First of all, what is ELF?

English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) has been around (and hotly debated) for a while now. (See the Wikipedia page for a useful list of references). Research by people like Jennifer Jenkins and Barbara Seidlhofer have worked on looking at various features, but there is still a lot of discussion about just how useful ELF is to teachers and trainers. For example, Jenkins (2007) says that “ELF emphasizes the role of English in communication between speakers from different L1s, i.e. the primary reason for learning English today.” On the other hand Swan (2009), argues that “In a pedagogic context, … there is little justification for its use: it is both redundant and confusing, and we would do better to avoid it.”

The crux of the issue seems to revolve around how we define ELF. For ELF researchers it seems to be a way of talking about how English is used between people who do not have English as their own native tongue. They are not suggesting that ELF is a specific variety of English, although there have been some attempts to try and describe its general characteristics, or “common core”. Indeed for some researchers (Firth, 2009; Jenkins, 2007) ELF is about a new attitude to English as a language – it should not be seen as a sort of incorrect or deficient type of English, which non native speakers (NNS) use in their communication with each other, but rather as a language in its own right. In ELF it is the end result that matters, not whether interactions contain “mistakes” when measured against some standard variety of English. The problem is that as teachers and trainers we have become used to providing a model (normally our own variety of English) for our learners to aim at – this is difficult with an ELF approach, where there is no easily identifiable model. As Seidlhofer points out, “spontaneous ELF communication always has an element of adhoc negotiation of relevant norms, because speakers’ systemic/linguistic and schematic/cultural backgrounds vary from case to case, by definition”(2006)

Читайте також:

<== попередня сторінка	\|	наступна сторінка ==>
Section 1. Guidelines for reading texts on the use of international English in European business	\|	And what about BELF?

Не знайшли потрібну інформацію? Скористайтесь пошуком google:

Генерація сторінки за: 0.004 сек.