If functional language is often the answer as I wrote in my last post, here are some of the questions it raises in its turn:

English as an International Language/ Lingua Franca and functional language

What can you do about students who are quite happy with “I think…” for opinions and “Sorry” for interrupting and go back to saying just those things five minutes after a whole hour on more ambitious language? Or are they right to stick to that simple language when most of the non-native speakers they will interact with won’t understand “Correct me if I’m wrong but…” and “Can I just come in here?”

Isn’t most functional language even more based on native speaker norms than the kind of useless idiomatic forms thrown up by corpus analysis? How can we get away from that?

What will EIL/ ELF functional language be like? Won’t “excuse me”, “pardon” and “sorry” all merge, “I’m afraid but” become standard and “I disagree” become a common spoken form, making all my functional language lessons useless? And what should language exams do about this?

You can make functional language lessons less Anglo-American-centric by including a text on apologising in Asia and using “mate” in Oz, but isn’t that just tokenism unless you actually change the models you give them for their speaking and/ or writing activities? For example, if they text explains that Thais give few excuses when apologising but English native speakers almost always give reasons for what happened, why do the speaking exercises and/ or listening models always practice giving more excuses rather than both options?

Other issues

How can you grade functional language?

If you’re apologising it could take an entire course to do it properly. Where on earth do you stop?

You can be pretty sure they’ll learn the Present Perfect Continuous eventually even if they never use English outside the classroom because all their future textbooks will have it in too. However, you can be pretty confident that none of their other books or teachers will bring up “I can see why you might think that, but…” or “I do beg your pardon”, and they won’t come across it again unless they watch loads of sitcoms, or work with or live with native speakers. What to do?

You can see how unsuccessfully I’ve struggled with these questions in my functions worksheets here.