English phonetics and phonology often focus on improving learners’ pronunciation. However, phonological processing is ‘a two-way street’ involving both speaker and listener. Thus, pronunciation instruction in this globalized time needs to be complemented with ways to help listeners understand a wide range of accents, thereby challenging the native speakerism and standard language ideology of more traditional English teaching. In this paper, we share our experiences of promoting listener abilities in university courses in Sweden and the US, two very different teaching contexts. In Sweden, Jeong takes a truly phonetic approach, starting from students’ own pronunciations rather than a ‘standard’ model, and focuses on ability to comprehend diverse accents. In the US, Lindemann uses native-speaking students’ complaints about supposedly incomprehensible instructors, not as justification for further training of instructors who are already proficient English users, but as an opportunity to offer listener training to the students. Put together, these experiences provide a basis for Forsberg's reflection on the teaching of L2 phonetics and pronunciation in other languages such as Swedish, and the benefits of shifting some of the focus from speaker to listener in order to begin to overcome native speakerism and standard language ideology.

English as a lingua franca (ELF) is a well-known concept for English used as an international contact language among people from diverse linguacultural backgrounds. Using a questionnaire, we explored the attitudes of Spanish and Swedish pre-service primary school teachers towards English and its users after their collaboration on a virtual platform, during which they were ELF users. The findings showed that the ELF user attitudes of the two European student cohorts tended to be ambivalent, mixed, and self-contradictory. After discussing factors for participants’ attitudinal tendencies, we conclude that the ambivalence in their overall attitudes seems to mirror the ambivalence of the ‘double’ definitions of English in educational policy documents, which may affect the goals of teaching English in the classroom. We suggest that university teaching help pre-service teachers develop critical perspectives towards English and English users, as well as reflecting on why they teach English to their future pupils.

Workplaces are becoming increasingly international. In many contemporary workplaces, English is used as a lingua franca (ELF). This chapter introduces the notion of WELF, Workplace English as a Lingua Franca, which is used as a means of conceptualizing English that is used in international workplace settings. The chapter focuses on the language skills and strategies that are deployed by successful WELF users. An important aim in conceptualizing WELF is to help English learners to find their own answers to the questions of why they need to learn English, and what it means to be a competent user of the language. A further aim is to reach out to English teachers working in contexts where students can be expected to work in globalized workplaces.

The native speaker (NS) norm, which promotes NS competence as the goal of language learning, is not congruent with Global Englishes Language Teaching. The purpose of English phonology courses in many teacher education programs is thus to “fix” teacher candidates’ accents to become nativelike and consequently enable them to teach American and British accents to their own learners. The curriculum has been developed for students in three teacher education programmes at a Swedish university to help them, and subsequently help their learners to achieve internationally intelligible pronunciation and maximised listening comprehension for diverse Global Englishes accents. The portfolio can be assessed qualitatively, in terms of how successfully the student has documented the profile of her pronunciation and critically evaluated her own global speaker and listener intelligibility. Phonology is frequently associated merely with teaching pronunciation although its usefulness for teaching listening comprehension has long been suggested.

As reflected in the concept of Global Englishes, English mediates global communication, where English speakers represent not merely those from English-speaking countries like United Kingdom or United States but also global people from a wide range of linguistic backgrounds, who speak the language with diverse accents. Thus, to communicate internationally, cultivating a maximized listening proficiency for and positive attitudes toward global Englishes speakers with diverse accents is ever more important. However, with their preference for American English and its popular culture, it is uncertain whether Swedish youth learners are developing these key linguistic qualities to be prepared for the globalized use of English. To address this, we randomly assigned 160 upper secondary students (mean age = 17.25) into six groups, where each group listened to one of six English speakers. The six speakers first languages were Mandarin, Russian/Ukrainian, Tamil, Lusoga/Luganda, American English, and British English. Through comparing the six student groups, we examined their listener intelligibility (actual understanding), listener comprehensibility (feeling of ease or difficulty), accentedness perception (perceiving an accent as native or foreign), and accentedness acceptance (showing a positive or negative attitude toward an accent) of diverse English accents. The results showed that the intelligibility scores and perception/attitude ratings of participants favored the two speakers with privileged accents–the American and British speakers. However, across all six groups, no correlation was detected between their actual understanding of the speakers and their perception/attitude ratings, which often had a strong correlation with their feelings of ease/difficulty regarding the speakers accents. Taken together, our results suggest that the current English education needs innovation to be more aligned with the national syllabus that promotes a global perspective. That is, students need to be guided to improve their actual understanding and sense of familiarity with Global English speakers besides the native accents that they prefer. Moreover, innovative pedagogical work should be undertaken to change Swedish youths’ perceptions and attitudes and prepare them to become open-minded toward diverse English speakers.

Our previous study examined the mutual intelligibility of Malaysian English to Swedish listeners and Swedish English to Malaysian listeners. The results showed that Swedish listeners did not understand the Malaysian speaker well. In the present study, the Malaysian speaker was trained to alter her realization of the word stress, consonant clusters and long vowels in a way that previous research has found intelligible for both native and non-native English speakers. The audible and measurable alteration significantly increased the intelligibility of the speaker for Swedish listeners. This indicates that the three phonetic features are important for intelligibility in international contexts and suggests including the word stress in the Lingua Franca Phonetic Core. Moreover, we discuss that Malaysian English being a dialect and Swedish English being a similect may be relevant to their mutual intelligibility and relate the discussion to teaching English pronunciation in countries where English has been localized.

In teaching and assessing pronunciation of English as an international lingua franca (ELF), intelligibility is more relevant than nativelikeness (Jenkins, 2015). As guidelines for intelligible ELF pronunciation, the Lingua Franca Core (LFC) syllabus (Jenkins, 2002) and relative functional load (FL) of phonemic contrasts (e.g., Catford, 1987) have been used (e.g., Jeong et al., 2018; Rahimi & Ruzrokh, 2016; Sewell, 2017).The paper examines phonemic details in the LFC and relative FL, based on the intelligibility of second language speakers’ phoneme realisation for Swedish university students. Using the perception of a group of Swedish youths for the study can be rationalised that they are known to have very high proficient English skills as a second language (Norrby, 2015). Speech data with IPA transcriptions were from the Speech Accent Archive (http://accent.gmu.edu/index.php), comprising nine speakers’ readings of the same text, whose first languages were Arabic, French, German, Japanese, Russian, Somali, Thai, Turkish and Urdu respectively. Each of seventy-five Swedish students taking university courses chose and transcribed one of the nine speakers in English orthography. Through comparing errors in the listeners’ transcriptions, their accounts, and the speakers’ segmental features deviating from either American or British English phoneme inventory, we firstly analysed whether, and to what extent such deviation affected intelligibility. From this analysis, some details of the LFC and relative FL were questioned. For example, while the LFC denotes that all consonants besides interdental fricatives need to be realised as in Standard American/British English, replacing some consonants with others, like plural marking /z/ with /s/ or alveolar /ɹ/ with uvular / ʁ/, did not compromise intelligibility. Likewise, while the ɔ/oʊ contrast is known to have high FL, replacing one with the other did not cause misunderstanding (e.g. realising ‘only’ as [ɔnli]). The findings suggest further scrutinising and developing the LFC and relative FL.

Phenomenology is not as common in language studies as other qualitative methodologies, such as ethnography. It however has potential to be a suitable way of exploring individuals' language-related experiences from the first-person perspective. The chapter presents how to do phenomenological research in second language studies, suggest criteria for assessing phenomenological studies, and discuss compatibility with quantitative methods.