English as a Lingua Franca: Theorizing and Teaching English examines the English used among non-native speakers around the world today and its relation to English as a native language, as well as the implications for English language teaching. Challenging and incisive, this book analyses positive and negative accounts of English as a lingua franca, and its linguistic features, within the context of: native and World Englishes multilingualism and intercultural communication sociolinguistic issues including accent and identity classroom teaching and learning English as a Lingua Franca is a useful guide for teachers and trainee teachers, and will be essential reading for advanced students and linguists concerned with multilingualism, language contact, language learning, language change, and the place of English in the world today.

Explores the language behaviour of speakers of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), through the lens of Gricean pragmatics. It will be of interest to a wide range of scholars across the fields of pragmatics, language contact, world Englishes, second language acquisition, and English as a second language.

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.

The study of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) has grown considerably in the last decades, and a wide number of issues related to this field have been addressed through a variety of lenses. These range from the changes occurring in spoken English, to the much-debated notion of the native-speaker; from the threat that English represents for minority languages, to the metadiscourse(s) contributing to the myth of English as a language equally accessible to speakers of all nationalities. Adopting different perspectives and positions, the articles in this special issue of The Interpreter and Translator Trainer all demonstrate that ELF poses many challenges to the teaching of translation and that, while there are no simple and ready-made solutions, such challenges need to be taken on board to fill the current gap between translation pedagogy and translation practice. The volume is intended as a starting point to encourage educators to rethink their approach to translation pedagogy by envisaging tools and practices that can contribute to preparing students to become professional translators of ELF and reflective practitioners who are aware of the centrality of translation in the digital age.

In the past 15 years, English as a lingua franca (ELF) has evolved from a ‘niche topic’ of a relatively small group of specialists to a highly productive research area that now has a firm place on the map of linguistics. Looking back (as well as forward), this edited volume addresses perspectives and prospects of ELF in connection with other areas of linguistics. It is the first volume that brings together ELF scholars with experts from a wide range of areas in linguistics (such as corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, language pedagogy, language policy, intercultural communication). Adopting an inter-/transdisciplinary approach, the book traces the impact that discussions about ELF have had – or may have – beyond the study of ELF as such: for the conceptualization, description, methodology, pedagogy and politics of ‘English’. As the book combines external perspectives on ELF, provided by well-known scholars in diverse fields, with a smaller number of internal perspectives provided by prominent ELF scholars, it will be of interest not only to students and researchers interested in ELF, but also to students and scholars in Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics and Intercultural Communication.

A lingua franca perspective into English language teaching in Brazil has only recently take flight. As an emerging economy, the country faces enormous challenges when it comes to language education in schools, where English has traditionally been taught as a foreign language. This collection brings the perspectives of academics and language practitioners in their efforts to incorporate an ELF approach into teacher education, thus offering a voice sorely missed in the international community interested in developing new approaches to English in a global world.

ELF researchers have been describing the dynamic and fluid ways in which multilingual speakers shape English in transcultural communication for more than two decades now. While this work seriously challenges traditional, static, and prejudiced views of English, the diverse and variable nature of its uses and users continues to be undermined in many EFL programs around the world. This is also the case in many Latin American contexts, which have been described as fertile ground for native-speaker ideology, but where the body of ELF literature is still scarce when compared to Asian and European settings. This book is the first to bring together a series of empirical studies on the implications of ELF perspectives for communicative, educational, and policy-making practices across different Latin American countries. It not only explores how ELF perspectives can inform students and educators in these settings, but also how locally emerging voices, experiences, and research traditions can help expand ELF theorising as well. The volume generates new opportunities for dialogue and global collaboration between researchers and practitioners interested in ELF studies as a critical approach to English language use and education.

In this first book-length treatment of MELF, the authors assert that MELF represents an important contribution to our understanding of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), in that existing ELF research has been limited to relatively low stakes communicative situations, such as interactions in business, academia, internet blogging or casual conversations. Medical contexts, in contrast, often represent situations calling for exceptional communicative precision and urgency. Providing both evidence from their own research and analysis from (the limited number of) existing studies, the authors offer a counterpoint to the optimism regarding communicative success prevalent in ELF. The book proposes a theoretical perspective on how the various features of healthcare communication serve as important variables in shaping interaction among speakers of ELF, further enlarging our understanding of this emerging sub-field.

This collection brings new insight into the relationship between English as a lingua franca and language teaching. It explores how the pedagogy of intelligibility, culture and language awareness, as well as materials analysis and classroom management, can be viewed from an ELF perspective in school and university contexts.

The aim of this edited volume is to examine how current theories and principles underlying English as a Lingua Franca studies contribute to research on present pedagogical practices in ELF contexts. The book provides useful insights into pedagogical practices in different ELF settings and knowledge on the pedagogy-policy relationship in terms of ELF.