“English as a Lingua Franca”: Rhetoric or Reality? Attitudes of Prospective English Teachers in Post-colonial Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

As a consequence of English developing into a global language, new varieties of English have emerged and the language has assumed the role of a common medium of communication among speakers of different ethnolinguistic backgrounds. When Hong Kong was transforming from a British colony into “Asia’s World City” after its sovereignty was returned to China, the notions of “World Englishes” (WE) and “English as a Lingua Franca” (ELF) were also introduced to teacher-trainees taking English as their major subject in a local university in Hong Kong. Despite this, preference for the native English models seemed to prevail. This article examines the extent to which ELF was a rhetoric rather than a reality as perceived by this group of students. Through the Verbal-guise Technique and group interviews, the article examined the attitudes of 105 English teacher-trainees in Hong Kong towards four native and three Asian speech samples of English (including their own). The results showed that although the respondents displayed good confidence in their own accent and positive attitudes towards all speakers, their strong preference for the American and British models remained deep-rooted, suggesting that a linguistic hierarchy exists even in the WE paradigm.

KEYWORDS:

• English accents
• English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)
• post-colonial Hong Kong
• language attitude
• World Englishes

Notes

1 LPATE has been implemented since 2001, which is a requirement imposed by the Hong Kong Government. All teachers aspiring to teach English as a profession must pass this test or obtain equivalent qualifications before they can be registered.

2 For the InG, the speaker was strongly rhotic (e.g. over) and stressed on the ending syllable of “hidden”. The speaker of HKG displayed stereotypical features such as no distinction between long and short vowels (slip as sleep), replacement of diphthongs with vowels (e.g. found as find). As for ChG, “v” was often replaced with “w” as in “every”; “th” with “z” as in “birthday”; and an extra vowel /a/ was added to words ending with “t” as in “first”.

3 Jenkins (2002, p. 96) proposed four categorical features of the Lingua Franca Core which addresses the comprehension needs of international listeners. Speakers of the “Educated” accents in this study might also display non-native features, yet their phonological repertoires were well within the Lingua Franca Core that safeguarded mutual intelligibility.

4 According to Hong Kong Education Bureau (2017), the NET schemes were launched since 1998 for secondary and 2002 for primary schools. Through these schemes, native English teachers from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US are employed.