Standards in English Language Teaching and Assessment

Featured Speaker:
Moncef Lahlou

Standards in English Language Teaching: The Place of Culture revisited.

This presentation will address the ever-increasing spread of English on the international scene and the so-called linguistic or cultural imperialism that accompanies it. Much has already been written about this, but most of it is emotional and even resentful.

As we move more and more toward the use of English as a single language of global communication, are we also losing our cultural specificity? Does the (pressing) need to communicate in English necessarily bring with it threat to one's identity? Should different countries, cultures, religions, be developing their own variants of the English language, with culturally specific approaches to teaching, or will these variants restrict learners rather than enable them?

Bio

Professor Moncef Lahlou is the Director of the Language Center at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, the only English medium university in Morocco. He holds a Doctorate in Phonetics from Provence University in France, as well as a Ph.D. in Foreign Language Education from the University of Texas at Austin, USA.

He has extensive teaching, research, and administrative experience. He has taught language and linguistics courses in Arabic, French, and English, to native and non-native speakers alike. His research interests include: foreign and second language learning and teaching, code switching and other language contact phenomena, and the use of technology in teaching. Professor Lahlou is a member of several professional associations.

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Photo by Tony Quirke