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“The goal is to enable students to communicate”: Communicative competence and target varieties in TEFL practices in Sweden and Germany

“The goal is to enable students to communicate”: Communicative competence and target varieties in... AbstractThis paper compares teaching practices of English as a foreign language in Sweden and Germany based on a questionnaire targeted at investigating teachers’ experiences and views on language use, giving a snapshot of teaching practices in classrooms in the two countries. In this regard, the focus is on the following questions: Which target varieties are used in TEFL, and to what extent? What is the status of different target varieties among teachers of English in the two countries? The results show that the use of target varieties is still in play in the TEFL classroom, despite the recent move towards communicative competence as the goal. The main target varieties used are AmE, BrE, a mixture of the two, and some neutral variety; with a slight preference among German teachers for BrE and among Swedish for the neutral variety alongside AmE or BrE. Further, teachers are in conflict between two ideals: learned (where they teach an English belonging to the native speakers) and didactic (where the goal is communicative fluency). In application, this conflict should be addressed by teacher training programmes in order to make (future) teachers aware of it and provide possible ways to cope with it. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png European Journal of Applied Linguistics de Gruyter

“The goal is to enable students to communicate”: Communicative competence and target varieties in TEFL practices in Sweden and Germany

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Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
ISSN
2192-953X
eISSN
2192-953X
DOI
10.1515/eujal-2018-0006
Publisher site
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Abstract

AbstractThis paper compares teaching practices of English as a foreign language in Sweden and Germany based on a questionnaire targeted at investigating teachers’ experiences and views on language use, giving a snapshot of teaching practices in classrooms in the two countries. In this regard, the focus is on the following questions: Which target varieties are used in TEFL, and to what extent? What is the status of different target varieties among teachers of English in the two countries? The results show that the use of target varieties is still in play in the TEFL classroom, despite the recent move towards communicative competence as the goal. The main target varieties used are AmE, BrE, a mixture of the two, and some neutral variety; with a slight preference among German teachers for BrE and among Swedish for the neutral variety alongside AmE or BrE. Further, teachers are in conflict between two ideals: learned (where they teach an English belonging to the native speakers) and didactic (where the goal is communicative fluency). In application, this conflict should be addressed by teacher training programmes in order to make (future) teachers aware of it and provide possible ways to cope with it.

Journal

European Journal of Applied Linguistics – de Gruyter

Published: Feb 28, 2019

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