Mehmet Ali Erkasap English as a Foreign Language

Assessment and Evaluation in Foreign Language Teaching
Discussion Report

English as a Foreign Language 

In this report, I will express my ideas and thoughts about English as a Foreign Language and give feedback of the discussion that we made in the classroom.

Before starting my feedback, I want to say thank you for giving us an opportunity to make a discussion. We simultaneously experienced an alternative assessment method and I was pleased with it academically. And also, I want to emphasize that I strongly support English as a Foreign Language against English as Lingua Franca in teaching language.

To begin with, English as a Lingua Franca has been becoming popular around the world. This is because of variety of the speakers. There are some researchers who support ELF because of the diversity of human population. They say that English should be taught according to non-native speakers and as long as there is intelligibility, some mistakes and wrong structures should be accepted. I also support this idea from this point of view. But, in order to create a new concept and new rules for ELF, a lot of linguistics have to work for a country’s accent and this rules should also be limited according to their speakers and language. This actually seems impossible and this may cause a lot of mistakes and misunderstandings. Moreover, ELF hasn’t been sufficiently codified and therefore it is difficult to find teaching materials. Furthermore, it has been argued that teaching a non-native model would make speakers internationally unintelligible. I opened a video as an example in the classroom which is about Yorkshire dialect and none of us understood anything. There were some friends trying to understand and claiming that they can understand but it was nearly impossible to understand that dialect. And also in the video, an old man was speaking and talking about his village and their dialect. He was claiming that only they can understand each other. This situation is so common around the world. So, how is it possible to enable using ELF?

All in all, there are both good and bad sides of using ELF but the idea of teaching ELF in the classrooms are less advantageous, in my opinion.


Mehmet Ali ERKASAP

4N4       2012177053


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