Within the communicative approach to English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching, the aims of instruction are primarily to enable learners to communicate; hence, functional and communicative intelligibility has become the goal of pronunciation training. On the other hand, contemporary approaches to EFL teaching leave sufficient room for accommodating the individual learner and contextual factors which largely influence the choice of the target pronunciation models. Moreover, in a globalized world, where English has become a contemporary lingua franca for intercultural communication, the pronunciation norms of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) appear to meet the needs and expectations of learners of English in international settings, coexisting with or replacing native-speaker pronunciation models as the target of instruction. The ELF approach and the Lingua Franca Core elaborated by Jenkins (2000, 2002) have aroused controversy among both researchers and EFL teachers. The paper presents the findings of a questionnaire study involving 234 Polish students, English majors, which aimed to determine their preferences and opinions concerning native-speaker and ELF norms as pronunciation instruction targets. The findings revealed a strong preference for native-like pronunciation models in the subjects’ own language development and a less strong preference for such models in pronunciation teaching at all levels of proficiency. Moreover, the results pointed to the significant role played by the intensity of pronunciation training and the level of awareness of native-speaker pronunciation models in shaping the subjects’ attitudes toward native-like and ELF pronunciation norms.
In the context of English as a global language, more and more people are learning it for the purposes of L2 to L2 communication. Criticism of global coursebooks is that they still operate within an ESL, native-speaker model. This article explores the arguments that these textbooks are culturally biased in favour of the target culture. The literature and studies show that publishers have not reacted to the changes that have happened to the international nature of English, nor have they made any amendments to the content of global coursebooks in reaction to criticism. A comparative content analysis was conducted on a first edition of English file (Latham-Koenig and Oxenden 1996) and a fourth edition of the same publication (Latham-Koenig et al. 2020) to examine what changes have been made with regard to the proportion of cultural content contained. The findings agreed with previous related studies; however, there was observation of a shift from the proportion of British target culture in favour of neutral, universality of culture. This article goes on to advocate the inclusion of more localised content or at least activities which encourage the inclusion of L2 culture.
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