This paper will report the findings of a study that has investigated spoken English as a lingua franca (ELF) usage in Swedish higher education. The material comprises digital recordings of lectures ...and student group-work sessions, all being naturally occurring, authentic high-stakes spoken exchange, i.e. from non-language-teaching contexts. The aim of the present paper, which constitutes a part of a larger study, has been to investigate the role pragmatic strategies play in the communicative effectiveness of English as a lingua franca. The paper will document types of pragmatic strategies as well as point to important differences between the two speech event types and the implications of these differences for English-medium education. The findings show that lecturers in ELF settings make less frequent use of pragmatic strategies than students who deploy these strategies frequently in group-work sessions. Earlier stages of the present study (
Björkman, 2008a, 2008b, 2009) showed that despite frequent non-standardness in the morphosyntax level, there is little overt disturbance in student group-work, and it is highly likely that a variety of pragmatic strategies that students deploy prevents some disturbance. It is reasonable to assume that, in the absence of appropriate pragmatic strategies used often in lectures, there is an increased risk for covert disturbance.
► Diversity is a key feature of interaction in English as a lingua franca (ELF). ► One way speakers manage this diversity is through their self-repair practices. ► Modifications may include using ...more specific terms, qualifying statements and making references explicit. ► There is a move from the general to the specific and from vague to explicit. ► Such practices help enhance the clarity of utterances and pre-empt trouble in understanding.
A key feature of interaction in English as a lingua franca (ELF) is diversity – in the varieties of English spoken, the levels of proficiency displayed and the cultural norms and communicative styles of the participants – which can pose challenges to the process of achieving shared understanding in talk. Research into ELF, however, shows that participants make adept use of interactional practices to both pre-empt and resolve problems of understanding. Additionally, speakers use various “explicitness strategies” (
Mauranen, 2007) to enhance the clarity of utterances and promote the comprehensibility of speech. This paper examines further the notion of raising explicitness of expression by looking at some of the self-repair practices of speakers using ELF. Using conversation analysis procedures, 15
h of audio-recorded naturally occurring ELF conversations of international graduate students were analyzed for this purpose. Instances of self-initiated repair were examined to identify the types of repair performed and the kinds of trouble addressed. The results show that in addition to correcting, the participants employ a variety of self-repair practices that make utterances explicit and improve communicative clarity. The speakers’ meticulous attention to clarity and explicitness possibly stems from an awareness of the precarious nature of the ELF situation.
In the last two decades, English-Medium Instruction (EMI) has fast increased in non-Anglophone universities, with the result that non-native English speaker (NNES) lecturers are increasingly using ...English as a lingua franca (ELF) to interact with their NNES students in the classroom. As such, EMI represents “a prototypical ELF scenario” (Smit 2017, 387). This paper identifies and describes language variations that occurred in EMI lecturers’ talk in a comparable corpus of six EMI engineering lectures taught in two different teaching modalities: in-person and virtual synchronous classrooms. By means of a corpus-based methodology, this study particularly focuses on lexical spatial deixis as it allows the lecturer to direct students’ attention towards a common referent so as to ensure students’ comprehension and participation (Hyland 2005). The findings indicate that the use of proximal deictics differs according to the context, with interactional and pedagogical implications beyond EMI.
This paper investigates the mechanisms of
mediation in an English-medium university seminar course. Mediation refers to a form of speaking for another where a co-participant starts rephrasing another ...participant's turn that was addressed to a third party. The paper sets out to investigate mediation in multiparty interaction. It adopts a situated approach and combines analysis of university seminar course interaction with interview data. The findings suggest that mediation occurs frequently in the university course analysed and that the institutional practices of the course influence the practice of mediation: the course teachers take on the role of an intermediary. Mediation seems to have three main functions: (1) It facilitates understanding between participants. By providing alternative ways of expressing the same thing, intermediaries help participants to take part in the discussion. (2) Mediation organises discourse, and it is a way for the teachers to manage interaction. (3) It also has a socialising function in that it can include evaluation of students’ contributions. Mediation is a means to engage participants who otherwise may not be able to participate in the interaction, and thus serves as a useful co-operation strategy.
A commentary and analysis on the miscommunication of medication names between native Arabic-speaking patients and pharmacists with a native English-speaking family physician using Medical English as ...a Lingua Franca (MELF), in a healthcare context. An important cause of communication difficulties is the different way native English and native Arabic speakers linguistically process medication names when using MELF. This is likely to be explained by the differences in the native grammars of English and Arabic which determine differences in pronunciation and predict potential error prone groupings of letters and sounds. This in turn leads to repeating linguistic errors such as epenthesis (insertion of additional vowels between consonants) and metathesis (the swapping of adjacent consonants). The article highlights a case where both epenthesis and metathesis occur simultaneously leading to a potential serious adverse event through a medication error and suggests further avenues of research to minimise such errors.
During the first decade of a new millennium, interest in English as a lingua franca (ELF) increased dramatically. Therefore a lot of research has been done at a range of linguistic levels, such as ...lexis, grammar, pronunciation and pragmatics as well as on the morpho-syntactic properties of ELF interactions and the communi-cation strategies used by ELF speakers in order to facilitate communication and avoid misunderstandings. This has also been reflected in the approaches and attitudes towards English as a lingua franca in English Language Teaching. That is why we might need to rethink not only how English is taught, but also which kind or variety of English. We should take into account a wide range of global trends and the current transformations that English is undergoing. In this article we pay attention to the definitions and features of ELF. We also deal with the reasons why English has become a global language. We concentrate on the global nature of English, the process of globalization, and the results of various empirical research which have raised profound questions about current principle and practice in English language teaching. According to the pedagogic implications of ELF, it is necessary to take into account the key areas in particular: the nature of the language syllabus, teaching materials, approaches and methods, language assessment and the knowledge base of language teachers. Apart from this, we would like to highlight that the main aim of this article is to demonstrate the communicative advantages of an ELF approach and to raise awareness of ELF among teachers.
Knowing which phrases to use in everyday situations is a key part of communicating effectively in English, and increasingly language learning materials are expected to reflect this. This paper ...presents a corpus analysis of five contemporary self-study books for English language learners, to identify common phrases taught, assess their form and function, and evaluate them against a baseline of lexical bundles (i.e. recurring sequences of words) used in social situations by users of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). Self-study textbooks aim to equip the learner with enough English to function appropriately in a range of different contexts; they usually present language in the form of dialogues in common everyday situations, often supplemented with exercises, grammar explanations and glossaries. While they may differ in pedagogical approach, it could be anticipated that the lexical bundles found would be broadly similar. However, analysis of this corpus showed a lack of consistency both in the form and number of bundles found in the different publications. Furthermore, comparison with a corpus of ELF conversations extracted from the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE, version 2.0 XML) (
2013
) highlighted the underrepresentation of lexical bundles with certain pragmatic functions, such as hedges/stance expressions (I don’t know, I think) and vague language (a little bit).
In this paper, I will discuss the phenomenon of linguistic accommodation in
professional tourism contexts. Linguistic accommodation refers to the selection of one or various linguistic codes in ...conversations between speakers who do not
have the same mother tongue. This is a particularly salient phenomenon in the
multilingual setting of the European Union, where conversations between
tourism professionals and tourists may be in the local language, the mother
tongue of the tourist or a lingua franca, which happens to be English by default.
Since tourism professionals very often have several options to choose from, they
should be made aware of the diversity of tourists' attitudes and opinions towards
different forms of linguistic accommodation. To achieve this pedagogic goal, I
argue in favor of integrating into the didactic materials various corpora of
tourists' testimonials. These corpora have been previously analyzed in
sociolinguistic studies. Reading and analyzing the testimonials as a didactic
method fulfils three important didactic guidelines, namely the importance of
stimulating life-long learning, the importance of establishing bidirectional links
between school training and direct experience in practice, and the development
of pedagogically mediated corpora
En esta contribución se describe el fenómeno de la acomodación lingüística en
contextos profesionales turísticos. La acomodación lingüística se refiere a la
selección de uno o varios códigos en conversaciones entre hablantes que no tienen
la misma lengua materna. Este fenómeno está particularmente presente en el
espacio multilingüe de la Unión Europa, donde las conversaciones entre turistas y
profesionales pueden desarrollarse en la lengua local, la lengua materna del turista
o una lingua franca, por defecto el inglés. A menudo, los profesionales pueden elegir
entre diferentes opciones, por lo cual conviene sensibilizarlos y concienciarlos de
la diversidad de actitudes u opiniones que pueda haber entre los turistas. Para
realizar este objetivo pedagógico, se aboga por integrar en los materiales didácticos
varios corpus de testimonios de los propios turistas. Estos corpus han sido
analizados previamente en estudios de índole sociolingüística. La lectura y el
análisis de los testimonios como método didáctico responde a tres principios
importantes, que son la importancia del aprendizaje continuo, la importancia de
establecer vínculos bidireccionales entre la formación escolar y la experiencia
directa de la práctica, y el desarrollo de corpus mediados para fines pedagógicos
Mastering English as a lingua franca has become a first-rate skill for new professionals in most jobs around the world. According to the bilingualism policies in Colombia it is expected that students ...from higher education achieve a level of English between B1 or B2 according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL), with students from bachelor degree programs in foreign languages, the level must be C1, in this sense the Ministry of Education has implemented projects and strategies to get a bilingual professional with high communicative competences, according to the demands of the globalized world. However, most students show low levels of communicative proficiency in English according to the results of the test applied by ICFES. Despite the demands of learning English, weaknesses persist in the mastery of communicative competences. A constant concern is to investigate some causes of low communication skills in this language. This article presents the results of some research conducted in various countries around the world that has attempted to investigate these causes. The causes, according to the results of the research, have to do with social and cultural aspects, but more importantly, teacher performance is one of the most frequent causes. This requires special attention to start programs and projects aimed at training teachers in didactic competencies.
Dominar el inglés como lengua franca se ha convertido en una habilidad de primer nivel para nuevos profesionales en la mayoría de los trabajos en todo el mundo. De acuerdo con las políticas de bilingüismo en Colombia, se espera que los estudiantes de educación superior alcancen un nivel de inglés entre B1 o B2 de acuerdo con el Marco Común Europeo de Referencia para las Lenguas (MCERL), en el caso de estudiantes de programas de licenciatura en idiomas extranjeros, el nivel debe ser C1, en este sentido el Ministerio de Educación ha implementado proyectos y estrategias para conseguir un profesional bilingüe con altas competencias comunicativas, de acuerdo a las demandas del mundo globalizado. Sin embargo, la mayoría de los estudiantes muestran bajos niveles de competencia comunicativa en inglés según los resultados de la prueba aplicada por ICFES. A pesar de las exigencias en el aprendizaje del inglés, persisten deficiencias en el dominio de las competencias comunicativas de este idioma. Una preocupación constante es investigar algunas de las causas del bajo nivel de competencias comunicativas en este idioma. Este artículo presenta los resultados de algunas investigaciones realizadas en varios países del mundo que han tratado de investigar estas causas. Las causas, según los resultados de las investigaciones, tienen que ver con aspectos sociales y culturales, pero lo más importante es que el desempeño pedagógico del profesorado aparece como una de las causas más frecuentes. Esto requiere una atención especial para poner en marcha programas y proyectos destinados a formar a los profesores en competencias didácticas.
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