English as a Lingua Franca

Theorizing and teaching English

Ian Mackenzie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134503889
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

English as a Lingua Franca: Theorizing and Teaching English examines the English used among non-native speakers around the world today and its relation to English as a native language, as well as the implications for English language teaching.

Challenging and incisive, this book analyses positive and negative accounts of English as a lingua franca, and its linguistic features, within the context of:

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• native and World Englishes

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• multilingualism and intercultural communication

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• sociolinguistic issues including accent and identity

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• classroom teaching and learning

English as a Lingua Franca is a useful guide for teachers and trainee teachers, and will be essential reading for advanced students and linguists concerned with multilingualism, language contact, language learning, language change, and the place of English in the world today.

1 What is ELF?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315890081-1

Se ti sabir,

Ti respondir;

Se non sabir,

Tazir, tazir.

Molière, Le bourgeois gentilhomme (4.5)¹

The new language which is rapidly ousting the language of Shakespeare as the world’s lingua franca is English itself – English in its new global form.

Graddol (2006: 11)

A character in Julian Barnes’ novel Talking It Over working as an EFL teacher in London has a revelation: the reason his former students can’t even buy a bus ticket is that they were taught English as a Foreign Language – ‘Why don’t they teach English as English, that’s what I want to know’ (1992: 122). After all, who wants to learn to speak English like a foreigner? Little did Barnes (or at least his character, Oliver) know that a decade or two later, some people would consider a non-native English speaker (NNES) speaking like a native English speaker (NES), or even attempting to do so, to be a Bad Thing.

This is because many NNESs use English as a language of wider communication, or as a lingua franca, largely in order to communicate with other NNESs, and it is argued that English teaching should reflect this state of affairs. If people learn English for use as a lingua franca, the language need no longer be related to a particular native ‘target culture’ in which certain ways of speaking and behaving are appropriate. On the contrary, rather than imitating the norms of NESs, users of English as a lingua franca (ELF) should adopt ways of speaking (with their bi- or multilingual English-speaking interlocutors) which aid mutual intelligibility and successful communication. Such is the logic underlying ELF.

This chapter sketches out what is generally meant by the term ELF and the claims its supporters make for it. It then considers the notion of the native speaker, and the position of NESs in ELF, and seeks to distinguish ELF from World Englishes or New Englishes – the nativized or indigenized varieties used in former British colonial territories. Unlike nativized World Englishes, ELF is not, and will almost certainly never become, a stable variety, because of the range of participants in the international use of English.

English as a lingua franca

The term ‘lingua franca’ comes from a contact language used in the eastern Mediterranean from the eleventh to the early nineteenth centuries. ² Today, the term ‘English as a lingua franca’ is used to refer to ‘any use of English among speakers of different first languages for whom English is the communicative medium of choice, and often the only option’ (Seidlhofer 2011: 7). ELF is an alternative term for English as an international/global/world language, and International English (see Seidlhofer 2004: 210). ³ Of course ELF is an applied linguists’ term; most users probably just think they are speaking English.

As well as being used – often in a very simple form – by tourists, ELF is prominent in international politics and diplomacy, international law, business, the media, and in tertiary education and scientific research – which Yamuna Kachru and Larry Smith (2008: 3) call ELF’s ‘mathetic function’ – so it is clearly not a reduced lingua franca in the term’s original (Frankish) sense. Yet it usually differs from English as a native language (ENL), the language used by NESs. Spoken ELF contains a huge amount of linguistic variation and non-standard forms (although formal written ELF tends to resemble ENL to a much greater extent). To use Noam Chomsky’s (1986: 20) term, in ELF there is no fixed or shared E-language (external language) as such.

This could result from the fact that ELF users – ‘different constellations of speakers of diverse individual Englishes in every single interaction’ (Meierkord 2004: 115) – are uninterested in the lexicogrammatical norms of any particular NES speech community (Seidlhofer 2001 b, 2009a, 2011), or simply from the ‘shaky entrenchment’ (Mauranen 2006: 138) or the fuzzy processing (Mauranen 2012: 41), or – from another perspective – the imperfect learning to be expected in a second language (L2). Either way, the leitmotif of the proponents of ELF is that it is different from but not inferior to ENL. Henry Widdowson (2003: 48–49) describes ‘the virtual language, that resource for making meaning immanent in the language which simply has not hitherto been encoded and so is not, so to speak, given official recognition,’ and Barbara Seidlhofer (2011: 120) describes ELF as ‘a different but not a deficient way of realizing the virtual language, or playing the English language game’: instead of restricting themselves to the realizations of NESs, ELF speakers exploit unused latent possibilities of English morphology, syntax and phraseology.

Dell Hymes (1972: 286) described ‘communicative competence’ in terms of ‘the systematically possible, the feasible, and the appropriate,’ but in relation to native speaker (NS) norms; ELF speakers expand what is possible, feasible, and appropriate. As Widdowson (2004: 361) puts it, the ELF perspective is that

the modified forms of the language which are actually in use should be recognized as a legitimate development of English as an international means of communication. The functional range of the language is not thereby restricted, but on the contrary enhanced, for it enables its users to express themselves more freely without having to conform to norms which represent the sociocultural identity of other people.

Not everybody shares this perspective, of course; for example, conference interpreters, who in general view ELF very negatively, often use the acronym BSE, for ‘bad simple English’ (Reithofer 2010: 144). From a formal point of view, one might agree with Michael Swan (2012: 387), who argues that

The most appropriate conceptualisation of ELF is surely a negative one. It is not that its speakers conform to identifiable ELF norms; it is that, like the speakers of all foreign languages, they do not conform to all NS norms; and this in various and largely uncodifiable ways.

But from a functional point of view, what is intrinsic to ELF – what Alan Firth (2009: 150) calls the ‘lingua franca factor’ – is not any specific language or discourse forms, but rather ‘the inherent interactional and linguistic variability that lingua franca interactions entail,’ and a ‘lingua franca outlook’ on language that ELF users adopt. As Seidlhofer (2011: 77) puts it, ELF should be ‘functionally not formally defined; it is not a variety of English but a variable way of using it.’ ⁴

However, stress on the inherent variability of ELF, and on function rather than form, is a recent development. ⁵ Previous work suggested that ELF could be codified and taught. For example, Seidlhofer (2001 b: 150) floated ‘the possibility of a codification of ELF with a conceivable ultimate objective of making it a feasible, acceptable and respected alternative to ENL in appropriate contexts of use.’ She suggested that a codified ELF could be ‘a possible first step for learners in building up a basis from which they can pursue their own learning in directions (ELF or ENL) which it may be impossible, and unwise, to determine from the outset’ (p. 151). ⁶ More recently, Jennifer Jenkins et al. (2011: 287) have written that

in line with increasing evidence of the fluidity and flexibility of ELF communication, the focus of research has shifted from an orientation to features and the ultimate aim of some kind of codification (an aim which, nevertheless, has not been dismissed out of hand), to an interest in the processes underlying and determining the choice of features used in any given ELF interaction.

Yet a few pages later they also state that ‘we can identify emerging patterns of lexical and grammatical forms’ (pp. 288–89) and that there is ‘a certain degree of typicality in the more salient features that occur in lingua franca interactions’ (p. 289), meaning that there are features that could be codified and taught. Similarly, Seidlhofer (2009b: 239) writes about how ELF speakers are making a significant contribution to norm development, so that ELF could become ‘endonormative’ or in Braj Kachru’s (1985: 16ff) terms, norm-developing or (ultimately) norm-providing rather than norm-dependent. Drawing on Ayo Bamgboṣe (1998), she compares ELF with endonormative World Englishes, stating that ‘codification is recognized as a crucial requirement in this process, and one that does not deny the inherent fluidity of ELF’ (p. 240). At first glance this seems contradictory, but Seidlhofer stresses that Bamgboṣe discusses behavioural norms as well as code norms and feature norms, and argues that these are compatible with a focus on the underlying significance and functional motivation of particular ELF forms.

A further reason for the linguistic variation and non-standard forms found in ELF is that English is in contact with the majority of the world’s languages, so there are ELF speakers whose English is influenced by (and contains recognizable transfer features from) a great many first languages (L1s). Given that all ELF speakers are bi- or multilingual, ELF interactions are likely to include borrowing, code-switching, and other types of crosslinguistic interaction. Transfer leads to people of many different typologically diverse L1s speaking recognizable varieties or ‘lects.’ These lects differ from regional dialects, which arise in local communities of speakers talking to each other, as, e.g. Japanese speakers do not normally need to speak to other Japanese speakers in English; they speak English to people with different L1s. So these lects come into prolonged contact with each other in ELF, in linguistically heterogeneous situations. Because ‘they arise in parallel, not in mutual interaction,’ Anna Mauranen (2012: 29) describes these hybrid variants as ‘similects,’ and says ⁷ that ELF can be characterised as ‘second-order language contact’ – a contact between hybrids:

Second-order contact means that instead of a typical contact situation where speakers of two different languages use one of them in communication (‘first-order contact’), a large number of languages are each in contact with English, and it is these contact varieties (similects) that are, in turn, in contact with each other. Their special features, resulting from crosslinguistic transfer, come together much like dialects in contact.

(p. 30)

Because speakers have a natural tendency to adapt to variability and to accommodate to each other’s uses, Mauranen suggests that second-order language contact will lead to the spread of innovations inspired by different L1s. Certain hybrid forms will diffuse into common usage, so that ELF will become more stable (p. 32). The features likely to be diffused are those that are widely shared among the world’s English speakers, because they are common in other languages, and therefore acquired comparatively easily in English as an additional language.⁸ As in all language contact, there is also likely to be simplification, and a convergence or levelling of phonological and grammatical systems, so that irregular and marked features are replaced by regular, unmarked alternatives (see Trudgill 1986; Thomason and Kaufman 1988; Thomason 2001; Winford 2003). These processes will be examined in Chapters 3–6.

ELF researchers insist that ELF speakers are users and not learners. As Mauranen (2006: 147) puts it, we need to

stop considering second and foreign language users as eternal ‘learners’ on an interminable journey toward perfection in a target language. Speakers may opt out of the role of learner...