Book review: Heiko Motschenbacher, New Perspectives on English as a European Lingua Franca (original) (raw)
Related papers
2017
The recent book edited by Marie-Luise Pitzl and Ruth Osimk-Teasdale, aims at identifying the nexuses between ELF (English as a lingua franca) and related fields. It is organized around two main sections, i.e. Perspectives on the study of ELF and The study of ELF in a wider context under which there exist three subsections that focus primarily on the ELF's relationship with domains like sociolinguistics, multilingualism, policy and pedagogy. The first main section opens with Jenkins' chapter where she summarizes Seidlhofer's major contributions, such as the compilation of a spoken corpus, establishing an ELF journal and reconceptualization of ELF, to the ELF research. The second chapter by Mauranen brings to the fore the need for an ELF corpus, emphasizing the challenges ELF corpus linguists can
PhD Dissertation, 2014
The growth of English into a lingua franca has inevitably created linguistic deviations and innovations in the use of English. These emerging uses that result from the needs and preferences of speakers whose mother tongues are all different can be broadly identified as lexico-grammatical and pronunciation features and they compose one of the main arteries of study in English as lingua franca communication. In an effort to investigate shared and systematized uses of English as a lingua franca and their possible codification have formed the focus of considerable research in the field. The present study is a corpus-based study which investigates the lexico-grammar of spoken ELF interactions. The corpus consists of 10 hours 47 minutes of recorded speech and 93,913 words of transcribed data. It is compiled by means of 54 speech events, 29 interviews and 25 focus group meetings. The participants of the study are incoming Erasmus students, enrolled in 4 state and 6 foundation universities in Istanbul in the 2012-2013 academic year. The number of participants is 79, with 24 first languages (L1s) represented. These L1s are namely Arabic, Azerbaijan, Basque, Bulgarian, Cantonese, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, Galician, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Lithuanian, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, Spanish, Suriname, Turkish, and Ukrainian. The study investigates whether there are variations from standard ENL forms with respect to the use of: 3rd person present tense –s, the relative pronouns ‘who’ and ‘which’, definite and indefinite articles, tag questions, prepositions, verbs that denote semantic generality, infinitive constructions, and explicitness, as have been outlined in ELF research (Seidlhofer, 2004; Cogo and Dewey, 2012). The results indicate that there are variations from standard ENL varieties with respect to the use of investigated lexico-grammatical units. The study further aims to discuss implications for an ELF- aware pedagogy in English language teaching and further research in the field.
The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 2013
, 2011. xvii+244 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-437500-9 (pbk). £32. Barbara Seidlhofer's latest monograph, Understanding English as a Lingua Franca, comes at a moment when the English language, while serving this function since the first colonizations in the 16 th century (Jenkins et al. 2011), has truly established itself as a language of nearly global communication, a language for which the predominant reason for learning has become to interact primarily not with its native speakers, but with other non-native users. The past two decades have accordingly witnessed a burgeoning of articles, dissertations, conferences, corpora, and a dedicated journal devoted to the topic; yet in many circles the phenomenon has still remained unnoticed or unacknowledged, acquired many misunderstandings, is raising mixed opinions or encountering strong resistance. Barbara Seidlhofer, a long-time expert on the subject and one of the pioneers of research in the field, explores and elucidates the many facets and repercussions of the controversial topic at hand. For the purpose of her book, Seidlhofer defines ELF 1 as any use of English among speakers of different mother tongues and linguacultural backgrounds, across all three Kachruvian circles 2. In contrast to some earlier definitions and conceptualizations (e.g. House 1999, Jenkins 2007), this importantly includes native speakers of English (NSs), who for aims of intercultural communication may use ELF as their additional language. The opening chapter sets the scene by casting light on the familiar phenomenon of the growing masses of people learning English worldwide, on a scale unprecedented by any previous lingua franca. Chapter 2 makes readers aware of the deeply rooted and all-pervasive misconception-in both popular and scholarly discourse-that English is the preserve and asset of native speakers, the only legitimate and authoritative provider of standards. In her critique of this linguistic imperialism, Seidlhofer also devotes some space to interrogating the very concept of NS, showing how this stable, homogeneous and hypercorrect construct is an idealized notion and how difficult it is to agree on its satisfactory definition (let alone a definition of an 'educated' NS). Chapters 3 and 4 turn to the reified and equally elusive notion of 'proper', 'real', 'Standard English' (StE) and to why (contrary to Quirk 1985, for instance) it is an inappropriate objective for learning the language. The first interesting chapter for this reviewer is chapter 4, devoted to a discussion of how non-native users adapt and variably alter English ad hoc to suit their communicative purpose (rather than "adopt" it as a "franchise language", per Widdowson (2003:50)). Thus, they preserve their identity without striving to mimic NSs' communicatively irrelevant conventions, and therefore play an active role in the development and spread of the language. The aim of lingua franca interactions is communicative efficiency, which is achieved by accommodating to the interlocutor. This is different from grammatical correctness. In Chapter 5, drawing on data from the VOICE corpus and other empirical studies-though without adequately explaining annotation conventions used in VOICE corpus data-Seidlhofer provides numerous examples of authentic ELF talk that diverge from standard English to illustrate the processes and communication strategies at work. 1 Sometimes also labelled 'English as an International Language' (EIL). 2 'Inner', where English has historically been the mother tongue of the vast majority of the population, 'Outer', where its varieties function as official and second languages, usually owing to colonial history, and 'Expanding', where it is being taught in schools as a foreign language (Kachru 1985).
Languages have traditionally been associated with specific ethnic groups confined to defined geographical areas and sometimes to certain discourse contexts or domains of use (e.g. French for diplomacy). Increasingly, telecommunication and most recently internet has meant that languages are no longer tied to particular geographical territories but may be found in various non-territorial dimensions. This has created a fluid, constantly changing global speech community in which different languages co-exist and interact in myriad ways and to varying degrees depending on the speakers' backgrounds. Within this complex scenario, not only does English become in effect translocal language (Pennycook 2007, Blommaert 2010) but English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) variations gain in influence, very possibly replacing traditional native-speaker varieties as the international standard (Seidlhofer 2011, Christiansen 2015). Thus, they will increasingly reflect the plurilingual reality in which spea...
Fourth Interlinguistic Symposium
Język. Komunikacja. Informacja
The fourth international Interlinguistic Symposium organised by the Interlinguistic Studies Programme (Institute of Linguistics, Faculty of Modern Languages and Literature, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland) was held September 21-22, 2017 in Poznań. The main subject was: The role of international languages from the time of Zamenhof to the modern multicultural world.
European Journal of Applied Linguistics Studies-ISSN 2602-0254
2020
In language structure, discourse is generally used by writers in their text to get readers to understand and comprehend the content of the written text. Metadiscourse is a specific class of language device used by writers to organize their text as well as manage the interactions or relations with the reader of the text. By using Hyland (2005) and Lakoff’s (1975) interactional metadiscourse models, this paper employs the data analysis driven method called document analysis to analyse the presence of interactional metadiscourse elements in an online entertainment article. Coding and frequency counting method are adopted to find out the sub-categories of respective four elements: Intensifiers, Hedges, Boosters, and Engagement Markers. The elements are interpreted as representing writers’ strategies to define the relationship between themselves, the reader and the topic. Consequently, it is found that the four elements of interactional metadiscourse are all deployed in the article text....