Volume 9, Issue 1

This paper presents a study investigating the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in media interviews of a specific kind: the focus is on post-match interviews with football (soccer) players. Professional football with its dynamic and fluctuating transfer market is increasingly internationalised and thoroughly mediatised, frequently requiring athletes and journalists to use English when interacting in front of the camera for the benefit of the media audience. The study is based on a small corpus of videos and transcripts of post-match interviews conducted with German football players in English. It uses a conversation analytic approach to explore the mutual influence of language use and genre characteristics on a structural, linguistic, interactional and media level. Post-match interviews are a dialogic media genre with distinctive features that contribute to the genre’s essential functions of reporting, evaluating and collectivising, and differentiate it from other types of interview such as the political, the news or the expert interview. The paper will illustrate and discuss how communicative, interactional and linguistic strategies are employed by participants to master the challenges of a specific type of ELF institutional, media and professional interaction.

This study investigates the South Korean perception of “native” speaker of English (NSE), namely won-eo-min and ne-i-ti-beu in Korean, with an examination of the use of such terms in the news and social media. To do this, the study examined news topics covered in the South Korean news media including newspapers and television news channels that mention or discuss these terms . Secondly, words used along with these two terms in social media forums such as Twitter or weblogs were examined. In order to realise this, two major data mining programs called the BIGKinds program (Korea Press Foundation, Big Kinds: News Big Data & Analysis , https://www.kinds.or.kr/; accessed 14 May 2018) and the Social Metrics program (Daumsoft, Social metricsTM, http://academy.some.co.kr/login.html; accessed 1 May 2018) were employed. This study shows that the concept of the “native” speaker in the forms of won-eo-min and ne-i-ti-beu is deeply manifested in the minds of South Koreans, especially when talking about the pronunciation of “native” speakers as the model of “correct” pronunciation of English. Such perceptions need to be critically revisited in an era where English is the most common medium of communication in the global community.

Despite Iran’s increasing use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) and its growing position as a more open country to international relationships, Iran’s education policy is still culturally conservative and intercultural language education is absent from the national curriculum and hence classrooms. In response, this article presents the results of a ten-session course focused on implementing and developing cultural awareness (CA) in an Iranian English language classroom. The data revealed that this course had a positive effect in developing students’ levels of CA, moving from basic in the first half of the course towards advanced in the second half. This provides important empirical evidence illustrating the value of systematic instruction of CA in students’ cultural learning. Furthermore, this course was the first of its kind in the predominantly monolingual, culturally restricted context of this study, where intercultural education is missing from the curriculum, yet where students are likely to use ELF for intercultural communication while travelling abroad or inside the country for communication purposes with non-Iranians. This study, thus, demonstrates the feasibility and documents the processes of integrating intercultural teaching into English education, specifically in contexts where educators might be limited by language policy makers.

The fact that English has become a lingua franca of academic communication has led to increased attention to teaching English for academic purposes (EAP) at the academia. Academic discourse markers, such as hedges, have been an important topic in academic writing research whose prime aim is helping non-Anglophone researchers to present their research findings in English for international publication. This study investigates the use of the most frequent hedging devices in a corpus of 58 works written by Russian university students and compares it to a corpus of articles published in peer-reviewed journals in business and management. The analysis of learner corpus data has provided evidence of how Russian ELF speakers use the language, showing significant differences between the use of hedges by the students and professional writers. The research has also highlighted a number of challenges which non-native learners face when writing academic texts. The study may contribute to a higher level of L2 academic writing in ELF contexts and have implications for creating EAP courses, research of second language acquisition and writing pedagogy.

Increasing numbers of corporations are now operating across national borders as a result of globalization. The “language barrier” is the first and foremost challenge they encounter when starting a business in a foreign market, and many companies are trying to solve the problem by adopting a common corporate language. Using English as an official corporate language is the most common solution for those corporations. The present study explored the impacts of English as a corporate official language policy implemented at a company, a rapidly developed high profile IT Company with 20,000 employees, in Japan, a country often perceived to be relatively monolingual and monocultural. When I started studying the company, I first found that the company’s motive to use English as the official corporate language was different from other instances of corporate language policy making I had come across. In previous studies (e.g., Feely & Harzing 2003; Marschan-Piekkari, Welch, & Welch 1999), the companies implemented common corporate language to solve problems caused by language barriers between employees with diverse linguistic backgrounds. However, the company in this study implemented the corporate language policy to prepare for globalization and recruit talents globally. When the company introduced the English-only language policy, most of the employees of the company were Japanese. Therefore, at the time of implementing the language policy, there was no compelling reason for them to use English. The language policy did not work effectively except for a few departments with non-Japanese employees who spoke different first languages. English functioned as a lingua franca in those departments with multinational employees. The findings indicate that for NNESs (non-native English speakers) to communicate with each other in English, the environment has to be more multilingual, less dominated by a single first language. Although almost all Japanese citizens are required to take intensive English courses in compulsory schoolings, the average level of English proficiency is considered to be relatively low in the advanced economies. The present study indicates that it is not for linguistic competence but a lack of interaction with other ELF speakers. Therefore, for learners of ELF in an intensely monolingual society such as Japan to become competent communicators in ELF, providing multilingual learning environments would be more effective than the prevailing teaching practices of classroom learning in L1 Japanese speaker only environments.

A growing number of Multinational Corporations (MNCs) adopt English as their official corporate language. Research on English used as a business lingua franca (BELF) in such contexts shows how its use is negotiated, context dependent, and influenced by cultural and linguistic diversity. Multinational teams (MNTs) are legion within MNCs, and need to find efficient ways of communicating across their diversity, in particular in demanding and complex interactions such as meetings. This case study uses non-participant observation and interviews to study how one MNT has developed shared BELF communication practices for meetings. It examines the BELF communication practices in both the MNC context and at the team level. The analysis of the data shows that team members were highly aware of the challenges posed by cultural and linguistic diversity, and how they developed their local communication practices by processes of developing common ground, building trust, and good leadership. Sammendrag Et økende antall multinasjonale selskaper bruker engelsk som sitt offisielle konsernspråk. Forskning på bruk av engelsk som lingua franca i næringslivet (BELF), viser hvordan bruken er gjenstand for forhandling, er kontekstavhengig, og er påvirket av et kulturelt og språklig mangfold. Multinasjonale team er vanlige i multinasjonale selskaper, og disse trenger å finne kommunikasjonsmåter som tar hensyn til dette mangfoldet, særlig i forbindelse med krevende og kompleks samhandling som for eksempel i møter. Dette case-studiet bruker ikke-deltakende observasjon og intervjuer for å undersøke hvordan et multinasjonalt team har utarbeidet delt BELF-kommunikasjonspraksis både for konsernkonteksten og på team-nivå. Analysen av dataene viser hvordan deltakerne i teamet var veldig klare over de utfordringene som kulturelt og språklig mangfold fører med seg. Analysen viser også hvordan de utviklet sin lokale kommunikasjonspraksis gjennom prosesser som innebar utvikling av et felles referansegrunnlag, tillitsbygging og god ledelse.