Volume 4, Issue 1 - Special Issue on “Teaching ELF, BELF, and/or Intercultural Communication?”, Guest editors: Susanne Ehrenreich and Marie-Luise Pitzl

English as a lingua franca (ELF) research highlights the complexity and fluidity of culture in intercultural communication through English. ELF users draw on, construct, and move between global, national, and local orientations towards cultural characterisations. Thus, the relationship between language and culture is best approached as situated and emergent. However, this has challenged previous representations of culture, particularly those centred predominantly on nation states, which are prevalent in English language teaching (ELT) practices and the associated conceptions of communicative and intercultural communicative competence. Two key questions which are then brought to the fore are: how are we to best understand such multifarious characterisations of culture in intercultural communication through ELF and what implications, if any, does this have for ELT and the teaching of culture in language teaching? In relation to the first question, this paper will discuss how complexity theory offers a framework for understanding culture as a constantly changing but nonetheless meaningful category in ELF research, whilst avoiding essentialism and reductionism. This underpins the response to the second question, whereby any formulations of intercultural competence offered as an aim in language pedagogy must also eschew these simplistic and essentialist cultural characterisations. Furthermore, the manner of simplification prevalent in approaches to culture in the ELT language classroom will be critically questioned. It will be argued that such simplification easily leads into essentialist representations of language and culture in ELT and an over representation of “Anglophone cultures.” The paper will conclude with a number of suggestions and examples for how such complex understandings of culture and language through ELF can be meaningfully incorporated into pedagogic practice.

Research into the use of BELF, notably through the analysis of authentic data from business contexts, has shown that BELF communication is intrinsically intercultural, with BELF being used in a wide range of settings and with diverse constellations of interlocutors. Yet, whilst business English teaching materials take a range of approaches to culture, they often fail to address the complexity of intercultural communication or integrate it sufficiently in the overall curriculum. In this paper, findings from BELF research on oral interaction in the workplace are considered from the point of view of pragmatics and in relation to the interface between culture and language. It is proposed that by adopting a research-based approach to curriculum design, syllabus and course development, which addresses not only intercultural communication within the overall concept of communicative competence, but also learning theory and teaching methodology, awareness of intercultural aspects of communication can both be raised in a more systematic manner and also applied in the classroom. This should help those entering the jobs' market to better meet the needs of today's employers and globalised markets. Finally, practical suggestions are given for possible approaches to the teaching of intercultural communication within the context of business English training and, above all, in the light of BELF research findings. The need for change in teacher education is also considered.

The paper argues that Negotiation (capitalised to differentiate from negotiation as an activity type such as business negotiation) is the most important means of engagement in intercultural and lingua franca communication. In intercultural and lingua franca communication, thus also in English as a lingua franca (ELF), variability, heterogeneity, and uncertainty are the norm, and therefore, the need to negotiate frames of reference and cultural identity is greater than in other types of communication. By providing a Negotiation approach for intercultural and lingua franca communication, we are able to focus on individuals taking part in interactions along with their agency rather than cultural groups, the here-and-now nature of interactions rather than assumed or predicted course of actions, the resources individuals bring with them rather than problems, and the process rather than the outcome.

Building on descriptive findings and theoretical insights from research on Intercultural Communication (IC) and English as a lingua franca (ELF), with a special emphasis on research in business contexts (i.e., BELF), this article examines how understanding and instances of miscommunication such as misunderstanding or breakdown are represented and discursively constructed in the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) (Council of Europe 2001). Using corpus linguistic methods, the analysis shows how the intercultural and linguistically diverse nature of interactions is portrayed as leading to – and being responsible for – the occurrence of misunderstanding in the CEFR. The observed patterns are equivalent to “analytic stereotyping” (Sarangi 1994: 409) of intercultural communication criticized by scholars already twenty years ago. The present paper argues that the deficit portrait of intercultural communication in the CEFR may be based on a number of implicit logical fallacies, such as the idealized notion that L1 communication is perfect and devoid of miscommunication. It is suggested that (E)LT discourse and language teaching practice would benefit from abandoning these essentialist concepts in favor of a more realistic approach to understanding as a jointly negotiated and interactional process as is proposed by many (B)ELF and IC researchers.

In recent years, the use of English has become everyday practice in multinational companies (MNCs), and it has been investigated in three disciplines: applied linguistics, international management, and corporate communication, all of which can be housed in international business schools. While reviewing research in these disciplines, we ask the question: how does the research inform the teaching of “English”? By taking an example of an international business school located in a small non-English-speaking country, we present the educational environment and the needs of future business graduates before moving on to demonstrating a continuum of English as a shared language constructed on the basis of the disciplines. The continuum extending from “official English” to “working language” BELF (English as Business Lingua Franca) illustrates different uses that English as a shared language meets in the MNC environment and in the students' future work contexts. On the basis of this discussion, we conclude our paper by presenting the implications of the different conceptualizations of English for the teaching of “English” at an international business school.