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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2023

An accent franca for a lingua franca? Chosen standards for EFL teaching and learning in the French education system

Dylan Michari

Résumé

Since the democratisation of the internet, it has never been as easy as it now is for French learners of English to access radio, videos, films, and series from all over the Anglosphere. This ever-growing influence of English therefore prompted the French Secretary of State for Education to commission a report that brought forth many changes in the teaching of English (Manes & Taylor, 2018). The report, entitled Daring to Express the New World, assesses the ubiquity of the English language on the world stage and draws up guidelines on how it should be linguistically tackled in class. The topic of this paper addresses an under-researched area of the French education system, namely that of the standard accent(s), if any, that ought to be taught in English classes as recommended in the national curriculum, and while bearing in mind that English is now being widely used as a global lingua franca. To provide a comprehensive analysis of the status of the English accents in the French education system, I triangulated the entire institutional sphere, encompassing both the learner and the teacher realms, as well as the EFL resources developed by the institution. I analysed materials ranging from primary and secondary national curricula through French learner-oriented phonetics textbooks to examiners’ reports of competitive exams for teaching English, as well as the findings of the report commissioned by the Department for Education (Ministère de l’Éducation nationale, 2018-2023). Textual, visual, and aural formats were analysed by frequency of occurrence of keywords using combined searchable text files or by manual examination. Results revealed a lack of explicit pronunciation instructions about the standard accent that should be taught and spoken in English class inasmuch as the current modern languages curricula are largely drawn from the latest version of the CEFR (Conseil de l’Europe, 2021). This revision abandoned the nativeness principle in favour of the more New World-ready intelligibility principle, according to which accentedness of L2 speech is no longer frowned upon. As for the teachers, any accent can be used as long as it is both consistent and spoken in English-speaking countries or regions. However, although explicit instructions are not given, implicit references to SSBE –and to British culture in general– are widespread and these can impact the teaching of English and learner’s linguistic representations. Overall, the results confirm that the British accent stands firm as the ‘legacy variety’, inconspicuously entrenched in the French education system despite English being considered a lingua franca therein.
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hal-04320015 , version 1 (03-12-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04320015 , version 1

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Dylan Michari. An accent franca for a lingua franca? Chosen standards for EFL teaching and learning in the French education system. 16th International Conference on Native and Non-native Accents of English, Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics at University of Łódź, Poland, Nov 2023, Łódź, Poland. ⟨hal-04320015⟩
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