37.488, FYI: Webinar by Sheryl Cooke (British Council)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-488. Wed Feb 04 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.488, FYI: Webinar by Sheryl Cooke (British Council)

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Date: 04-Feb-2026
From: Elina Vasu [elina.vasu at tuni.fi]
Subject: Webinar by Sheryl Cooke (British Council)


The Nordic Speech Research Forum convenes on Tue, Feb 10th at 11:00 -
12:00 (Helsinki/Eastern European Time EET; UCT+2). You are warmly
welcome to join the webinar via our website https://www.jyu.fi/nsrf.
Please check how your time zone relates to Helsinki time.
Tensions around the teaching and testing of oral proficiency in
English as a lingua franca
Sheryl Cooke (British Council)
Language is a wonderfully dynamic, malleable tool to express human
thought and creativity. As a global lingua franca, English is
especially varied, enriched by a multitude of speakers’ own cultural
and linguistic backgrounds while still enabling the effective exchange
of ideas, information, and identity. Rather than reflecting this
communicative reality, testing and teaching approaches have tended to
force speakers into the straitjacket of standardisation, leading to
negative consequences.
In response to Shohamy’s statement that “while ample research is
available about [English as a lingua franca (ELF)], the language tests
continue to overlook it and to use standard native criteria and goals”
(2018, p. 586), this talk will explore ELF and consider how teachers
and testers can help to move the needle towards
comprehensibility-focused models to inform teaching, learning and
assessment.
References
Shohamy, E. (2018). ELF and critical language testing. In J. Jenkins,
W. Baker, & M. Dewey (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of English as a
Lingua Franca. Routledge.
The Nordic Speech Research Forum is organized by the Speech and Speech
Research Special Interest Group of the Finnish Association for Applied
Linguistics (AFinLA) and the Nordic Network for L2 Pronunciation
(NNL2P). The current coordinators are Riikka Ullakonoja (University of
Jyväskylä) and Elina Vasu (Tampere University).
The spring season programme is now available at
https://www.jyu.fi/nsrf.

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics
                     Phonetics
                     Phonology




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