to become a native speaker,
10:58but they have a life outside of the classroom
11:00where they use adequately and successfully the language.
11:04So think about this
11:06as the next discussion topic with your tutor.
11:09Think about your own students
11:11and try to decide to what extent your students are learners of English and users of English.
11:19Try to provide as many examples from your own experience
11:23that prove that your learners are users of English independently of your EFL context.
11:31Let's go back to the prerequisites to understanding ELF awareness.
11:35ELF cannot,
11:37will not,
11:38and should not replace EFL.
11:41It should become incorporated, integrated within it.
11:45The underlying assumption here is that
11:47EFL cannot deny the existence of ELF.
11:51In other words, ELF is useful for EFL.
11:55However, there are no textbooks, there are no grammar books or dictionaries,
11:58which means that every ELF integration will be different.
12:03But the key question to ask yourself here is
12:08if this is okay and we agree to make the link of the integration of ELF within EFL,
12:14how do we do it?
12:16What pedagogy are we going to be using?
12:18Because we have certain decisions to make that we cannot bypass.
12:23In other words, the pedagogy we will choose for integrating ELF,
12:27we very much determine how we perceive EFL teaching in general.
12:33So the bottom line, in order for ELF integration to succeed in EFL settings
12:38is the following,
12:39learners should embrace it, at least to some extent.
12:43And of course, yourself as a teacher.
12:45Teachers should be in some control of the teaching context,
12:50in other words, you should be autonomous.
12:52You should be able to make a decision to incorporate ELF.
12:55Teachers should integrate appropriate activities that raise learners’ confidence as ELF users.
13:03So moving away from the user trying to become a native speaker,
13:08teachers should target learners’ attitudes towards ELF concerns.
13:13Remember, attitudes are very, very important.
13:16In other words, ELF awareness as a concept is not just becoming aware of ELF.
13:22It's a lot more than that
13:23as we're going to see.
13:24So as a teacher, and as a syllabus designer of your own teaching context,
13:29ask yourself the following question:
13:31In integrating ELF within EFL,
13:33is it worth pursuing the same parts that we do for EFL
13:38that is designed a specific core curriculum for ELF?
13:43Are we going to be using the same syllabus,
13:46the same curriculum every time we incorporate ELF in our class?
13:51That's a really important question to ask.
13:54Try to think of everything we've said before about ELF.
13:57So how do we define ELF-aware pedagogy?
14:00It's the process of engaging with ELF research
14:03and developing your own understanding
14:06of the ways in which it can be integrated in your classroom context
14:12through a continuous process of critical reflection design, implementation, and evaluation of instructional activities
14:20that reflect and localize your interpretation of the ELF construct.
14:25In other words, to become ELF-aware,
14:28you need to constantly develop and experiment
14:31with new ways of incorporating the reality
14:35of your learners outside of the class in the EFL classroom.
14:39And this necessitates that you incorporate a critical element,
14:45a reflective element that deals with your own,
14:48and, of course, your learners attitudes towards ELF.
14:52ELF awareness has three components,
14:55awareness of language and language use that could be the typical awareness of the existence of ELF.
15:03The second component is awareness of instructional practice or being aware of how we teach,
15:09and the third one is awareness of learning.
15:13Let's have a look at these three components quickly.
15:17The first one is awareness of language and language use.
15:20This means becoming engaged with language with ELF in communication.
15:26So in this case,
15:27you expose your learners to successful examples or excerpts of ELF interactions,
15:35and you can take these examples from corpora from ELF corpora, like the voice corpus,
15:41and there are other inventories of ELF, successful ELF interactions.
15:47While you do this,
15:48it's a good idea to engage your learners by asking them to notice
15:54all the various syntactic, morphological, lexical, phonological, or pragmatic, and sociocultural features of that discourse of ELF discourse.
16:04And the idea here is to make them sensitive to these structures.
16:10So you raise the awareness of the existence of these structures
16:14by making them notice by becoming alert to these stimuli.
16:21In other words, you make them aware of language as a process of communication
16:26and of translanguaging as a means of any other means that you have at your disposal,
16:33linguistic or otherwise
16:35in order to have a successful interaction
16:39with other non-native speakers.
16:41And this involves
16:43making your learners aware of their own preconceptions or attitudes about all the things that are relevant with EFL with ELF,
16:54such as the normativity standardness, appropriateness, comprehensibility and ownership.
17:00How do we do this?
17:02By developing activities that are not linguistic activities,
17:06but metalinguistic activities.
17:08In other words, they focus on asking your learners to focus on how ELF communication works successfully.
17:18That's what you do.
17:20You take all these examples from ELF Corpora, and you raise your learners’ awareness of them,
17:28and at the same time,
17:30you ask about their attitudes
17:32and you try to see if they are shifting towards accepting these deviations from standard English.
17:39The second component of ELF awareness
17:42is awareness of your own instructional practice.
17:46The way that you teach.
17:47Is it a teacher-centered practice? What do you do? What do you do not do?
17:52How does the textbook allow you to move with non-standard varieties of English and with ELF?
18:01Also, what is your own personal theory about instruction?
18:06Where to give corrective feedback?
18:09How you're dealing with your learner's mistakes, and your learner's real communicative needs
18:14and your own self- perception as a language user.
18:19And as a role model for your learners.
18:23That's really important. Because we mentioned that attitudes are really important.
18:28And in this case, this is also true.
18:30And you are also involved as a teacher.
18:34So in practice, to raise awareness of instructional practice,
18:39you need to develop metacognitive activities,
18:42thinking,
18:43in other words, about the origin of all these perceptions,
18:48you ask essentially why you have these perceptions.
18:52Why are you correct when you correct and so on?
18:55And the last component of ELF awareness is awareness of learning.
18:59In this case, you look at the user of English outside of the classroom
19:03and you try to see to what extent that use of English can impact
19:10or influence your learners’ learning?
19:14You look at where learning takes place in different settings.
19:17And of course, this means that you consider English as
19:22a language with which your learners are familiar with,
19:26and therefore using it outside of the classroom makes them improve the learning of that language.
19:33So in practice, what you can do in the actual classroom is incorporate authentic tasks
19:39with realistic communicational goals,
19:42and you can ask your learners to reflect on the wrong convictions about what works
19:48in communication in English.
19:50What's the bottom line with ELF awareness?
19:52What you should know?
19:53Three things.
19:54First of all, know your teaching context really, really well,
19:58not all teaching situations are the same.
20:01Different situations have different goals,
20:03different expected outcomes, and different practices,
20:08so you cannot incorporate the same amount of ELF in every teaching context,
20:12so know the context.
20:14Secondly, know your learners.
20:16You have to make this about themselves, their own use of English,
20:22and finally, know yourself.
20:25Know your own reaction, your own deeper convictions about your own role.
20:31Are you a Guardian of proper English?
20:34Is this how you consider your role, your presence in the EFL classroom,
20:40or would you see yourself more as a facilitator or prompter of authentic interactions?
20:48If the latter is the case, then of course, you see yourself as a prompter of learners to be themselves
20:55rather than someone else, like a native speaker.
20:58To the extent, of course, that they're willing to do that.
21:01And finally, you have to welcome change.
21:03And you have to think about these very important bullets
21:07that I'm asking you to think about with your tutor.
21:10First of all, what is taught is not necessarily what is learned.
21:14What your learners will be exposed to doesn't mean that they will learn it.
21:19So we have to rethink about the way that we provide correction and feedback.
21:24You have learning at the back of your mind and as the ultimate goal every time you teach.
21:31Secondly, we should go beyond EFL in the post EFL case,
21:37and we should be working with and building upon what our learners already do with English.
21:43And finally, you should understand that EFL is not something that we should be leaving behind.
21:51We still, of course, need EFL.
21:53This is a very tangible orientation and very real orientation, professionally.
21:59All they're saying is that
22:00it's important to have at your disposal
22:03to be able to incorporate ELF as an additional, professional skill
22:09in case you might need it.
22:12So ELF Awareness is an opportunity for professional development,
22:17and that's really, really important.
22:19Thank you for watching this presentation.
22:21I hope you enjoyed it, and found it useful. Goodbye.

About this transcript

This page contains the full transcript of 1-2. ELF Awareness by 蘇瑩珊 Su, Ying-Shan 9608035, generated from the public captions YouTube serves with the video. The transcript has 2,962 words across 329 segments, with the original timestamps preserved so you can click any line to jump to that moment in the embedded player.

What you can do with it

Use the transcript to take notes, quote the speaker, build a study guide, generate a summary with ChatGPT or Claude via the YouTube Summary tool, or export it as a timed subtitle file with YouTube to SRT. You can also re-open it in the transcriber to translate the transcript into 100+ languages.

Free YouTube transcript tool

YouTube2Text is a free YouTube transcript generator — no signup, no daily limit. Paste any YouTube link and get the full transcript instantly, with timestamps, click-to-jump, translation to 100+ languages, AI prompts for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and exports to TXT, SRT, VTT, or Markdown.