Questão 66787

An English teacher is working in a language institute in Dubai, a hyper-diverse metropolis where English serves as the de facto lingua franca. Her students come from dozens of different countries (e.g., India, Philippines, Russia, Egypt, Brazil) and speak a wide range of L1s. While the institute's official policy promotes a 'native speaker' model (a mix of General American and British Received Pronunciation), the teacher observes that this model has little relevance to her students' daily reality. They use English to communicate with other non-native speakers in a highly multilingual environment. Insisting on a native-speaker accent seems not only unrealistic but also pedagogically misguided. She decides to shift her pedagogical focus towards an 'English as a Lingua Franca' (ELF) approach. The core idea of an ELF pedagogy, as she understands it from her studies, is to focus on what is crucial for successful intercultural communication, rather than on mimicking native speakers. A key text on ELF states: 'An ELF-aware pedagogy prioritizes communicative effectiveness and mutual intelligibility over native-like accuracy. It focuses on developing learners' intercultural communicative competence, their ability to negotiate meaning, and their awareness of linguistic diversity. It values accommodation and code-switching as valid communicative strategies, not as signs of deficiency.'

Based on this ELF perspective, analyze the following pedagogical choices the teacher could make:

I. Focus pronunciation practice on features identified by research as crucial for intelligibility in ELF contexts (e.g., consonant sounds, vowel length), while being more tolerant of variations in features that are less critical (e.g., the 'th' sound, which is often replaced by /t/ or /d/).
II. Explicitly teach communication strategies like clarification requests ('Could you say that again?'), paraphrasing ('So, what you mean is...'), and accommodation (adjusting one's speech to be better understood by the interlocutor).
III. Insist that students eliminate all traces of their L1 accent and use only idioms common in the UK or the US, correcting them every time they use a more transparent or internationally understood phrase.

Which choice(s) is/are consistent with an English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) approach?