Understanding English as a Lingua Franca

Оглавление

Barbara Seidlhofer. Understanding English as a Lingua Franca

Acknowledgements

Preface: why, what, what not, who for?

1. What is this thing called English?

1.1 English as an international language (EIL)

1.2 What’s in a name? A note about terminology

1.3 English as a lingua franca (ELF)

1.4 Towards a reconceptualization of English

1.5 A conceptual gap

1.6 English: foreign language versus lingua franca

1.7 The need for description

1.8 Conclusion

2. Assumptions and presumptions

2.1 Anglo-Saxon attitudes

2.2 The assumption of native-speaker authority

2.3 Convictions and contradictions

2.4 Conclusion

3. Standard English and real English

3.1 Standard English ideology

3.2 Setting the standard

3.3 ‘Nativeness’

3.4 ‘Foreignness’

3.5 ‘Real English’

3.6 Conclusion

4. Reconceptualizing ‘English’

4.1 Appropriation and adaptation

4.2 The sociolinguistics of ELF

4.3 Established concepts and convenient fictions

4.4 ELF, ‘World Englishes’, and the concept of ‘variety’

4.5 Rethinking the concept of community

4.6 Rethinking the concept of competence

4.7 Conclusion

5. The dynamics of ELF usage

5.1 Variety and variation: state and process

5.2 Performativity and creativity in ELF

5.3 Exploiting linguistic resources

5.4 The virtual language

5.5 Constitutive rules and regulative conventions

5.6 Conformity and creativity

5.7 Conclusion

6. Form and function in ELF

6.1 The function of non-conformity

6.2 Communicative interaction and the idiom principle

6.3 ELF and idiomatic usage

6.4 Unilateral idiomaticity

6.5 ELF and the idiomatizing process

6.6 The exploitation of redundancy

6.7 Conclusion

7. Designing English as an international language

7.1 Linguistic description and prescription

7.2 Language planning and linguistic intervention

7.3 The prescription of an international language

7.4 Nuclear English

7.5 Basic English

7.6 Basic English and ELF

7.7 Conclusion

8. ELF and English Language Teaching

8.1 Prescriptions for use and learning

8.2 Natural use and usefulness for learning

8.3 English prescribed: objectives and processes

8.4 Objectives and processes reconsidered

8.5 English as a subject and the relevance of ELF

8.6 Rethinking the subject

8.7 ELF and teacher education

8.8 Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Отрывок из книги

It is now accepted as a fact that English, as a cause and consequence of globalization, currently serves as the most widespread means of international and intercultural communication that the world has ever seen. But this does not mean it is uncontroversial. People are uncertain about what kind of English this is, who it ‘belongs’ to, and how they should react to it. Even those who use English as a lingua franca (ELF) on a daily basis differ markedly in their attitudes to it, as the above extracts show. These extracts come from a workshop discussion at an international student conference and are just two examples of the kind of usage that now occurs in so many interactions in the world. This phenomenon is so widespread and so crucial for international communication that it has become imperative to take it seriously and try to find out how and why ELF functions as it does. This is what this book sets out to do: to arrive at ‘a certain level of understanding’ of ELF by both seeking to explain the concept as such and describing how ELF users interact amongst themselves, how they understand each others’ ELF. Understanding ELF in both these senses is not an easy task to tackle in one book, and so while this is not a bulky volume it has been long in the making, as the years spent writing it were also the years in which ELF research gathered considerable pace and momentum. Although discussion about the ‘ownership’ of English has been going on for quite some time, this issue and its implications, so central to an understanding of ELF, still stand in need of conceptual clarification. This has become more pressing as the number of ELF users continues to increase with accelerating globalization.

Nobody is likely to deny that English has, in one way or another, in some shape or form, become a global lingua franca in the contemporary world. But acknowledging the existence of ELF is, of course, not the same as approving of it, and two kinds of disapproval have been widely expressed, both related to this question of ownership. The first concerns the way in which English is perceived as an alien invasive force, occupying the space of other languages and so threatening linguistic and cultural diversity. The second kind of disapproval concerns the form, or forms, that English takes in its international uses, perceived as its various ‘deviations’ from the established standard of ‘proper’ English, which are seen to undermine the very integrity and intelligibility of the language itself.

.....

So understanding the nature and implications of ELF involves taking account of a range of issues about language ownership, variation, and pedagogy. But not only is it, as I have indicated, relevant to such areas as sociolinguistic research and language teaching but also to a whole spectrum of practical and theoretical issues both within and beyond academia concerning, for example, language assessment, translation and interpreting, language and education policy, international research and development, professional communication, and diplomatic mediation and peace-keeping. Of course, each of these areas of activity has its own concerns and priorities and, as I have frequently experienced at conferences, these will usually give rise to different reactions to ELF, often mutually contradictory. It would be surprising if this book did not meet with the same diversity of reactions.

While I obviously will not be able to satisfy all expectations a book on this topic may raise, I can make it as clear as possible what my intention was in writing it. To begin with, the book focuses on spoken ELF, as it is by studying the spoken language that emergent processes of variation and change can be most readily observed. Once these processes are understood, more work will have to be done on how they are relevant to various kinds of written communication. Of course, the book does not aim to offer a comprehensive description of spoken ELF usage as such. Its perspective is conceptual rather than descriptive and although a good deal of description appears, this is meant to exemplify various phenomena and processes, and especially, to show that none of these are actually unique to ELF. It was tempting to provide more description of data in VOICE, the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English, which has been developed alongside the writing of this book over recent years. But this would not have been appropriate to my main purpose, and anyway more and more description is now becoming available in individual studies. My primary concern is to present a clear argument for a well founded conceptualization of ELF, and I have homed in on the issues that seem most important for this purpose. There was much more that I would have liked to include, but then left out so as not to distract from the main line of argument – not only more description but more theoretical discussion – and more controversy. So any readers with a special interest in one particular area, be it sociolinguistics, language variation and change, language learning and teaching, social psychology, anthropology, sociology, or any other area are likely to feel that their interests have not been adequately represented, that the book is either ‘too linguistic’ or ‘not linguistic enough’. But I would hope that it nevertheless gives some indication of how an understanding of ELF is relevant to their concerns.

.....