Teacher and Student Attitudes Towards Implementing the Lingua Franca Core Approach to Pronunciation Instruction

Sammanfattning: In Swedish National Agency for Education’s (Skolverket) steering documents, there is little to no mention on how pronunciation should be taught in Swedish schools. There is, however, a focus on intelligibility. This implies the implementation of an approach like the Lingua Franca Core (LFC), which focuses on non-native speaker communication (NNS-NNS), is expected from teachers. In the current paper, I survey recent experimental research that investigates how teachers and students perceive this approach and English as a lingua franca (ELF) in general. The general finding across studies is that teachers and students have negative attitudes towards ELF, and that phenomena like the native speaker ideal and native speaker fallacy still exist among a significant number of non-native English language learners and educators. Moreover, a number of studies indicate that teachers are hesitant to implement LFC due to lack of knowledge of the approach as well as the preference for native speaker norms. In conclusion, looking across this body of research it can be seen that the negative attitudes around ELF of both teachers and students may have implications on the implementation of LFC. However, more in-depth research is required to fully understand how LFC is affected by teacher and student perceptions.