Understanding English as a Lingua Franca. Barbara Seidlhofer
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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.
I mentioned earlier that this book has been long in the making. When I first announced my intention to compile a corpus of ELF interactions at an English studies conference in 2000, many found this a strange idea. A decade on, ELF research has really taken off: with the corpora VOICE (now accessible online) and ELFA, the corpus of English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings, more and more descriptive work being published and studies undertaken for PhD theses and MA dissertations becoming available, a series of annual international conferences, and a newly founded international journal, the Journal of English as a Lingua Franca, the field of ELF study is thriving. As is of course the phenomenon that is being studied as ELF continues to spread. Most of its users are not much concerned about the controversial issues their activities give rise to: they just get on with using ELF in their daily personal and professional lives as the most effective, and often only, means of communication available to them.
The primary purpose of this book is to raise awareness in (mainly applied) linguists and language teaching practitioners about the significance of ELF. I do not claim that this is the first or only attempt at doing this. There have been a number of articles and book chapters dealing with conceptual questions regarding ELF, and there are now a few excellent sources that provide insights into recent empirical ELF research to date, and these have obviously informed my own thinking. In writing this book, I have also drawn and expanded on earlier work I have published myself in articles and book chapters (listed in the Acknowledgements section) and integrated them into the discussion. This procedure has enabled me to connect up-to-date studies with ELF work as it has evolved over recent years and to make connections with areas of research outside ELF, but relevant to it, such as second language acquisition, sociolinguistic variation, World Englishes, and earlier conceptual and empirical approaches to English for international communication.
ELF is a controversial topic. Both as a phenomenon and as an area of study it has aroused a good deal of animated debate and animosity. It has been said that the study of ELF is ideologically motivated, and if this means that ELF researchers have particular ways of thinking about the way the world is and about desirable goals and actions, then of course it is. But so is every other way of thinking about ‘English’. Ideologies can either be aimed at change in society, or at adherence to conformity. Of course, change is more noticeable than continuity or stagnation, and this is what defenders of the general validity of Standard English tend to overlook. Whether one believes in the need for change in established ways of thinking, or for preserving the status quo, there is some obligation, I would think, to make explicit the grounds for the belief through argument and empirical evidence. This is what I have tried to do in this book in putting forward a case for change. But it is not a propaganda exercise to promote the study of ELF as a new ‘paradigm’, or a new ‘ELF model’ for teaching. And it certainly does not have the agenda of furthering the global dominance of English at the expense of other languages. Its purpose, as its title indicates, is to try to get at a fuller understanding of this global phenomenon and to consider what implications this understanding might have for our thinking about the role of English alongside other languages and the most appropriate approach to teaching and learning it.
1
What is this thing called English?
… the English language no longer belongs numerically to speakers of English as a mother tongue, or first language. The ownership (by which I mean the power to adapt and change) of any language in effect rests with the people who use it, whoever they are, however multilingual they are, however monolingual they are.
1.1 English as an international language (EIL)
This book is about English as an international language. This, of course, is a topic that has been extensively discussed elsewhere, and I take as my starting point comments made by David Graddol in his wide-ranging study English Next (Graddol 2006). In his introduction to the book, Graddol summarizes the main findings of his earlier treatment of the topic (Graddol 1997) in a list of bullet points. The first of these is that ‘the future development of English as a global language might be less straightforward than had been assumed’. He then comments as follows:
It is difficult to recapture the sense of complacency evident amongst some native English speakers in the mid-1990s for whom even the first of these points provided a challenge. The global ‘triumph’ of English was understood as a done deal. And, given the widespread recent discussion in the west about the global impact of China, it is equally difficult to appreciate the general lack of awareness, little more than five years ago, of the rapid transformation already then taking place in East Asia. But the world has been changing so fast that it scarcely seems to be the same place as that of the 1990s1 …
What has not changed, Graddol observes, is the enormous global demand for learning English, with learners becoming ever more numerous, and beginning at an ever earlier age. The popularity of English has become a fact so familiar that it is hardly newsworthy any more. However, he continues:
But at what point do we pause, take a fresh look at what is happening and decide that what is going on now is not just ‘more of the same’. After scrutinising current trends, including those which have not yet reached the statistical yearbooks, I conclude that there has been a significant – even dramatic – qualitative change: one that may be taking the language in a very new direction.
It is precisely this ‘very new direction’ that the present book sets out to explore. Its basic message is that the dramatic ‘qualitative change’ Graddol is referring to is due to the role that English now plays as a global lingua franca, and that this must have significant consequences for the language itself and the way we conceive of it.
Of course nobody would dispute the fact that English has spread all over the globe to become the predominant international language. This, after all, is the principal reason why it figures as the primary foreign or other language in school curricula all over the world. In the early 21st century, English is not only an international language, but the international language.
It is impossible to give exact figures for ‘speakers of English’, not least because just how you define who qualifies as a speaker is bound to be arbitrary.2 So while estimates of speakers are bound to be vague, the orders of magnitude seem to be fairly clear. Here are some figures, which taken together certainly amount to the conclusion that ‘native speakers’ of English are clearly outnumbered by ‘non-native speakers’: Crystal (2003b: 69) gives the following estimates for speakers of English in terms of Kachru’s model of ‘concentric circles’ (Kachru 1992): ‘Inner Circle’, i.e. first language in, for example, UK, USA: 320–380 million; ‘Outer Circle’, i.e. additional language, in India, Nigeria: 300–500 million; ‘Expanding Circle’, i.e. foreign language, in China, Russia: 500–1000 million.3 This means that ‘one in four of the world’s population are now capable of communicating to a useful level in English’ (Crystal 2006a: 425) and in turn, that roughly only one out of every four users of English in the world is a ‘native speaker’ of the language. While this insight should not lead us to ignore the fact that about three quarters of the world’s population are left without such command of English and often without even any prospect of gaining access to it, it does not alter the fact that the spread of English, geographically but also in terms of social strata and domains of use, is on a scale that no other language has ever reached in the history of the planet. The German author Beneke (1991: 54) adds another
Since Graddol wrote this, the impact of China and other countries such as India has grown even more rapidly. This state of affairs is perceived as worrying by people/countries for whom the global spread of ‘their’ language (English) represents an advantage. This may explain the debates often raging, for example, in Britain (and hardly noticed elsewhere) about ‘the state of the language’ (see Jones and Bradwell 2007; Ostler 2010).
See Crystal 2003a regarding the difficulties involved in counting speakers.
It is interesting to compare these figures with the first edition of the book in 1997. Figures have shot up for Outer and Expanding Circle (see review by Leech in