Learners need not chase native-like perfection and can keep their cultural identity in English (“Czenglish” is a stage, not a crime). Teachers should still flag the ‘tricky’ L1-driven errors that cause embarrassing or serious misunderstanding.
Ideas from the P.A.R.K. conference talks
- TENOR (Simon Gill): “teaching English for no obvious reason”. Ask learners why they are learning; motive shapes what accuracy matters.
- Czenglish (Mark Andrews): L1-shaped English as a topic to discuss, not to police item by item.
- Activity: give a list of L1 expressions with no word-for-word English equivalent; learners must explain them in English with context.
Limits
A conference report; “tricky” errors are never defined, so the line between tolerable and harmful transfer is left to teacher judgement.
A working criterion (Claude)
Use Jenkins’s Lingua Franca Core logic for pronunciation and Burt & Kiparsky’s global vs local errors for grammar and lexis: correct what blocks meaning or causes offence; tolerate what is merely marked.
- Uzbek/Russian examples worth flagging: false friends (magazine for shop, accurate for neat), I am agree, direct-translation politeness that sounds rude.
Connections
Intelligibility as the goal, accent as the learner’s informed choice · Reactive focus on form - choose few, global, developmental errors · Errors are often developmental, not L1 transfer