Abstract

The teaching of English faces some questioning about which is the “best” variety to be
taught. Some queries about choosing American or British varieties are common among
teachers (while other varieties are rarely mentioned as a possible choice for classrooms).
However, is it necessary to encourage students to have a mimetic behavior towards their
learning, just aiming to have a native-like pronunciation? This investigation is important
if we consider that most interactions do not happen involving native speakers. It is
desirable that applied linguists, teachers and classroom materials be critical about the
conception of English and its importance in the current international scenario. How can
we teach it? As a foreign language or as a Lingua Franca? In this paper, we discuss the
current role of English worldwide, and how some of the mentioned aspects have
influenced the coursebook confection, trying to understand its possible impacts on the
representation of non native speaker to the users of the book. Our corpus consists of the
first coursebook from the Global series (Macmillan) and we are going to analyze how it
presents the English language and its huge number of speakers. Based on the bibliography
on English as a Lingua Franca, we developed an analysis matrix to investigate the social,
cultural and linguistic aspects of the representation of non native speakers in the material.
The result of our analysis shows that, even though there is the non native speaker in the
material, the way it is portrayed is superficial, being presented, mostly, in a separated
section of the unit, and hardly ever in communicative situations of interaction. It is also
presented a brief discussion on ways to approach English as Lingua Franca in teaching
materials.

Keywords: Teaching-learning. English language. English as a Lingua Franca.

Coursebook.