TY - JOUR
T1 - An evaluation of the pronunciation target in Hong Kong's ELT curriculum and materials: Influences from WE and ELF?
AU - Chan, J.
PY - 2014/3/1
Y1 - 2014/3/1
N2 - The present study evaluates the pronunciation target in Hong Kong’s ELT education at senior secondary level with reference to the pedagogical proposals of World Englishes (WE) and English as a lingua franca (ELF). It triangulates information from various documents, namely the new ELT curriculum, public examination papers and reports, and three sets of listening and speaking commercial textbooks. The findings suggest that the new curriculum apparently has taken account of the WE and/or ELF perspectives in its design such as (i) promoting communicative competence, (ii) downplaying the importance of NS norms, and (iii) exposing students to more varieties of accent, but seems to be conceptually still guided by nativespeaker norms. In practice, one breakthrough in the listening examination is the inclusion of Hong Kong English phonological features in localised tasks. However, the commercial textbooks seem to be lagging behind this development in the curriculum, though textbook writers do seek to include ELF using contexts in some of the textbook tasks due to Hong Kong’s global status. The paper argues that an important step in the move towards a WE/ELForiented pronunciation teaching is to recognise the role of English in particular sociolinguistic settings because by embedding the tasks in a simulated authentic language using context, it is likely that teachers and students will be aware that the speech and pronunciation of nonnative speakers are most relevant.
AB - The present study evaluates the pronunciation target in Hong Kong’s ELT education at senior secondary level with reference to the pedagogical proposals of World Englishes (WE) and English as a lingua franca (ELF). It triangulates information from various documents, namely the new ELT curriculum, public examination papers and reports, and three sets of listening and speaking commercial textbooks. The findings suggest that the new curriculum apparently has taken account of the WE and/or ELF perspectives in its design such as (i) promoting communicative competence, (ii) downplaying the importance of NS norms, and (iii) exposing students to more varieties of accent, but seems to be conceptually still guided by nativespeaker norms. In practice, one breakthrough in the listening examination is the inclusion of Hong Kong English phonological features in localised tasks. However, the commercial textbooks seem to be lagging behind this development in the curriculum, though textbook writers do seek to include ELF using contexts in some of the textbook tasks due to Hong Kong’s global status. The paper argues that an important step in the move towards a WE/ELForiented pronunciation teaching is to recognise the role of English in particular sociolinguistic settings because by embedding the tasks in a simulated authentic language using context, it is likely that teachers and students will be aware that the speech and pronunciation of nonnative speakers are most relevant.
KW - lingua franca approach
KW - nativised endonormative model
KW - pronunciation model
KW - norm
KW - communicative competence
KW - ELT materials
KW - Hong Kong
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?eid=2-s2.0-84957378084&partnerID=MN8TOARS
UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/jelf-2014-0006/html
U2 - 10.1515/jelf-2014-0006
DO - 10.1515/jelf-2014-0006
M3 - Article
SN - 2191-9216
VL - 3
SP - 145
EP - 170
JO - Journal of English as a Lingua Franca
JF - Journal of English as a Lingua Franca
IS - 1
ER -