Interview with Robin Walker
August 2010
Author: Teaching the Pronunciation of English as a Lingua Franca
OUP 2010
(Podcast Transcript)
Part 2
Susan: OK, so this is part two. Would you like to elaborate a little bit more on the models of
pronunciation that you are researching?
Robin: Well I’m not researching models but the issue of models comes up, of course, and it’s very
important. We need models and everyone panics and says “If you take away native speaker
pronunciations that have been used as models up until now, what will we use in their place?”
The immediate thing is while you don’t have to take away the native speaker models, let’s say
“RP” the standard British pronunciation; what you do have to do, if you continue to use “RP” as
your model in class, is make sure that you don’t teach those aspects of this particular native
speaker pronunciation that are known to cause problems of intelligibility in Lingua Franca
contexts. So far it’s been assumed that because it’s a native speaker who is talking this is going to
be the maximum level of intelligibility possible; this is a standard native speaker accent. The
reality, once you get into Lingua Franca contexts is that this is not the case and in fact there was
work done back in 1982 by Larry Smith in Hawaii where people were allowed to listen to native
speaker and non-native speaker accents and it turned out that the U.S. and UK standard accents
were the ones that were not considered very intelligible.
Susan: How interesting.
Robin: More recent work done by a Japanese teacher working for the British Council in Tokyo, she
tested intelligibility out with different speakers from all around the world, world class leaders, so
we are talking about people who are talking pretty standard englishes, and the guy who got the
least votes for “Mr. Intelligible “ was David Cameron. ( the 2010 British PM)
Susan: Yes, I read about that.
Robin: So if you decide to use the existing materials, (because at the moment there are no or only
a very few ELF materials available), to use as models in your pronunciation classroom for English as
a Lingua Franca is fine, as long as you avoid using those features that I mentioned that cause
native speakers to be less intelligible in ELF contexts. Mostly these are the supra-segmental things
of vowel reductions, the use of weak forms, assimilations, coalescences, that sort of stuff that’s
been the bread and butter of pronunciation teaching since communicative teaching came in and is
very, very native speaker, but it’s not actually useful for being intelligible in ELF contexts.
Susan: How interesting, my students are going to enjoy this.
Robin: So, you’ve used your existing materials, but you’ve used them selectively and you would
concentrate on well pronounced consonants and issues of vowel length and issues of correct
sentence stress and tonic stress, as we would say more technically.
So, that’s one model in your classroom; use what you’ve got but use it selectively. The other
model is to use competent ELF speakers; anybody who knows that their pronunciation works in
ELF context and that they are intelligible in ELF context with their pronunciation as it is now; that
person is the perfect model.
Susan: Right, so you’re talking about who is going to instruct this kind of model?
Robin: Yes. Now, who as a non-native speaker knows that their pronunciation works when they’ve
gone out and spoken to other non-native speakers? Well, most competent non-native speaking
teachers around the world.
Susan: Yes, exactly.
Robin: There, interestingly, native speakers that are in such demand and have such prestige are
probably poorer models for students learning English for Lingua Franca use. Because many native
speaking teachers don’t know what it is that they do that makes them less intelligible and
therefore aren’t capable of eliminating it from their speech and they give you a native speaker
model, when what your students are looking for is ELF intelligibility.
So given a choice, if I’m aiming at ELF competence in my pronunciation, I would like someone who
has demonstrated that they are competent, intelligible ELF speakers; and often that would be the
non-native speaker teacher over many, many native speaker teachers.
Susan: It’s very interesting you should say that, because I work at NILE every summer and I often
go with a colleague from Argentina who is as near to native as can be, but does have a slight
Argentine accent and some years ago at NILE the trainees only wanted native speakers as their
teachers. Now they’re beginning to change their mind because they can see what they can aspire
to.
Robin: Well, this is another issue of course, that if I am learning English in Argentina and my
teacher is Argentinean and has demonstrated that he/she is fully competent in ELF context and
understands and communicates perfectly, then this is a person who started where I am starting
and has achieved what I would like to achieve and therefore, if this person could do it, I can do it
whereas a native speaker has started somewhere else and I can never do what the native speaker
has done in that sense.
Susan: It’s really, important isn’t it?
Robin: Of course, I think that perhaps people who go to the UK or the U.S. to perfect their English
go because they want to reach the goal of native speaker competence because of some reason
that attracts them to that culture or because they’re going to work there and want to integrate
completely. If you go to the U.S. to become completely integrated into that society you may (or
may not) wish to sound as if you were U.S. born, now if you do wish this, you are going to need a
native speaker to get you there. So, it’s a different goal and therefore you need a different
instructor to get you to that goal.
Susan: Yes, good. Can I ask you, have you altered your native accent at all to go along with these
kinds of models that you are talking about?
Robin: Well, I think even as I’m speaking now, my accent is not the accent I’d have when I was
back home with my family. I think we do this, we accommodate towards something that is more
intelligible internationally and when I speak abroad, when I speak at conferences and things like
that, I hope that I don’t speak like I do when I’m in Newcastle with my family.
Susan: Yes, because you are from Newcastle aren’t you? Well, as you know I’m from Liverpool and
when I first went over to Singapore I radically changed my language, my pronunciation. I didn’t
want all these little Chinese-Malaysian-Indians running around sounding like John Lennon.
OK, great! Can I ask you one more question? I’d like to ask you to what extent you agree with
Kachru when he says: “Is the English language inevitably linked with western culture or is it a tool
or instrument that can be applied to local commerce and literature, like adapting the design of an
automobile to fit life in Japan or using a violin to play an Indian Raga?” I think that many people
would like to agree with him but I wonder if you feel that governments and ministries of education
would agree with that.
Robin: Well, I don’t know what governments and ministries of education feel or think but I know
that I don’t see why English has to be linked inevitably with western culture and what brought this
one really strongly to me was the closing plenary in IATEFL in 2008, which was Radmila Popovich
from Serbia and she was talking about how she dealt with going back into the English language
classroom with her University students once NATO had begun bombing Belgrade, because here
was the language that was bringing the bombs, and she had to get in there and teach it. In the
end, she brought this up with the students and said to them: “We can do something about this by
simply taking the language and using this language which apparently is our enemy and
appropriating it and using it to express what we feel”. You should have seen some of the stuff in
the way of haiku and other literary expressions that came out of these Serbian university students
written in English. So, they took this and there was no western culture in what they were saying
here, this was their culture coming from English. They took the English language and they
expressed themselves culturally through the English language and this is obviously happening all
over the world with the literatures, so, above all English is a tool and it’ll serve peoples’ purposes,
but it’ll only fully serve them when the native speakers accept that it is not theirs, it’s everybody’s.
Once people take it on as a tool, they will modify the tool to make it do what they want and to
allow them to express what they want to express.
Susan: Exactly. We’re doing a lot of reading from Andy Kirkpatrick’s book: “World Englishes” and
many of the exercises that my students are doing are on the CD and they are really amazed at
some of the literature coming out of his work, it’s quite incredible.
Robin: For me it was interesting, I spent 20 years teaching English in a school of tourism and at
first, of course, what you do is drag all your tourism brochures across from the UK to show them
English as she is and all that, and then one day I finally woke up and I thought: “This is dumb. What
these people need to do with English is talk about their culture. English is just the tool that allows
them to communicate their culture to the whole world; but it’s their culture they have to talk
about.” So, then they say to me: “How do we talk about FABADA?” and I say: “Well, you have to
say what it is, you can’t translate it, there isn’t something in the English language for this thing that
we have here and that we eat in winter” and they say: “there isn’t anything in the English
language?” and I said: “No. So, you just put the word in and make that your English; your English
includes this word, and then you’ll have to explain it to people who’ve never heard the word
before.” It was fascinating for me, this change from trying to show them how English was used by
tourism professionals in the UK to actually saying: “Give them the English that they need to talk
about their culture.”
Susan: Yes, that’s fabulous. Thank you very much indeed Robin, I’m really very happy about being
able to have this interview with you and I’ll send back some of the comments from my students
after next week, because we’re not starting until next Tuesday and this module lasts for three
weeks, so in a month you’ll have some responses. Thank you very much!
Robin: It was my pleasure.