Volume 7, Issue 1 -

In this article, I address issues, concepts and empirical insights that have profoundly shaped my view of English as a lingua franca (ELF) and of the pedagogical lessons to be learned for English Language Teaching (ELT). Starting from discrepancies in my ELF identity as a speaker of English with ELT roots in a German secondary school, I argue for the social constructivist concept of MY English as a basis for understanding ELF competence development and the tensions surrounding the relationship between ELT and ELF. Continually shaped by speakers’ participation in ELF communication, relevant dimensions of their MY English profiles include linguistic-communicative-communal repertoires and requirements of performance, individual and social identity orientations, and confidence in their ELF creativity. Against this backdrop, I discuss topics I consider relevant for a much-needed pedagogical reconciliation of ELT with ELF. Special attention is given to teachers’ ELF apprehension and the distinction between a “strict” (quasi-behaviouristic) and an “open” (social constructivist) target language orientation, speaker satisfaction as a criterion of success in ELF communication, and teaching towards ELF competence from awareness raising to comprehension, production and interaction to non-native speaker emancipation. Successful ELF implementation in both ELT practice and ELT teacher education requires extensive and authentic involvement of students and teachers in ELF communication. Intercultural telecollaboration provides innovative means for creating a space for ELF communication in the ELT classroom. Pedagogical case studies about video and text chat conversations strongly support the assumption that using their common target language as a lingua franca significantly enables learners of English to develop an emancipated non-native speaker identity and thus to become speakers of English in their own right. And what is more, the pedagogical lingua franca approach can be successfully transferred to other foreign target languages as well. I conclude my article with a brief contextualization of the MY English concept in relation to translingual practice and ELF languaging.

In the past years, it has become generally accepted that the social dynamics of ELF cannot be captured by the notion of a speech community. Instead, the concept Community of Practice (CoP) has gained widespread currency in ELF research. While applications of the CoP framework have given rise to valuable insights, even ELF scholars who work with the concept often acknowledge its limitations. Since factors like situationality and ad hoc negotiation are seen as particularly important in ELF interactions, many ELF researchers have recently emphasized the transient and dynamic nature of the social clusters in which ELF communication typically takes place, especially in light of the multilingualism and language contact. This paper offers a first sketch of how the social dimension of ELF might on many occasions be conceptualized as involving Transient International Groups (TIGs) rather than more stable CoPs. Building on the idea that the Individual Multilingual Repertoires (IMRs) of ELF speakers make up a Multilingual Resource Pool (MRP) in each ELF interaction, the paper argues that ELF theory-building and descriptive work would benefit from exploring the group and the development dimension of ELF more thoroughly than has been done so far. In support, the paper provides a qualitative case study of a TIG in the leisure domain of VOICE. This case study illustrates how an in-depth micro-diachronic analysis of multilingual practices and instances of explicit reference to languages, countries, places, etc., can make visible the group’s development of shared translingual and transcultural territory.

This article analyzes how code-switching (CS) is used as a key strategy in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) interaction. We use data from CASE, a corpus of ELF Skype conversations in an informal setting between students from nine European countries. CS in our data is commonly used as a communication strategy. A quantitative analysis shows that it occurs in the majority of conversations and across all nationalities. Participants mostly switch to their own L1, frequently also to their interlocutors’ L1, rarely to other languages. CS co-occurs with other discourse features, in particular other instances of CS and laughter. Based on a qualitative analysis, we distinguish three motivations and functions of CS: On an interpersonal level , CS can underline group membership or cultural identity and create rapport, often in combination with laughter. CS is used to improve communication at the discourse level by conveying concepts that are untranslatable and possibly unknown to the interlocutor, in metalinguistic commentary, or to close lexical gaps. CS can also be used for addressee specification . Through its combined qualitative and quantitative approach, the article aims at contributing to the analysis of the context as well as the motivations and functions of CS in ELF.

Ensuring linguistic operability in supranational organizations has led to the de facto imposition of an English-only policy in otherwise lingua-culturally diverse environments. This paper uses a combination of a literature review of military-related language policy documents and semi-structured interviews to explore the impact of those policies on the use of English as the working language of a professional context, the Spanish military. Broadly, the findings show that the standardization of linguistic certification procedures, a requirement for their participation in international operations, places these professionals in a disadvantage scenario in which lack of linguistic proficiency translates into the questioning of their personal, professional and institutional validity. The analysis of Spanish soldiers’ perceptions and attitudes helped to shed light on the conflicting interaction of language policies, practices and beliefs. Although English is valued as the language of work and therefore as a vehicle for interaction with other armies, for socialization or for contact with the local population, it is nonetheless viewed as an imposition of the globalized world, accepted with pragmatic and instrumental criteria, which entails the requirement of language certification standards they struggle to meet.

The role of English at European universities outside English-speaking countries has recently been so dynamic and complex as to merit elaborate acronyms and frameworks of comparison to capture the actual diversity involved in each case of using English, for example in what Dafouz and Smit (Dafouz, Emma and Ute Smit. 2014. Towards a dynamic conceptual framework for English-medium education in multilingual university settings. Applied Linguistics 37[3]: 397–415) subsume under English-medium education in the international university. This contribution, however, looks at ELFFRA, English as a lingua franca in academic settings at the bi- and multilingual University of Fribourg, Switzerland. When English first became officially acknowledged as an additional academic language in 2005, being preceded by a period of “unruly” emergence, it was often the marked case, even in and for its local disciplinary speech events. Its current use at UFR as the default in some English-medium study programmes is by no means uniform or monolingual either. Meanwhile in the promotion of bilingualism in French and German, English is mostly “included” – reminiscent of the semiotics of the 2005 nonce coinage of “bi(tri)lingualism.” This contribution will revisit ideas about the “edulect” role of ELFFRA (Schaller-Schwaner, Iris. 2017. The many faces of English at Switzerland’s Bilingual University: English as an academic lingua franca at the institutionally bilingual University of Freiburg/Fribourg – a contextual analysis of its agentive use . Vienna: University of Vienna doctoral thesis) but look for it in unusual and under-researched places where it is indeed “included” viz. in beginners’ university language courses teaching the local languages French and German. First explorations will be shared and discussed with a view to what this might mean for ELF(A) and edulect.

Despite the growing interest surrounding the use and role of the first language in the second language classroom, the vast majority of research in the field has been conducted in classrooms where English is taught as a second language in English-speaking countries. Very little research has investigated the role of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in other language learning environments, such as those in which Japanese is learnt as a second language (JSL) in Japan. This paper investigates the purposes for which ELF is employed, and the perspectives of learners from multilingual and multicultural backgrounds on the use of ELF, in the JSL classroom. The findings show that English is employed to varying degrees in relation to proficiency level, and that learners themselves are generally welcoming of this use. The author suggests that learners seek security and comfort in what they already know, with ELF easing the gap between their L1 and their developing Japanese skills.