Pronunciation

Communication depends upon mutual intelligibility. That is to say that it is only possible if the language forms produced by the speaker are identified and understood by the listener. It is therefore the responsibility of speakers to pronounce them as intelligibly as possible, and it is also the responsibility of listeners actively to seek to identify what has been said and to use appropriate repair procedures if they are unable to do so. The ease of communication depends largely on the extent to which speaker and listener share a common practice. Speakers of the same dialect understand each other without difficulty, but widely separated dialects may well be mutually unintelligible. For purposes of national (or international) communication standard languages with standard pronunciations have generally developed, based usually on the speech of educated people in capital cities, or that of some other prestigious social group. The standard language is widely used in the education system, in the serious media and in middle-class life and culture. This is not to say that all users of a standard pronunciation sound alike. The speaker's socio-regional provenance may be clearly marked and easily detectable by an experienced listener. It may well be important to the individual's sense of identity that this should be so (e.g. Scottish English), but conformity to national norms is sufficient to ensure ready mutual intelligibility on a national scale.

Vantage is the third level in a series of specifications of learning objectives developed within the Council of Europe's programme for the promotion of language learning in Europe. The series is intended to offer guidance and support to the many ‘partners for learning’ whose co-operation is necessary to the creation of a coherent and transparent structure of provision for effective learning relevant to the needs of the learners as well as of society, which normally provides the resources. Without setting up bureaucratic mechanisms of control, it provides a series of reference points, common objectives towards the achievement of which all can work independently but in harmony – curriculum planners, examining and qualifying authorities, course designers and materials producers, teacher trainers and last but by no means least the teachers and learners through whose interaction organised learning takes place.

The series is directed towards those – probably the great majority of ordinary language learners – who want to use another language for communication with people who speak it, both for transacting the business of everyday life and for exchanging information and opinions on private life and public affairs.

It therefore sets out to define in some detail what such an objective means in practice: what users of a language are most likely to wish or need to be able to do in the communication situations in which they take part and consequently what they have to know and the skills they have to develop in order to be able to communicate effectively in those situations.

Vantage, like its predecessors Threshold and Waystage, is conceived as a contribution to improved communication, particularly among Europeans of all backgrounds. A communicative approach aims to enable the learners to use a foreign language for their own purposes. What these purposes are, depends on the personality, the circumstances, the needs and interests of the learners themselves. They are never fully predictable, but, starting from a particular target group, however heterogeneous it may be, we can make an attempt to identify those things that all of them are at least very likely to need or wish to be able to do in the foreign language. In order to do this in any useful way we have to try to determine in what situations they are most likely to use the foreign language, what roles they will play in these situations, and what matters they are most likely to have to be able to deal with in the foreign language. Determining all this – especially if we want to arrive at a fairly detailed description – is, in a way, a matter of guesswork. However, we can make at least better educated guesses if we make use of our collective experience, our knowledge of the world, and of whatever amount of consensus would appear to have been – explicitly or implicitly – achieved. In fact, the information on this that is available by now is by no means negligible.

Vantage is an objective derived from the estimated needs of the learners as communicators. A course – that is the sum total of the learning experiences offered to the learners – designed for Vantage will have to enable the learners to satisfy these needs. Yet, it will inevitably do other things as well. Depending on its design and presentation it may give the learners pleasure or hardship, it may promote, maintain, or reduce their motivation for learning, it may bolster or diminish their self-confidence, it may stimulate their interest and sensitivity to the world around them or it may cause them to withdraw into themselves. In short, it may benefit the learners far beyond the basic objectives of the course or it may limit itself to these and, possibly, it may even harm the learners as individuals. All these effects – positive or negative – are independent of the learning load that is represented by the content of an objective; they are produced by the impact upon particular learners of the forms and the manners of the presentation and the practice of this content. At the same time they may affect the learners' impression of the learning load in making this load appear to be more demanding or less so.

The experience, then, of learning for Vantage will affect the learners in various ways beyond the acquisition of a certain learning content.