International Perspectives on English as a Lingua Franca

Pedagogical Insights

Hugo Bowles, Alessia Cogo, Hugo Bowles, Alessia Cogo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137398079
• eBook ISBN: 9781137398093
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Languages

This collection brings new insight into the relationship between English as a lingua franca and language teaching. It explores how the pedagogy of intelligibility, culture and language awareness, as well as materials analysis and classroom management, can be viewed from an ELF perspective in school and university contexts.

1

English as a Lingua Franca: Descriptions, Domains and Applications

Alessia Cogo

There has been a remarkable growth of interest in the phenomenon of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in recent years, and as a result this has become a productive field of research, which has now found its place in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics discussions. Interest in this area started with a couple of seminal publications: Jenkins (2000), an empirical study of phonology and related concepts of intelligibility and accommodation in English international contexts, and Seidlhofer (2001), which called for more empirical descriptions of ELF communication and effectively marked the foundation of VOICE (Vienna Oxford International Corpus of English), a corpus of ELF naturally occurring spoken data. This work signed the beginning of ELF research, which, in the 15 years that followed, has increased exponentially and has developed into a vibrant area of investigation. This field today includes numerous scholars from all over the world, a dedicated Research Network under the auspices of AILA (the ELF ReN, www.english-lingua-franca.org), the foundation of two more large-scale corpora (ELFA, English as a Lingua Franca in Academic settings and ACE, Asian Corpus of English), an annual international conference (which started in 2008 in Helsinki and subsequently took place in Southampton, Vienna, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Rome, Athens and Beijing), and a journal dedicated to work in this area (Journal of English as a Lingua Franca) and book series (Developments in English as a Lingua Franca), both published by De Gruyter Mouton.

Since the early publications, developments have been fast and certainly not free of controversies and even heated debates. In this overview, I explore what ELF is, from different definitions, and I cover the empirical work of linguistic description in lexicogrammar and pragmatics, including the debates concerning the nature of ELF communication. I will keep this part relatively brief, as the main aim of this volume is to explore not the description but the applications of ELF research for ELT. So, in the last part, I review sociolinguistic applications of ELF research in professional and academic domains, and finally address implications and applications for English language teaching and teacher education.

What is ELF? Definitions, conceptualisations and debates

Seidlhofer defines ‘ELF as any use of English among speakers of different first languages’ (2011: 7) and linguacultural backgrounds, across all three Kachruvian circles. In contrast to some earlier definitions and conceptualisations (e.g., Firth 1996; House 1999), this one includes native speakers of English, who may use ELF as an additional resource for intercultural communication. This position is shared by most scholars today (Jenkins 2007; 2014; Mauranen 2012; Cogo and Dewey 2012), but in the past has created a great deal of controversy and debate (Cogo 2008 in response to Saraceni 2008; Cogo 2012a in response to Sowden 2012; and Dewey 2013 in response to Sewell 2013).

Apart from the inclusion-exclusion of native speakers, conceptualisations of ELF also have revolved around key notions such as variety, community and language. Most scholars today would agree that ELF is not a variety, and not a uniform and fixed mode of communication. Nonetheless, corpus research was initially concerned with identifying recurrent and systematic characteristics of ELF as well as co-construction processes of a pragmatic nature. The ‘feature’ focus, though, was what primarily drew the attention of scholars challenging ELF research and misconstructing it as another attempt to ‘create a variety’. Rather, ELF is a flexible, co-constructed, and therefore variable, means of communication. The variability is locally constructed in different geographical areas and domains, but not necessarily geographically constrained, since remote, virtual communities may also develop ELF communicative practices (Jenkins 2014; Mauranen 2012; 2014).

ELF’s intrinsic and contingent fluidity and variability therefore challenges traditional notions of ‘variety’ and ‘community’. The concept of ‘community of practice’ is generally considered a more appropriate conceptualisation of ELF communities (Seidlhofer 2011; Jenkins et al. 2011), which do not fit within the nation-state boundaries and go beyond fixed notions of competence, in relation to nativeness, and language norms. Work on conceptualisation has also emphasised the differences between ELF and English as a Foreign Language (EFL), especially in respect of the linguacultural norms used as points of reference (native speaker norms in EFL contexts), the objectives of communication (such as membership in a NS community) and the processes involved (imitation and adaptation to NS), as Seidlhofer summarises it (Seidlhofer 2011: 18). Jenkins also includes a fundamental difference in paradigm: while ELF is part of Global Englishes, EFL belongs to the Foreign Languages paradigm, whereby languages are learnt in order to communicate and identify with native speakers’ communities (cf. Jenkins 2015). Global Englishes, instead, includes communication in Outer circle contexts (normally defined as World Englishes) as well as across Inner and Expanding circle contexts. It is a more inclusive label, which overall emphasises difference and variability, over the reductive, deficient and fixed perspective of EFL (for more on this, see Jenkins 2014).

The emphasis on fluidity and flexibility is a crucial aspect of ELF research and makes it possible to go beyond static descriptions of the formal linguistic properties and focus, instead, on practices and processes, such as ‘languaging’ and ‘translanguaging’ (Cogo 2012b; Hülmbauer 2013), which emphasise the multilingual nature of ELF and the language contact situation of most ELF communication. This places more importance on speakers’ creative practices in their use of plurilingual resources to flexibly co-construct their common repertoire in accordance with the needs of their community and the circumstances of the interaction.

Conceptualisations of this nature are challenging both for scholars working in the field and for teachers trying to apply an ELF-oriented perspective. The challenge for researchers is to work with the inherent variability of ELF communication and for ELT practitioners to incorporate a difference and variability perspective in their classroom practices. I will now explore the variability in the descriptive work of sociolinguists working in ELF and then turn to the applications for practitioners.

Empirical work on linguistic description

Speakers in ELF encounters normally come from different linguacultural backgrounds, and are likely to display varying levels of competence in English. They are expected to have had different experiences with the language, having learnt it formally in the education system or informally under different circumstances in different parts of the world. In all this, the influence of the local context and the domain in which they function are likely to manifest themselves in various localisations at the different linguistic levels.

Descriptive research of ELF communication has been particularly productive in the past 15 years, especially since the creation of a number of corpora of spoken data (VOICE, ELFA and ACE, as well as some individual and small-scale corpus projects), and increasingly more work on written data too. In this section, for reasons of space, I will provide only a succinct summary of work on the nature of ELF that is relevant for structuring and situating the contributions in this volume. This will include the main findings of research in pronunciation, pragmatics and intercultural aspects. Research in lexico-grammar is not reviewed here as papers in this collection do not involve this aspect in the teaching practices explored.

Pronunciation was the first area of linguistic description to be empirically researched. Jenkins’ seminal work (2000) explored intelligibility in ELF spoken communication and the kind of accommodation processes speakers engage in. Her data showed the speakers’ ability to accommodate to more or less ‘native-like’ speech in order to enhance intelligibility. The findings also cast light on the core aspects of pronunciation that are essential for intelligibility – that is, all the consonants (apart from the dental fricatives), consonant deletion in initial clusters, vowel length distinctions and nuclear stress. As such, teaching implications require that practitioners focus more on the pronunciation items that are core and are found to enhance intelligibility, rather than on the entire pronunciation inventory. This research also has fundamental implications for assessment – the ELF pronunciation influenced by speakers’ linguistic repertoires can be considered as legitimate rather than as pronunciation errors (cf. Deterding 2013; Schaller-Schwaner, this volume; Walker 2010).

Research in pragmatics has been more extensive, but has provided similar results in terms of recurrent uses of ELF rather than random learner errors. Numerous pragmatic studies have focused on understanding/non-understanding in the attempt to identify those aspects or expressions that facilitate the solution of understanding problems (see Cogo and Dewey 2012; Kaur 2009; Mauranen 2006; Pitzl 2005). Research has shown that misunderstanding issues are less frequent than might be expected and that interlocutors tend to pre-empt or signal possible issues in a problematic exchange. The focus, therefore, has been on the strategies used for dealing with pre-empting, addressing or resolving issues in communication, such as the use of repetition, paraphrasing or co-construction of idiomatic expressions (Cogo 2010; Kaur 2012; Pitzl 2009; Seidlhofer 2009).

Another aspect of pragmatic investigation is the repertoire of multilingual practices that is creatively co-constructed and flexibly integrated (Hülmbauer 2011; Kalocsai 2013; Pitzl 2012; Vettorel 2014) in ELF communication. This implies strategies involving both code-switching and trans-languaging (Cogo 2012b) for meaning making, expressing a specific orientation to the talk (playful, engaged, irritated etc.) and expressing cultural and identity functions.

ELF in business and academic contexts – pedagogical questions

This section is dedicated to specific contexts of ELF research, and includes the applied work of scholars that have examined how ELF works, is constructed and is practised in the business and academic domains.

In international business contexts, especially multinational corporations, the use of English as a ‘corporate language’ has become a common practice, if not an official recognition of the company’s language policy. Business English as a Lingua Franca (BELF for short) is now a requirement in globalised business and, even more, an essential aspect of business knowledge. Kankaanranta and Planken (2010: 399) compare the use of BELF in professional contexts ‘to the ability to use a computer: you could not do your work without it in today’s international workplace’. The ‘it’ in this quote, though, is not the English of native speakers, but is ELF in a business context, a mode of communication used among professionals operating globally. Most studies in this area confirm the overall tendency of focusing on content of the message and understanding of business ideas, rather than foregrounding accuracy in linguistic terms. In the words of one professional in Ehrenreich’s study, ‘I must say I’m confronted with so many levels of correctness that I don’t actually care whether something is correct or incorrect. As long as the meaning is not distorted’ (Ehrenreich 2010: 418).

It is not uncommon for professionals to make reference to variation in linguistic proficiency among the people they come in contact with in the workplace, and often comments include easiness or difficulty of accents, and native speakers tend to be singled out as the most difficult interlocutors (cf. Rogerson-Revell 2008; Sweeney and Zhu 2010). This is not so surprising if we think that professionals operate with a range of L1 and L2 speakers of English who potentially display variation in their speech at all levels, lexico-grammar, phonology and pragmatics. What makes their communication work, therefore, is not so much adherence to ‘native speaker norms’, but a flexibility to accommodate the unexpected and adapt their pragmatic and strategic competence to the various communicative challenges of the international workplace. Various scholars have emphasised the importance of accommodation as well as relational talk and rapport-building as essential aspects of communication in BELF environments.

Studies exploring business discourse, notably through the analysis of naturally-occurring data from BELF contexts, have also demonstrated that BELF communication is intrinsically intercultural, and for that business professionals need to be able to deal with not only multiple backgrounds and identities, but also different ways of operating or acting in multiple business cultures (Kankaanranta and Planken 2010). On that basis, because of the cultural hybridity of these contexts, some scholars also focused their research on the negotiation of meaning, the co-construction of understanding and the strategies used to solve non-understanding (Cogo and Dewey 2012; Pitzl 2005; Zhu 2015). This discourse focus has highlighted the importance of collaborative practices at all levels of professional communication and provided important findings in BELF-based interactions, which could partly feed into pedagogical discussions (of which more later).

The other aspect the research in BELF has emphasised is the multilingual nature of most business contexts. Studies have shown that English is not the only language at work in international businesses and professionals normally bring into play a repertoire of resources in their communicative practices. Some studies emphasise that English is a ‘m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 English as a Lingua Franca: Descriptions, Domains and Applications: Alessia Cogo
• 2 Promoting Awareness of Englishes and ELF in the English Language Classroom: Lucilla Lopriore and Paola Vettorel
• 3 Developing Critical Classroom Practice for ELF Communication: A Taiwanese Case Study of ELT Materials Evaluation: Melissa H. Yu
• 4 Linking ELF and ELT in Secondary School through Web-Mediation: The Case of Fanfiction: Enrico Grazzi
• 5 ELF Oral Presentations in a Multilingual Context: Intelligibility, Familiarity and Agency: Iris Schaller-Schwaner
• 6 Language Awareness and ELF Perceptions of Chinese University Students: Ying Wang
• 7 ELF-Aware In-Service Teacher Education: A Transformative Perspective: Yasemin Bayyurt and Nicos C. Sifakis
• 8 The Pedagogical Implications of ELF in a Domestic Migrant Workplace: Kellie Gonçalves
• 9 Teaching through ELF at International Post-Secondary Institutions: A Case Study at United World Colleges: Veronika Quinn Novotná and Jiřina Dunková
• 10 ELF, Teacher Knowledge and Professional Development: Martin Dewey
• 11 ELF-Oriented Pedagogy: Conclusions: Hugo Bowles
• Index