Why a new concept of English?

Thus far the default measuring stick for what English is correct has been the native speaker model, usually that of the U.K. or the U.S. Barbara Seidlhofer is leading the pack to fight for a new concept of English, English as a lingua franca which she, among others, is working on its own description and codification. She argues in an English Today article, “the emergence of an endonormative model of lingua franca English which will increasingly derive its norms of correctness and appropriacy from its own usage rather than that on the UK or the US, or an other ‘native speaker’ model.” (Seidlhofer 2001:15)

What is English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)?

Therefore, there is a movement for teaching English as a lingua franca (ELF), whose supporters believe that the way we teach and assess English should reflect the needs and goals of this expanding growth of non-native speakers who use English to communicate with other non-native speakers. How do non-native speakers use English with each other? This is currently a big area of research. Barbara Seidlhofer is heading the first large-scale effort to collect exclusively lingua franca English. The project is called the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE), which is collecting data of mostly face-to-face communication of fairly fluent speakers of English from a wide range of L1 backgrounds in Vienna. Proponents of ELF would like people to reconsider the way English is taught. Although these ideas seem rather radical, Graddol believes that it is likely that some of its ideas will influence mainstream teaching and assessment practices in the future (2006).

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Traditional ELT Standards: a brief discussion of people’s views toward the two main inner circle varieties (British and American English)	\|	What is Euro-English?

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