English As A Lingua Franca In Wider Networking

In a constantly interconnected world communication takes place beyond territorial boundaries, in networks where English works as a lingua franca. The volume explores how ELF is employed in internationally-oriented personal blogs; findings show how bloggers deploy an array of resources to their expressive and interactional aims, combining global and local communicative practices. Implications of findings in ELF and ELT terms are also discussed.

This volume examines the role of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in education in Europe. Following the implementation of the Bologna process, English has assumed a central role in European education offering institutions the opportunity to cater to the needs of an internationalized student body and increase their competitiveness. On the other hand, the increased use of ELF has become an issue of concern, often perceived as a threat to other languages, tilting the scale towards linguistic inequality and stressing the urgent need for the development of new language policies. Both aspects of ELF are at the center of discussion in the proposed volume, which consists of a variety of papers examining ELF in different parts of Europe (Eastern, Central and Western) and different levels of education. The volume makes a substantial contribution to the lively and controversial debate about what is recognized as a central topical concern of language education policy in Europe and beyond.

This edited volume addresses perspectives and prospects of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in connection with other areas of linguistics. It is the first volume that brings together ELF scholars and experts from a wide range of areas in linguistics (such as corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, language pedagogy, language policy, intercultural communication) in order to explore how ELF relates to these fields.

Today, the Internet has become a prime venue for social interaction through online services where people share aspects of their daily lives, talk about their interests with other like-minded people, and express their opinions without formality or constraint. Against this background, this book investigates the aesthetics of informal text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC), such as question-and-answer websites conceived of as a distinctive medium of communication based on cosmopolitan brand communities that share the same field of expertise and a common interest in a particular topic. By adopting sentiment analysis in order to recognize the positive or negative semantic orientation of texts and their emotional style, the book demonstrates that the aesthetics of such informal texts written using Digital English as a Lingua Franca (DELF) is influenced by how we associate emotions and opinions with certain linguistic aspects, such as specific words or syntactic patterns, and how we can classify linguistic expressions according to the type of opinion that they convey.

A complete introduction to the theoretical nature and practical implications of English used as a lingua franca. Explore the theories and principles of English as a Lingua Franca with leading expert Barbara Seidlhofer

This book explores the interfaces of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) pedagogy. It presents the theoretical aspects of ELF, discusses issues and challenges that ELF raises for the EFL classroom, and demonstrates how EFL practitioners can make use of ELF theorizing for classroom instruction, teacher education, developing language learning materials, policymaking and testing and assessment. Accounts of innovative and practical pedagogical practices and researchers’ insights from diverse geographical, cultural and institutional contexts will inform and inspire EFL practitioners to reconsider their practices and adopt new techniques in order to meet their learners’ diverse communicative needs in international contexts.

This book investigates formal characteristics and discourse functions of linguistic creativity at the level of idioms in spoken ELF as represented in the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE). Building on the findings of previous ELF research, the book proposes that creativity might serve as a fundamental concept in accounting for the variation that seems to be central to describing and understanding English as a lingua franca.

English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) research has become central in current debates in linguistics and is commonly referred to in conferences dealing with other sub-fields of sociolinguistics. This volume collects ten papers that testify to the great scope of ELF research currently being carried out through the analysis of different kinds of data in a variety of contexts and domains. The three chapters in the first part of the volume tackle computer-mediated communication, a medium that currently accounts for a great proportion of human communication. The four contributions in the second section differ with regards to the domains under investigation, and all touch upon social issues that have an impact on how language is used: from Vietnamese university students negotiating their identities in the UK to a Pakistani migrant making efforts to be understood by Italian officials. Finally, the three papers in the final part are an example of the many ELF-oriented pedagogical initiatives that have emerged in recent years across educational levels and all over the world. The introduction to the volume also situates ELF research in its current transition to a third phase in which more attention will be paid to the multilingual nature of ELF users. The proposal put forward in the introductory chapter holds that ELF has two well established fronts where more quality work will surely be carried out, and that ELF could benefit from establishing connections to other approaches to multilingualism and languaging, but without forgetting what the E in the acronym stands for. This collection of papers will be of interest to teachers and language practitioners who are curious about the ELF paradigm; researchers in ELF and in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics in general; internet linguists and computer-medaited communication experts; educational policymakers; and undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses in areas such as applied linguistics, English studies, multilingualism and plurilingualism, and intercultural communication, amongst other fields.