Volume 3, Issue 1

English as a lingua franca (ELF) research has primarily concentrated on academic or business contexts so far, leaving private communication with little or no attention. This article approaches ELF use in the private sphere with focus on code-switching, by studying interviews from six couples who use ELF as the main language of the relationship. By combining conversation analysis (CA) with content analysis, it is discovered that sometimes ELF couples code-switch automatically, without noticeable awareness of switching. This, together with the observation that all couples mentioned using code-switching, indicates that ELF couples allow a relaxed attitude towards language mixing within the couple's shared range, where code-switching facilitates meaning-making without jeopardising understanding. This strategy may over time turn into such an automated process that it sometimes arises unexpectedly. The data also indicates a less restrained use of code-switching among multilingual couples who share several fluent languages.

This paper investigates the use of ELF in interactions between people in a romantic relationship (couples) and explores to what extent cultural factors are involved in the process of establishing and maintaining intimacy through ELF, with the main focus on the hybrid forms in their talk. The data (audio recordings of domestic ELF interactions, questionnaires, interviews) came from four European couples representing four different first-language constellations. The data suggest that ELF couples do not conform to conventionalized ENL linguistic and cultural norms. This allows for a creative pragmatic process of hybridization and acculturation of English into the partners' private space, whereby ELF couples will accommodate the language by drawing upon any available resources, and re-load it with their own cultural values for the pretextual purpose of achieving the desired effect of mediating comity.

Today's higher educational contexts challenge teachers, students, and researchers in making effective oral presentations for international audience in academic contexts. This study examines the lexical richness and organizational cohesion in the oral presentations made by three groups of presenters: 44 college-level ELF learners representing novice ELF speakers, 30 conference presentations in economy, social sciences, humanities, and technology from the ELFA project, and 23 conference presentations in applied linguistics from the JSCC corpus. Salient differences were found in the proportion and levels of lexical items, and the quantity and variability of organizational devices between the three groups. The two expert groups demonstrated that ELF academic presentations do not require massive uses of difficult words or complex sentence structures; rather, experienced ELF speakers built up their presentations with 85% of basic and 15% of academic and professional level words. Unlike the novices who relied on grammatical cohesion heavily, the two expert groups show a balanced use of lexical and grammatical cohesive devices in structuring clauses and information. The procedures for quantifying lexical richness and organizational cohesion may be developed into assessment rubrics for ELF presentations. Future studies should take the presentation content, usage accuracy, and the audience evaluation into account.

This qualitative study analyzes the construction of humor in interactions of two dyads of English as a lingua franca (ELF) speakers who are female graduate students in the United States. Using a sequential analysis, this study closely investigates how these ELF speakers are co-constructing humor in their interactions. In particular, humorous talk including contextual cues such as joint laughing, smiling, and abruptness of talk are examined in sequential contexts. The humorous talk data exhibit the skillful use of humor to achieve and maintain solidarity and to minimize possible disagreement among these ELF speakers. In other words, collaborative co-construction of humorous interactions demonstrates ELF speakers' “complex and skillful accomplishment” (Firth 2009: 158) of communicative success in English.

English as a lingua franca is generally viewed as a user language in which the formal characteristics are adapted to meet the communicative needs of its speakers, inherently resulting in linguistic innovation and variation. In the part-of-speech (POS) tagging of the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE), many cases were encountered whereby ELF users go beyond the commonly assumed boundaries of word class categories in Standard English by the process defined as word class change. Word class change is understood as a change of word class category, or syntagmatic function, without alternation of the morphological form. In this paper, it is demonstrated how forms which were used in a non-codified function were dealt with in the tagging procedure. Reviewing concepts commonly used to explain word class change, namely conversion and multifunctionality, it is argued that a number of presumptions inherent in these concepts cause difficulties when applied to ELF data. In a case study, the most frequent types of word class shifts or variation (terms which are considered more suitable for ELF data) in VOICE are exemplified, analysed, and discussed with regard to the forms which are shifted, the directionality of these shifts, as well as the environment in which the shifts occur. It is shown that word class shifts in ELF interactions follow clear tendencies and thus a reconceptualization of the concepts of conversion and multifunctionality with regard to ELF is proposed. Finally, it is argued that if tagging practices attempt to display, rather than disguise, initial “problems” arising in the tagging process, this can help to gain useful insights into the nature of the data.

The present study evaluates the pronunciation target in Hong Kong's ELT education at senior secondary level with reference to the pedagogical proposals of World Englishes (WE) and English as a lingua franca (ELF). It triangulates information from various documents, namely the new ELT curriculum, public examination papers and reports, and three sets of listening and speaking commercial textbooks. The findings suggest that the new curriculum apparently has taken account of the WE and/or ELF perspectives in its design such as (i) promoting communicative competence, (ii) downplaying the importance of NS norms, and (iii) exposing students to more varieties of accent, but seems to be conceptually still guided by native-speaker norms. In practice, one breakthrough in the listening examination is the inclusion of Hong Kong English phonological features in localised tasks. However, the commercial textbooks seem to be lagging behind this development in the curriculum, though textbook writers do seek to include ELF-using contexts in some of the textbook tasks due to Hong Kong's global status. The paper argues that an important step in the move towards a WE/ELF-oriented pronunciation teaching is to recognise the role of English in particular sociolinguistic settings because by embedding the tasks in a simulated authentic language-using context, it is likely that teachers and students will be aware that the speech and pronunciation of non-native speakers are most relevant.

This paper sets out theoretical approaches to language that guide the authors' research in the field, but which have been under-represented in literature. As the English as a lingua franca field of enquiry grows, this article provides needed dialogue, consideration, and reflection over how we conceptualise our subject matter, our roles, and our rhetorical stances. This paper proposes the usefulness of considering the complexity of language, not as something that gets in the way of empiricism or clarity, but as something that makes ELF researchers perfectly positioned to investigate and contribute to wider understandings of language. Complexity theory is drawn upon as a conceptual tool that can be useful in guiding our thinking about the dynamic nature of language, which, in turn, is considered in relation to the reasons why language is complex, namely its roles in relation to practices and contextualisation. Having established our approaches to the complexity of the language in ELF scenarios, we propose implications for ELF researchers' treatment of speakers, language, and ideology.

This paper explores the relevance of concepts and methods of language planning and policy for ELF researchers and teachers. As the global communication environment consolidates through globalisation of systems, such as publishing and education credentialing, the topics chosen for research and even some practices in teaching can be seen as forms of intervention which influence form, usage, and status of languages and language varieties. The escalating role of English in the public life of more and more countries raises questions of the overall language ecology (how English interacts with other languages in existing and future communication environments). By fostering dialogue with the conceptual categories and methods of language planning, ELF scholars and practitioners can sharpen their focus on how institutional and publishing gatekeepers operate and foster an expanded sense of what English as an international language can mean, in the interests of encouraging a more democratised global communication order.