Keywords

Introduction

Over the last century, English has been developing into the first truly global lingua franca . A lingua franca is most generally defined as a medium of communication among people who do not share a first language. This means that lingua franca interactions happen, by definition, in multilingual settings: they are bi- or multilingual encounters because they bring into contact and mediate between the linguacultures of two or more speakers. This is as true of English as a lingua franca (henceforth ELF) as it is of lingua francas of earlier periods of human history (e.g., Sabir , Latin , Greek ) and artificial lingua francas (e.g., Esperanto , Volapük ).

It stands to reason, then, that the recent significant increase in multilingual encounters due to developments in digital communication and international mobility has also increased the need for a lingua franca that multilingual speakers in all parts of the world can rely on to communicate across many different L1s. This is why recent decades have seen an unprecedented spread of ELF as both consequence and driving force of globalization , resulting in a fast-growing field of research that is concerned with the use of ELF as a naturally adaptive linguistic process and with its theoretical as well as applied linguistic implications, the latter particularly in the areas of language policy and education . The use of ELF as a means of communication has become recognized as a crucial issue in a number of other quite diverse domains of activity including youth culture, science and technology, international business, conflict resolution, migration, and tourism. As a consequence, ELF as a subject now figures increasingly in university courses in English departments alongside the longer-established study of World Englishes , with a significant number of PhD projects completed and under way at universities all around the world.

ELF, then, is an expedient translingual use of English where the interactants do not share a knowledge of each other’s language. Where they are bi- or multilingual, they can of course make use of other mutually known languages. So ELF is complementary to other manifestations of multilingualism and not at all in conflict with it (cf. House 2003). But if it is to serve this complementary function, it is crucial that ELF be dissociated from English as a native language (ENL) – and this represents various difficulties that it is important to be clear about and raises issues particularly relevant to language education. ELF is the first truly global lingua franca – which of course does not mean that everybody in the world has access to it, far from it. But more people across the globe and across social strata make use of it than of any other lingua franca before: ELF pervades the daily lives of millions of people, from Brazilian researchers to Russian oil magnates, hip hoppers in Indonesia, American tourists and African asylum seekers in Italy. This is a situation very different from the relatively restricted use of lingua francas of earlier periods. Moreover, some other lingua francas like Latin from the Middle Ages onwards are “dead” in that they are historically decontextualized from their L1 communities or, like Sabir or Esperanto, are artificially constructed languages and so in both cases exist(ed) as vehicular languages in their own right. In the case of ELF, however, there is a “big brother,” or rather several brothers, making claims of ownership of the language out of which it developed. But it has to be understood that ELF needs to be decontextualized from ENL communities if it is to serve a lingua franca function. Simply put, a national language cannot be international. This essential dissociation of ELF from English as a native or national language calls for a radical reconceptualization, and this is more easily said than done.

This chapter first gives a sketch of how ELF research has developed. It then explains the main areas and objectives of ELF research, highlighting those aspects that are relevant for multilingualism , language awareness , and language education more generally.

Early Developments

The most important early explicit treatment of English as an international language goes back to the time between the two world wars, when Basic English was conceived by Charles Ogden and I.A. Richards as a means of international communication in the service of world peace (see, e.g., Ogden 1930). As a constructed form of English (850 carefully selected words and a handful of grammar rules), Basic was totally different from the naturally occurring use of ELF, but it has been argued that it held great potential for developing an understanding of how natural languages work in communication, particularly for language awareness (Seidlhofer 2002, 2011). A later model of English for international communication was Randolph Quirk’s (1981) concept of Nuclear English . Unlike Basic this was a subset of standard grammatical forms selected for clarity and explicitness. Again, this was very different from ELF as it is being currently studied in that it was a model arrived at by introspection rather than observation and only allowed forms that were in conformity with Standard English.

Another forerunner of ELF research was the discussion of English as an international language (EIL), particularly with reference to pedagogy, by a relatively small number of scholars in the 1980s such as Christopher Brumfit, Werner Hüllen, Karlfried Knapp, Larry Smith, Peter Strevens, and Henry Widdowson. The issues addressed in their writings partly overlapped with the struggle for recognition of Outer Circle (i.e., postcolonial) varieties of English pursued in the study of World Englishes (cf. Kachru 1992). So while Basic English was motivated by a perceived need for international communication and understanding following the First World War, the focus on World Englishes was a response to the postcolonial situation: Braj Kachru and Larry Smith in particular argued that countries in the Outer Circle were entitled to their own Englishes, signalling their identity and independence. This in turn required the recognition of separate “nativized” Englishes , with their respective endonormative models for teaching and reference works for individual, clearly delineated varieties such as Indian English or Nigerian English, from which curricula and materials for teaching could, in principle, be derived. It may well be that this focus on nativized varieties as representing the independent identity of their users in Asia and Africa prevented this line of thinking from moving seamlessly into ELF research in the Western/Northern part of the globe, where models for English language teaching (ELT) remained oriented to Anglo-American ENL. Another reason why the rare exhortations of the 1980s to rethink the teaching of English had no lasting impact can be traced to the enormous influence of the USA– and UK– led “mainstream” research on second language acquisition (SLA) and corpus linguistics that continued to take the primacy of standard native speaker norms as self-evident.

In the 1990s, there were some important publications, without reference to ELT, that discussed “lingua franca negotiations” (e.g., Firth 1996; Gramkow Andersen 1993/2001) and intercultural communication (House 1999; Meierkord 1996). These studies made important early contributions, but, unlike ELF as currently conceived, they limited the notion of “lingua franca” to exchanges exclusively among nonnative speakers of English.

Major Contributions

Around the beginning of the twenty-first century, discussions intensified of the processes of change referred to as globalization “which underpin a transformation in the organization of human affairs by linking together and expanding human activity across regions and continents” (Held et al. 1999: 15). These discussions about changes brought about by global connections coincided with the emergence of new perspectives on English as a global language. Here, too, a “transformation” was taking place, namely, a conceptual one: from a basically monolingual view of English that regarded English as a bounded, completely separate code owned by its native speakers, even when used for international communication, to the recognition of ELF as a multilingual mode, encompassing all the linguistic resources of speakers and listeners. This understanding of ELF as intrinsically multilingual, characterized by linguistic plurality, is distinctive of its development from about the year 2000.

At that time, taking ELF seriously was a novel and very controversial proposition, mainly because both linguistics and English language teaching as well as SLA (pace Cook 1999) operated virtually exclusively with idealized native speaker models , thus constructing “nonnative” speakers as defective communicators. Therefore, the first publications on ELF had to address this native speaker orientation head-on in order to be noticed and recognized as relevant. This is done in Jenkins (2000), which argues that for pronunciation in international uses of English, what counts is mutual intelligibility among bi- or multilingual ELF users rather than approximation to native speaker models, and outlines clear priorities for ELT consistent with this approach. While Jenkins particularly addresses pedagogic issues, Seidlhofer (2001) focuses on the necessity of linguistic description , arguing that discussions about “global English” on the meta-level need to be accompanied by substantial empirical work on ELF, ideally making use of the currently dominant methodology of corpus linguistics, in order to make ELF a “tangible reality” that cannot be ignored. As for ELF and SLA, Brutt-Griffler (2002) posits the notion of “macroacquisition,” emphasizing societal (rather than individual) SLA in both Outer Circle and Expanding Circle settings, the latter being areas where English is a foreign rather than a second or official language (Kachru 1992). In Brutt-Griffler’s account, too, bi- or multilingualism is an intrinsic design feature of both ELF and World Englishes. She demonstrates the active role of ELF users as agents in the spread and development of English: they are not just at the receiving end but contribute to the shaping of the language and the functions it fulfills and so in effect appropriate the language and adapt it to their own purposes. The three publications described above clearly start from a functional definition of ELF and in the sense that they constitute the first assertive efforts to map out the area of ELF research, they are also programmatic. This programmatic character, staking the claim for the legitimacy of the study of ELF, also meant that, as a first step, concepts and methodologies had to be employed that constituted a focus of contemporary “mainstream” research, in order for these unconventional ideas to be taken notice of at all. This approach was effective to the extent that these publications did have an impact and kick-started a broader debate about ELF, although it also gave rise to some misinterpretations. As we shall see, these early writings subsequently opened up space for work on ELF to develop in directions more akin to the sociolinguistic and socio‐psychological concerns that motivated the recognition of the need for ELF research in the first place.

These early main contributions to the study of ELF can also be seen as translations into action of Widdowson’s (1994) provocative calling into question ENL speakers’ claim to the “ownership of English ”, further developed in Widdowson (2003). This book makes clear that the changing role and nature of the language call for a radical reconsideration of some common assumptions about “English” as a subject for teaching. This reconsideration involves a critical reappraisal of criteria for goals for learning and of the relevance of corpus descriptions of “authentic” native speaker English for the specification of course content and methodology. This in turn led to a questioning of the customary practice of monolingual teaching and the recognition that learning English is necessarily a bi- or multilingual process in that learners naturally refer it to their L1.

By 2004 ELF research had gathered enough momentum to occasion the first overview of the field in the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (Seidlhofer 2004). Only 2 years later, this was followed by another overview in the same journal (Seidlhofer et al. 2006); another 5 years on, a state-of-the-art article in the journal Language Teaching (Jenkins et al. 2011) reviewed developments of ELF research up to 2011. Concurrently, a series of annual ELF conferences was established, accompanied by a number of volumes of proceedings including Archibald et al. (2011) and Mauranen and Ranta (2009). In 2012 the AILA Research Network on English as a Lingua Franca was founded and the Journal of English as a Lingua Franca launched, closely followed by the book series Developments in English as a Lingua Franca ; in 2016, the preparation of the first handbook of English as a lingua franca is under way.

It is clear, then, that ELF has developed into a vibrant area of research – so what is the content of all these writings, and how does what is being discussed relate to multilingualism? We can look at this body of work in terms of conceptualization, description, and application, which has already been mentioned above and will be taken up again below. We can also consider in which areas of social and professional life, i.e., in which domains, ELF is particularly pervasive and has therefore received a great deal of attention. Here the areas of academia and business rank highest due to their intrinsic international character. The use of ELF in business contexts, also referred to as BELF , has traditionally been less tied to native speaker norms than in other settings, probably because ELF, often employed as a corporate language, is regarded quite pragmatically as a means of getting things done, as part of the job. This has been confirmed in research in this area by, e.g., Susanne Ehrenreich, Leena Louhiala-Salminen, and Anne Kankaanranta, who have analyzed the attitudes that business people themselves hold towards ELF, usually regarding it as an integral part of their business expertise. Alan Firth, Almut Koester, Marie-Luise Pitzl, Rita Poncini, Patricia Pullin, and Anita Santner-Wolfartsberger, among others have focused more closely on the functions and forms of business ELF, how negotiations are conducted, and which pragmatic strategies are employed. There is also vivid interest in applying insights from intercultural communication to business contexts, and to implications for teaching, as evidenced in a special issue of the Journal of English as a Lingua Franca entitled “Teaching ELF, BELF, and/or Intercultural Communication?” (Ehrenreich and Pitzl 2015). Innovators in the actual teaching of English for international business such as Vicki Hollett emphasize that communication awareness , rapport building , and accommodation skills are more important than proficiency in Standard English .

Academia is a particularly rich site for investigating ELF because research has long been an international endeavor and academic mobility has a very long history. As higher education and research are becoming more and more globalized, English for academic purposes (EAP) can generally be said to be ELF. As Mauranen et al. (2010: 640) point out, academia is an area “where international communication characterizes the domain across the board.” It is not surprising, then, that a substantial body of descriptive research has been undertaken that offers rich insights into how ELFA , ELF in academic settings, is employed in university teaching and research projects – which are often staffed by international teams that only include a small minority of native speakers of English or none at all. Many studies are based on the English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings (ELFA) corpus, in particular Mauranen 2012, and work that came out of her collaboration with her colleagues in Helsinki, and numerous references to their publications can be found on the ELFA website. The fact that most big universities have adopted an international policy as far as their student populations are concerned has of course also led to a steep increase in the use of ELF in higher education. The need to follow this development through by acknowledging the truly international nature of this teaching medium, i.e., ELF rather than ENL, is forcefully argued in Jenkins (2014). So where in the realm of academic oral and written communication we have seen a rethinking of EAP as ELF, in the area of higher education, what has hitherto been termed English-medium instruction (EMI) is being recast as ELF as well. In addition to the policy discussion about ELF in higher education, there are studies of ELF as it is used in particular courses in various places all over the world. Björkman (2013) is an in-depth study of spoken ELF as used in engineering courses at a Swedish technical university, Smit (2010) of an international tourism course in Austria. There are also numerous smaller-scale papers investigating communication among students with different L1s. All these studies point to the importance of strategic skills and the way academic staff and students use ELF and shape it to their specific requirements.

While business and academia are areas on which empirical ELF research has focussed most, there are of course numerous other domains, and countless interactions every day all over the world, for which ELF is the chosen medium of communication. In order to facilitate the investigation of ELT talk in different domains, two corpora of transcribed spoken ELF interactions have been compiled and are freely available online. VOICE, the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English , was the first ELF corpus to be released for online use and download. It contains data from educational, leisure, and professional domains, the latter subdivided into business, organizational, and research/science, and all manifested in a wide range of speech event types, from casual conversation to panel discussion and from service encounter to press conference. The VOICE architecture was then adopted for compiling ACE, the Asian Corpus of English , which thus complements the Europe-focussed VOICE with data from ASEAN + 3 settings and allows connections and comparisons to be made (Kirkpatrick 2010). The many studies based on these ELF corpora are listed on the corpus websites. VOICE and ACE, as well as ELFA for the academic domain, have enabled researchers to access linguistic forms and patterns and study how these are employed in ELF interactions, which functions they serve, and how and why ELF use varies. Corpus findings encompass all levels of language, in particular lexicogrammar and pragmatics . They are summarized in the overview articles mentioned above and in Cogo and Dewey 2012; Mauranen 2012 and Seidlhofer 2011.

Conceptualization, Description, and Application

What is of primary interest for us here, however, is not the investigation of linguistic forms and patterns for their own sake but the question as to what motivates them and how ELF users exploit all their linguistic resources to negotiate meanings and relationships, to achieve their communicative purposes. The primary goal is thus to understand what the variability of ELF tells us about the communicative and interpersonal functions that these observed forms and patterns serve. Descriptive ELF studies, even when focused on specific linguistic features such as multi-word units , discourse markers , variable verb forms , lexical and phraseological coinages , non-English elements, turn-taking mechanisms and repetition , etc., ultimately shed light on the pragmatic processes and accommodation strategies that characterize all communication. There are, for instance, analyses of the resolution of misunderstandings, establishing rapport and solidarity, expression of identity, and creation of intercultural space .

It is important to understand that all these processes are manifestations of ELF interactions as sites of multilingual contact by definition, so the pragmatics of ELF and multilingualism are the same. This means that ELF, while unprecedented as a global phenomenon, is – or should be – at the hub of current research on language variation and (potential) language change , multilingual processing , and current deliberations about societal multilingualism , superdiversity , transcultural flows, and translingual practice . In ELF interactions, we can see how the interlocutors’ first languages come into contact or, as Mauranen (2012: 248) puts it, their “similects ,” i.e., “the lects that arise from speakers with a shared first-language background.” So ELF is both unprecedented in its global spread and also arises from exceptionally complex language contact, which Mauranen terms second-order language contact. Not surprisingly therefore, descriptive studies of ELF interactions highlight the variability, fluidity, and hybridity of the linguistic resources involved. And precisely because of the complexity of the communication situation, interlocutors can be observed mobilizing their language awareness and employing strategies that help communication along. Speakers and listeners engage in fine-tuning their perception of what is going on; they (consciously or unconsciously) enhance intelligibility by modifying sounds and structures, e.g., by making them more regular, simpler, or more redundant and explicit; they cooperate in asking for words, signaling understanding or lack thereof, paraphrasing ; they adjust speed of delivery; and they use repetitions. But they also produce complex structures and utterances, often employing resources from more than one language code. And they create new words and phrases, many of which turn out to be frequently attested across speakers from typologically different languages when larger corpora are consulted (Pitzl forthcoming, Pitzl et al. 2008). By and large, these processes can be subsumed under the notion of accommodation, so the hunch expressed in the earliest writings on ELF is being confirmed as more descriptions become available. Understanding ELF, then, fosters an awareness of the essential nature of linguistic communication and awareness of the nature of language in general beyond the knowledge of particular languages (Firth 2009; Seidlhofer 2011). Focus on the specifics of particular languages tends to inhibit an understanding of language in general. This is why it is important to “make strange” what is familiar, and this is what studying ELF communication helps us do.

Of course, many of these processes are also at work in much the same fashion as communication among speakers of any language, in that meaning is negotiated and co-constructed, and, obviously, as in any use of natural language, occasional non- or misunderstandings do occur (Deterding 2013). At any rate, what is clear is that ELF communication is a creative process in that the code is treated as malleable and adjustable to the requirements of the moment. Apart from the message speakers want to convey, these requirements also have to do with a host of other factors impinging on the accessibility and acceptability of what is said in terms of clarity, time constraints, online processability, memory, available repertoires , social relationships, and shared knowledge . Another way of conceptualizing what goes on in these ELF interactions, therefore, is the notion of languaging , or rather translanguaging , the harnessing of all linguistic resources that help make communication happen; Jørgensen (2008: 169) observes that people “language with all their skills and knowledge,” employing “whatever linguistic features are at their disposal with the intention of achieving their communicative aims.” It follows that ELF languagers “act upon, and sometimes against, norms and standards” (op.cit: 164), and this is an issue we will return to when we consider pedagogical implications below.

The starting point, then, of ELF research was the increasingly global role of English, which called into question the tradition of thinking of “a language” as an autonomous and bounded object at home in a particular territory. Along with this realization has come the need to rethink the relevance of traditional notions such as (local) speech communities speaking their own linguistic varieties , and of language proficiency and the authority of “native speakers.” When used as a medium of “translingual” communication, what speakers learnt or acquired as “English” inevitably undergoes a transformation into a multilingual mode (Hülmbauer 2013; Hülmbauer and Seidlhofer 2013). The underlying argument is that in a world characterized by enhanced mobility and electronic communication, ideas of mapping languages on particular territories and linking them to the speakers inhabiting these territories have become anachronistic. Describing “mobile media practices and transnational people,” Jacquemet (2005) talks about a “deterritorialized social identity tak[ing] shape, light-years away from the corporate logic of the nation-state” and “find[ing] its expression in the creolized, mixed idioms of polyglottism” (Jacquemet 2005: 262f). He is talking here about issues of “language and power in the age of globalization” (subtitle of his paper), and these will be taken up below.

Work in Progress and Problems and Difficulties

While ELF has, over the last few years, been fairly well accepted as a subject of research in some quarters, a great deal remains to be done. On the one hand, there are areas of activity where the idea of ELF is still fiercely contested, in particular ELT and testing. On the other hand, there are important kinds of ELF interaction into which only relatively little research effort has gone so far, although they are of particular topicality and social relevance. These are areas where “work in progress” and “problems and difficulties” merge and will therefore be treated together in this section.

It has long been noted that while ideas both about the role of English and about classroom methods have changed considerably over recent decades, curricula and textbooks have changed very little in content. This state of affairs has recently been challenged by insights coming from ELF research, and this challenge in turn has been vigorously resisted in some quarters. This is probably due to a combination of reasons including vested interests in a huge global English language teaching and testing industry and inertia in the teaching profession, bolstered by lay attitudes based on conventional ideas of what constitutes “good language use” and “legitimate speakers” (Jenkins 2007; Seidlhofer 2011). For ELT, ELF as conceived as a manifestation of heteroglossic practice (cf. Blackledge and Creese 2014) represents a radically new development, which takes into account the similarly radical changes in the contemporary world. It would seem reasonable to suppose that there might be some corresponding rethinking about how the language might be taught. Just as ELF calls for a reconceptualization of English in use, so correspondingly it should also call for a fundamental reconsideration of the nature of English as a subject . So what would such reconceptualization entail? In relation to language education, the only way forward seems to be a process of careful awareness raising and rethinking in teacher education, examining what Widdowson (2012) calls the “inconvenience of established concepts.” These established concepts include, in particular, the notion that the objective of learning must be the acquisition of competence which entails conformity to native speaker norms (Dewey 2012; Vettorel 2015).

It has been argued by ELF researchers concerned with pedagogy, in keeping with research in multilingual education generally (Cenoz and Gorter 2015), that the most crucial reorientation concerns a change of focus in ELT: from goal to process orientation , building on the learners’ own experience of language and representing English not as something distinct but as an additional communicative resource, an extension of their lingual repertoire. But such a reorientation is difficult to accept, as is evident, for example, in the exchange between Swan and Widdowson in the Journal of English as a Lingua Franca.

What has only received fairly scarce attention in ELF research so far are the kinds of translingual, intercultural interaction via ELF where the power differential between the communicating parties is very great. These are encounters, not typically captured in the available ELF corpora, whose outcomes have far-reaching consequences, especially for the weaker side. Such high-stakes encounters h appen, everyday all over the world, in areas such as asylum procedures , language policy and language planning , language and the law , diplomacy and peacekeeping, international publishing , testing , and interpreting .

These unequal encounters call for a particularly critical consideration and awareness of the lingua franca role of English, but this is often not in evidence. Much more research and public debate will have to be dedicated to investigating whether, and how, an explicit and agreed-upon reconceptualization of the means of communication in these areas – not as “English” riddled by nation-language ideology but as English as a lingua franca – may be appropriate and feasible. In the absence of such a reconceptualization, there is little prospect of resolving the sometimes literally vital issues of misunderstanding, alienation, inequity, and disenfranchisement that often beset such intercultural encounters. Stark examples are documented in Guido (2008), which presents a discourse-analytic account of the unequal encounters mediated through ELF between Nigerian asylum seekers and Italian immigration officers. A more general lesson to be learnt from Guido’s work is the importance of taking into account how ELF interactants perceive of their L1, of English, and of themselves as users of it. Such perceptions will, also in other kinds of encounter via ELF, influence the way interactions proceed and the linguistic forms they exhibit.

High-stakes encounters that readers of this encyclopedia will be more familiar with include language assessment and international publishing. In both of these areas of activity, Standard English and Anglo-American pragmatic conventions had long been the unquestioned model which any writing and speaking had to adhere to in order to be acceptable, for instance, to get one’s article published in an international journal or to pass one of the powerful internationally valid English tests. Now that descriptions of ELF variability call into question the universal validity of traditional standards of correctness and instead emphasize appropriateness, it is becoming clear that the benchmarks hitherto employed are no longer appropriate (see, e.g., Jenkins and Leung 2013 and WrELFA, the Corpus of Written English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings). As McNamara (2011) demonstrates, issues of assessment are also closely tied to, and influenced by, language policies, in particular the Common European Framework of Reference , which has achieved near-global currency.

Future Directions

For a field of research as recently established as the study of ELF, most of the work to be done is likely to be in the future. But one can identify the vectors of future development in current research. One, for example, is the continuing exploration of the nature of languaging in ELF interaction – of the process of communicative interaction by the use of multiple linguistic resources and the shift away from the concept of distinct languages as linked to distinct cultures and communities (cf. García and Wei 2014). And this involves a corresponding shift from the concept of multilingualism itself as having to do with competence in different languages and toward the concept of lingual capability , the strategic use of English and other linguistic resources in ELF for the achievement of meaning and the expression of identity. The implications of such shifts are evident in the areas of high-stakes encounters and language pedagogy already mentioned.

Future work on ELF will continue to explore these implications. Its future challenge will be to develop an educated awareness of these implications in areas of policy and decision making – to engage in applied linguistics as it is generally defined, the dealing with problems which involve the use of language in the real world.

Cross-References

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