Chuyên đề HSG Anh 2

Part I: Introduction
Foreign language education has become a significant phenomenon in the present age. Responding to personal or professional needs, people learn a foreign language to qualify for overseas education, to communicate with colleagues in international businesses, or to prepare themselves for round-the-world travel. In order to understand the phenomenon, a lot of wide knowledge related to the process of language acquisition, second or foreign language education, and specific knowledge of foreign language teaching pedagogy, testing and evaluation, etc.have become especially important. According to Cook (1999), foreign language teaching has,broadly speaking, two goals:Firstly, students learn the formal properties of a language and get some practice using it incommunicative situations, typically realized in the classroom. Secondly, students actually communicate with people in an L2 environment,realized outside the classroom.There emerge new areas of research in English Language Teaching (ELT) including the relationship between ELT and World Englishes (WEs), English as an International Language (EIL) and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). In many schools of WEs, EIL and ELF existsthe interaction between people (e.g., nonnative speaker-nonnative speaker; native speaker-nonnative speaker) in choosing a common language–i.e., English–to communicate. Therefore, it is open to question that whether it is necessary to teach ‘standard English’ or English varieties to develop students “communicative competence” (Hymes, 1972). This is also a big challenge that most teachers of English are commonly facing in such countries as China, Korea, or Viet Nam as stated by Le (2012). Therefore, using a variety of sources beside the textbooks especially authentic materials rooted in different Englishes may bring a prospective outcome. This writing mainly aims at introducing some sources for teachers to get authentic materials to use in English teaching to acquaint their students with a variety of English in the world. Because of the limit of the article, the specific sociolinguistic aspect – regional dialects, specifically of English, is taken into consideration to draw some implications for foreign language education. The study consists of four points as follows:
1: Language, Dialects and Varieties
2: Standard English and World Englishes
3: Authentic materials
4: Implications in English Language Education
Part II: Development
II.1. Language, Dialects and Varieties
There have been a number of definitions of language, especially in comparison with dialects. According to Trudgill (1978) “if two speakers cannot understand one another, then they are speaking different languages.” (p.15) while Wardhaugh (2006) challenged that definition by providing the examples of Cantonese and Mandarin people in China, who will not be able to understand each other in speaking but will be able in writing so he defined language as what “can be used to refer either to a single linguistic norm or to a group of related norms” (p.28). Fishman (1972) defined language to be “a superordinate designation” (p.23), which shared the view of Trudgill (1978) in that languages are “autonomous” (p.16). Put it differently, language is an independent linguistic body including vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation which can help people to intelligibly communicate with each other.For instance, some languages are Vietnamese, Japanese, Chinese, English, Russian, etc.
One of the uses of language in society is to build and sustain meaningful relationships among people (Spolsky, 1998). When we meet people for the first time in a social context, our first reaction often includes speculation, on the basis of their spoken language and dialects to know about where they come from, and what social class they belong to. Such speculation leads one to form a fuller image and understanding of people, which may or may not be accurate.
Dialects, according to Trudgill (1978, p. 17), strictly speaking, refers to “differences between kinds of language which are differences of vocabulary and grammar as well as pronunciation”. Thus, dialects are ‘heteronomous’ (Trudgill, 1978, p. 16) or “a subordinate designation” (Fishman, 1972, p.23). In other words, while language is independent, dialects are dependent. Language and dialects can be distinguished in terms of size, in which a language is larger than a dialect, and prestige, in which a language has a prestige but a dialect does not. For example, Vietnamese is a language with a lot of dialects of different regions along Vietnam and of different social classes in the society.
Dialects used to be regional but now they may be regional at one time and social at another time. Because when mentioning the term dialects, in some people’s minds, they are related to “provincial, perhaps not well educated”, many of the scholars would rather use the term variety to connote its technical meaning.
A variety of language is defined by Hudson (1996, p.22) as “a set of linguistic items with similar distribution” while by Ferguson (1972, p.30) as “any body of human speech patterns which is sufficiently homogeneous to be analyzed by available techniques of synchronic description