Promoting a World Englishes Perspective through Podcasts

Abstract

As the most widely studied and spoken language worldwide, English is a medium of communication between speakers of varied language backgrounds. Global English users need not converge on any one variety; rather, they need adaptive, flexible skills that support communication with speakers of diverse World English (WE) varieties (Kirkpartick 2007). Nevertheless, many English learners and teachers around the world continue to adhere to ‘native speaker’1 models that prioritize language varieties from English-dominant nations, such as the United States or the United Kingdom (Tseng 2019). We have encountered this perspective first-hand in our work in Indonesia. Hanung has taught English and trained teachers at an Islamic University in Central Java for over twenty years. Tabitha has nearly twenty years of experience in ELT, including three years as a visiting instructor at Hanung’s institution. Among the students and teachers we have worked with in Central Java, the dominant language learning model is the ‘native English speaker’. For instance, on a survey given to our first-year English-major students, 81 percent reported wanting to ‘sound like a native speaker’. To challenge this tendency, Simanjuntak and Lien (2021) encourage the use of materials from global and local language communities. Using diverse listening materials can help students understand a wide variety of language varieties and accents and adapt to dialects they have never encountered before. We found podcasts, free audio recordings which are automatically delivered to users’ devices, to be a particularly rich and convenient source of listening materials featuring WE speakers. In the sections below, we describe our teaching context and use of podcasts. We close by discussing how our approach could transfer to other contexts where students and teachers continue to aspire to ‘native speaker’ models, and offer recommendations for teachers interested in shifting to a WE approach and exposing students to varied linguistic norms through podcasts.