English Today: Mine, Yours, Everybody’s or Nobody’s?

English Today: Mine, Yours, Everybody’s or Nobody’s?
In a global perspective, for most learners and speakers today, English has established itself as a language learnt predominantly for interaction with other non-native users. This talk will commence with a presentation of the expected and non-trivial areas of daily life where English has become prevalent, and the reasons behind these developments. We shall then interrogate the concepts of a native speaker (NS) and of “proper,” “Standard English,” examining whether they are viable models for most students. We will discuss how non-native users adapt and variably alter English ad hoc to suit their communicative purpose, thus preserving their identity without striving to mimic NSs’ conventions. These considerations will steer us towards a discussion of the implications for language pedagogy, and the assets of non-native speaker teachers. The talk will conclude with recommendations for academic instruction, taking as an example students speaking French as their first language, and for the translation and interpreting professions.

Michał B. Paradowski is an associate professor at the Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw, a trainer of teachers and translators, and a language teaching consultant for television. His interests include English as a lingua franca, second and third language acquisition research, foreign language teaching, bilingualism and bilingual education, embodied cognition, educational technology, and complexity science. He has given over 140 invited lectures, seminars and workshops in Europe, America, Africa and Asia, many in universities from the top of world rankings. His recent edited volumes are Teaching Languages off the Beaten Track (2014) and Productive Foreign Language Skills for an Intercultural World (2015); his latest (2017) monograph appeared under the title M/Other Tongues in Language Acquisition, Instruction, and Use.