TY - JOUR
T1 - English language proficiencies–recasting disciplinary and pedagogic sensibilities
AU - Leung, Constant
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - The notion of language proficiency in English Language Teaching (ELT), as an internationalized educational enterprise, has tended to be operationalized in terms of stable lexicogrammar and enduring normative patterns of social use. It will be argued that this ‘established’ stability has been challenged by the scholarship in several fields of applied language studies that has demonstrated the ‘leaky’ and mutable language boundaries and emergent communicative enactments in situated use. The main theme of this article is on the coalescing professional and curricular recognition of the fact that use of English is contextually and functionally variegated, and can include resources from other languages. I will draw on relevant works from research fields such as academic literacies, English as a Lingua Franca, flexible multilingualism, and translanguaging to illustrate this growing understanding. Some aspects of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) will be discussed as a curricular example of the movement towards a more linguistically fluid and interactionally accomplished notion of language proficiency. In the final part of the discussion I will look at the key challenges brought about by this more contingent and situated view of language proficiency/ies in terms of pedagogy and assessment, and some of the potentially productive directions of investigation for further development.
AB - The notion of language proficiency in English Language Teaching (ELT), as an internationalized educational enterprise, has tended to be operationalized in terms of stable lexicogrammar and enduring normative patterns of social use. It will be argued that this ‘established’ stability has been challenged by the scholarship in several fields of applied language studies that has demonstrated the ‘leaky’ and mutable language boundaries and emergent communicative enactments in situated use. The main theme of this article is on the coalescing professional and curricular recognition of the fact that use of English is contextually and functionally variegated, and can include resources from other languages. I will draw on relevant works from research fields such as academic literacies, English as a Lingua Franca, flexible multilingualism, and translanguaging to illustrate this growing understanding. Some aspects of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) will be discussed as a curricular example of the movement towards a more linguistically fluid and interactionally accomplished notion of language proficiency. In the final part of the discussion I will look at the key challenges brought about by this more contingent and situated view of language proficiency/ies in terms of pedagogy and assessment, and some of the potentially productive directions of investigation for further development.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85179946198&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/15427587.2023.2292185
DO - 10.1080/15427587.2023.2292185
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85179946198
SN - 1542-7587
VL - 20
SP - 426
EP - 447
JO - Critical Inquiry in Language Studies
JF - Critical Inquiry in Language Studies
IS - 4
ER -