English language teacher education in the Czech Republic: attitudes to ELF

Abstract

This text investigates how teacher educators and students involved in the Teaching of English for Primary and Lower Secondary Schools programme at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic view the issue of (in)appropriateness of native-speaker standard English norms in ELT. It also addresses the question of whether intelligibility rather than conformity to ‘standard English’ might be established as a primary criterion (Flowerdew 2008, Jenkins 2011) for assessing the acceptability of written English in diploma theses. The analysis of questionnaire data suggests that while university teachers mostly direct students towards attaining native-speaker competence, both Czech and international students tend to prioritize comprehensibility and show an awareness of the lingua franca status of English in Europe. In written academic texts, however, and especially in diploma theses marked by a clear gatekeeping function, both students and teachers expect adherence to native-speaker norms. The results of the survey are compared to the findings of a corpus-based analysis of formulaicity in students’ diploma theses aimed at finding to what extent the students use academic formulas typical of expert academic discourse (Simpson-Vlach and Ellis 2010). The relatively narrow range of formulas used by students and the tendency towards variation indicate that students’ written discourse bears traces of some general tendencies established in ELF (Seidlhofer 2004, Jenkins 2011). The pedagogical implications of this investigation concern the need to reflect on the changing role of English in Europe and to incorporate the ELF perspective in teacher education programmes.