English as an academic lingua franca: The ELFA project

Abstract English is unquestionably the world language of academia – yet its most notable characteristic, being predominantly used by non-native speakers, has not seriously been taken on board in ESP descriptive studies. The project English as an academic lingua franca (ELFA) based at the University of Helsinki investigates academic discourses, branching out into two parts: one is the ELFA (English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings) corpus project, whose major achievement is the 1-million-word ELFA corpus of spoken academic discourse. The other part is SELF (Studying in English as a Lingua Franca), a project with a micro-analytic orientation, which aims at capturing participant experience of ELF in a university environment. This research note describes the rationale and the design of the ELFA corpus, and introduces recent research in the project.

[1]  Anna Mauranen.  Signaling and preventing misunderstanding in English as lingua franca communication , 2006 .

[2]  Mary Lea,et al.  The "Academic Literacies" Model: Theory and Applications , 2006 .

[3]  Jennifer Jenkins,et al.  The Phonology of English as an International Language: New Models, New Norms, New Goals , 2000 .

[4]  Brenda Leibowitz,et al.  Becoming Academically Literate in South Africa: Lessons from Student Accounts for Policymakers and Educators , 2004 .

[5]  Barbara Seidlhofer,et al.  ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA IN EUROPE: CHALLENGES FOR APPLIED LINGUISTICS , 2006, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics.

[6]  M. Rampton,et al.  Displacing the ‘native speaker’: expertise, affiliation, and inheritance , 1990 .

[7]  Maria Metsä-Ketelä,et al.  “Words are more or less superfluous”: the Case of more or less in Academic Lingua Franca English , 2006 .

[8]  C. Geertz.  Local Knowledge: Further Essays In Interpretive Anthropology , 1983 .

[9]  Anna Mauranen.  Chunking in ELF: Expressions for managing interaction , 2009 .

[10]  Alan Davies,et al.  The Native Speaker: Myth and Reality , 2003 .

[11]  H. Widdowson.  The Ownership of English , 1994 .

[12]  C. Tardy.  The role of English in scientific communication: Lingua franca or Tyrannosaurus rex? , 2004 .

[13]  Elina Ranta.  The 'Attractive' Progressive - Why use the -ing Form in English as a Lingua Franca? , 2006 .

[14]  Anna Mauranen,et al.  Introduction: English as A Lingua Franca , 2006 .

[15]  Anna Mauranen.  The Corpus of English as Lingua Franca in Academic Settings , 2003 .

[16]  A. Suresh Canagarajah,et al.  Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching , 1999 .

[17]  Anna Mauranen,et al.  A Rich Domain of ELF - the ELFA Corpus of Academic Discourse , 2006 .

[18]  Anna Mauranen.  Hybrid Voices: English as the Lingua Franca of Academics , 2007 .

[19]  B. Seidlhofer.  Closing A Conceptual Gap: The Case For A Description Of English As A Lingua Franca , 2001 .

[20]  A. Pennycook.  English and the discourses of colonialism , 1998 .

[21]  Anna Mauranen,et al.  English as a Lingua Franca: Studies and Findings , 2009 .

[22]  George Braine,et al.  Academic literacy and the nonnative speaker graduate student , 2002 .

[23]  John M. Swales,et al.  English as Tyrannosaurus rex , 1997 .

[24]  R. Phillipson.  Linguistic Imperialism Continued , 2009 .

[25]  Robert Phillipson,et al.  English, a cuckoo in the European higher education nest of languages? , 2006 .

[26]  Sally Jacoby,et al.  The Constitution of Expert-Novice in Scientific Discourse! , 1991 .