English as a Lingua Franca: Perspectives and Prospects

Contributions in Honour of Barbara Seidlhofer

Marie-Luise Pitzl, Ruth Osimk-Teasdale, Marie-Luise Pitzl, Ruth Osimk-Teasdale

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781501511226
• eBook ISBN: 9781501502996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique historique et comparative

In the past 15 years, English as a lingua franca (ELF) has evolved from a 'niche topic' of a relatively small group of specialists to a highly productive research area that now has a firm place on the map of linguistics. Looking back (as well as forward), this edited volume addresses perspectives and prospects of ELF in connection with other areas of linguistics. It is the first volume that brings together ELF scholars with experts from a wide range of areas in linguistics (such as corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, language pedagogy, language policy, intercultural communication). Adopting an inter-/transdisciplinary approach, the book traces the impact that discussions about ELF have had – or may have – beyond the study of ELF as such: for the conceptualization, description, methodology, pedagogy and politics of 'English'. As the book combines external perspectives on ELF, provided by well-known scholars in diverse fields, with a smaller number of internal perspectives provided by prominent ELF scholars, it will be of interest not only to students and researchers interested in ELF, but also to students and scholars in Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics and Intercultural Communication.

IIThe study of ELF in a wider context

Section A: Sociolinguistics, variation and ELF

Edgar W. Schneider

World Englishes and English as a lingua franca: Relationships and interfaces

Edgar W. Schneider, University of Regensburg

1Introduction

Evidently, the disciplines of World Englishes (WE) and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) are closely related to each other – there are similarities and areas of overlap but also substantial differences in their subject domains, conceptual frameworks, practical applications, and methodological approaches. Both disciplines focus on non-native uses of English which have gained in importance tremendously all around the globe over the last few decades. In both contexts the question of whether we observe stable varieties or ‘just’ socially defined usage contexts is at stake. Both show structural similarities, language contact effects, and the impact of both substrate transfer and cognitive principles. In both of them learner usage and an applied perspective have come to be important in practice. What, then, is their mutual relationship like? This chapter explores some interfaces between them from a variety of perspectives.

This is not a wholly new line of thinking, of course; a number of authors have touched upon these issues, either in passing or in a more focused and deliberate fashion (e.g. Jenkins, Cogo, and Dewey 2011: 284). Most importantly, a panel at the conference of the International Association of World Englishes held in Regensburg in 2007 focused on this relationship; versions of these contributions of varying length were published in Berns et al. (2009) and in the journal World Englishes (Seidlhofer and Berns 2009), including Seidlhofer (2009), a paper-length contribution by the honoree of this volume on precisely this issue, explicitly recognizing the mutual relationship. I had my say on some of these points in an earlier paper (Schneider 2012). In what follows, I have been informed and inspired by these and other sources, and I summarize, adopt and address some of the issues there, but essentially, here is my own take on the subject (unavoidably sketchily, given space constraints), summarized under a few main concepts and headings.

2Historical relationship

Historically, ELF research lags behind WE research by a few decades. The emergence of WE as a scholarly discipline can be dated to the early 1980s: after a few isolated publications on individual varieties, notably English in Singapore and Malaysia, a wider awareness of shared concepts and approaches and similarities between varieties was established by the publication of the first, influential collective volumes (Bailey and Görlach 1982; Kachru 1982; Platt, Weber, and Ho 1984), and scholarly journals specifically devoted to this subject domain were founded (English World-Wide in 1980, World Englishes in 1982). It can be viewed as a predecessor field to ELF, which gained momentum about two or three decades later and which clearly to some extent has been inspired by the concepts and methods developed there (for early traces of the cross-fertilization of both lines of thinking see some of the paper reprints from that period in the Journal of English as a Lingua Franca 4(1), Ehrenreich and Pitzl 2015). Early references to concepts related to ELF appeared in some publications of the 1980s and 1990s (cf. Jenkins, Cogo, and Dewey 2011), but the “turning point” (Jenkins, Cogo, and Dewey 2011: 282) of ELF’s appearance as a coherent discipline can be dated to the early 21st century, with Jenkins (2000) and Seidlhofer (2001) constituting early milestones which triggered interest in the subject as such. These were soon followed by book-length studies and collections (e.g. Jenkins 2007; Mauranen and Ranta 2009; Cogo and Dewey 2012), an influential survey monograph (Seidlhofer 2011), and also a specialized journal, with the Journal of English as a Lingua Franca launched in 2012.

Practitioners of both areas of study also meet at annual conferences – the International Association of World Englishes (IAWE) since 1992 (when the association was formally established – precursor conferences had been held since 1978), and scholars interested in ELF since 2008.

3Conceptual setting

It is a not a chance effect that both disciplines under comparison emerged when they emerged – to put it pointedly, both would be hardly conceivable in a nineteenth-century world with strongly dividing national boundaries. Indirectly but quite indisputably, both are children of the late-twentieth-century globalization process. Both appear in contexts where bilingualism is the norm, multilingualism is widespread, and multicultural attitudes and interactions are many people’s daily bread. By their very nature, both approaches transcend national boundaries and perspectives – ELF even more so than WE: WE research has traditionally upheld a focus on national varieties (e.g. Schneider 2007) categorized by Kachruvian “Circles” or status assignments of English (as Native, Second or Foreign language, i.e. ENL – ESL – EFL, respectively) and has only recently come to recognize the increasing blurring of these boundaries (see, e.g., Buschfeld 2013 on the ESL-EFL distinction, Schneider 2014 with an overall assessment of ongoing developments, and Blommaert 2010 and Meierkord 2012 on English as a fragmentary resource in a poststructuralist perspective). ELF, in contrast, has never championed a national or a variety-specific perspective but has highlighted the intercultural function of (predominantly) non-native English usage.

Both WE and ELF are closely (though not exclusively) associated with orality, being products of intercultural oral interactions. The nativization processes which stand at the heart of the emergence of World Englishes occur in speech, and features of these new varieties are much less widely employed in writing, if at all. Basically the same applies to ELF interactions, although in this domain there are some branches – notably academic settings (e.g. Mauranen 2012), to some extent also international businesses – where ELF commonly appears in writing as well. As I argued elsewhere (Schneider 2013), ELF (but not WE) shows also a close affinity and substantial overlap with using English for Specific Purposes (ESP), in both professional and (though this is less commonly recognized) leisure-orientated settings.

Both disciplines also share a strong focus on an Applied Linguistics orientation: while a lot of descriptive work has been done and there is also some interest in theorizing, many practitioners of both perspectives have been primarily interested in what implications for the practice of language teaching might be. In both of them influential books have advocated such a direction: Kirkpatrick (2007) for WE, Seidlhofer (2011, esp. ch. 8) for ELF. The main shared issue is the quest for which norms to strive for, given a widespread feeling that a traditional exonormative orientation, with learners forced or expected to adopt British or American English, is no longer necessary, and seems unjustified, and undesirable. WE, in a nationally oriented and postcolonial perspective, offers an alternative, namely an endonormative orientation as a natural stage in the emergence of new varieties (Schneider 2007), i.e. the acceptance of educated local usage as a newly-adopted standard, as ‘correct’ and the target of education in a young nation (although this typically meets with substantial resistance amongst conservative authorities). In ELF contexts, this is more of a problem, since there is no ‘ELF norm’: Even if such new targets have been suggested in early ELF publications (e.g. Jenkins 2000), this seems unmotivated and artificial in the light of the wide variability and the strong impact of native-language transfer in ELF speakers. Claims of mutual accommodation leading to newly-emerging shared norms and habits, e.g. across Europe (cf. Modiano in Berns et al. 2009), appear premature and unsubstantiated by facts at this stage (Mollin 2006). It remains to be seen whether such thinking may ultimately lead to an ‘everything goes’ attitude, without a target norm imposed. Personally, I believe a loosening of traditional norm orientations in itself would not be deplorable, since most non-native learners do not speak like the Queen anyhow (just like most native speakers, for that matter), and asking them to do so often is not a realistic goal. In my view, it is more important to teach and train intercultural and cross-linguistic communication skills, actively and receptively, including the abilities to accommodate to one’s interlocutors, to ask back, to rephrase things, to articulate slowly and clearly when the need arises. On the other hand, the question is how much variability can be tolerated without jeopardizing a shared basis of usage habits across idiolectal preferences. Still, in ELF contexts the trend clearly is to value variability and to regard ELF as a functional tool rather than looking at formal properties, let alone attempting to codify or teach it as such.

This connection with practical issues of language teaching, finally, leads to my next point, the importance of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) processes in both frameworks. Both WE and ELF usage have emerged in the mouths of second-language learners of English, and thus the processes, strategies and products of SLA processes have left their marks. The notions of both ELF and EFL view speakers as reasonably competent users of English, at least for practical communicative purposes, but as non-native speakers both must have gone through such acquisitional stages, irrespective of what proficiency level they have achieved or whether or not a learning effort is still being invested (cf. Schneider 2012: 62–67).

4ELF versus EFL (and ESL)

The overlap and particularly close relationship between ELF on the one hand and EFL countries and contexts in the WE domain on the other is obvious: when speakers of English from an EFL country use it naturally, outside of learning and teaching contexts, this represents ELF by definition. Not so the other way round, obviously: ELF usage may involve ENL speakers (as well as ESL users, of course). And the focus of both concepts is quite different: EFL highlights the ‘foreign’ status of English in a given nation, while ELF emphasizes the application and usefulness of English between speakers of different, including non-native, backgrounds.

As just stated, in both frameworks speakers have acquired English as second or later languages, whether in formal schooling or naturally through exposure without explicit teaching. Basically the same applies to ESL countries, with the minor difference that there both the obligatory teaching of English in schools and the presence of the language within the community interact and contribute to speakers’ proficiency levels. In WE research the learner’s perspective and the connection with SLA as a discipline were pointed out early on (Sridhar and Sridhar 1986), then disregarded for a while, and then rediscovered in the recent past (Mukherjee and Hundt 2011; Gilquin 2015). In ELF scholarship, as far as I can see, however, the focus is often either on usage contexts or on questions of how to teach, but not predominantly on how ELF speakers have acquired whatever they command.

Interestingly, the similarities and overlaps pertain to scholarly sources for investigation as well. Both WE and ELF rely on the compilation of electronic corpora to some extent, and have embraced the tools and methods of modern corpus linguistics (e.g. Lindqvist 2009). Both Louvain’s International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE; http://www.uclouvain.be/en-cecl-icle.html, 26 Jan 2015), rooted in the corpus-linguistic tradition of building learner corpora, and Vienna’s VOICE (Vienna-Oxford Corpus of International English; http://voice.univie.ac.at, 26 Jan 2015), stemming from an ELF orientation, compile language production by speakers of various mother tongues, and the WE-oriented sub-corpora of the International Corpus of English project (ICE; http://ice-corpora.net/ice, 26 Jan 2015), while aiming to record ESL varieties, are also comparable. All of them reflect the similarities between EFL, ELF and ESL, and allow empirically based comparisons.

5Formative influences and shared properties

Both WE and ELF are products of language contact, with properties of the speakers’ native languages possibly being transferred to their English usage. The strength of such transfer varies by levels of language organization and speakers’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Contributing authors
• Preface
• English as a lingua franca: Perspectives and prospects – Introduction
• I Perspectives on the study of ELF
• II The study of ELF in a wider context
• Afterword
• Index
• Footnotes