English as a lingua franca: Prof. Jennifer Jenkins’ talk

Prof. Jenkins

Second language education group series, University of Cambridge, 22 Feb, 2016

Back in the 80’s, researching English spoken by non native speakers was considered as a waste of time: what is the point in researching “bad” English?

In the early days, it was language ideologies and attitudes, mutual intelligibility, speech and accommodation theory, and the early world Englishes literature (Kachru, Snith,etc.).

Kachru, The Other Tongue. English across cultures.

The Lingua Franca Core (pronunciation only).

VOICE corpus, Seidlhofer, some common features identified

ELFA corpus, Mauranen

Inherent fluidity (Seidlhofer, 2009)

Not tied to Angliphone cultures

Not restristed to representing their own L1/culture

Hybrid culture practices

Similect speakers, Mauranen (2012)

Definitions of ELF:

English used as a contact language among speakers from different first languages (Jenkins, 2009)

ELF in NOT about establishing a variety, although it continues to be thought so by many (even quoting Jenkins herself).

Celia Roberts: the ELF bubble (June 2013), ELF as being self-contained

Multilingualism research:

Translanguaging, Garcia 2009, Garcia & Li Wei, 2014. Different from code-switching,

Flexible bilingual pedagogy

ELF refers to English as used as a contact language among speakers from different first languages (Jenkins 2009).

L1 transfer becomes language leakage or language seepage.