What is English as a Lingua Franca?
The literature on ELF, it has to be said, is not always clear or unanimous as to the
nature of this phenomenon. This is not surprising given that ELF is relatively recent
by contrast with EFL. But let us begin with a straightforward definition: we can
consider ELF, in essence, a means of communication in English between speakers
who have different first languages. Most commentators would agree with this. Where
they start to disagree is whether a native speaker of English (henceforth NS) can
participate in ELF communication. A minority of scholars (e.g. House 2003) argue
that ELF by definition excludes NSs. On the other hand, the majority (e.g. Seidlhofer
2004, Jenkins 2007) believe that NSs can indeed participate in ELF, but that when
they do so, the situation is very different from EFL, in that NSs no longer set the
linguistic agenda and should not expect the non-native participants in the interaction
to defer to NS norms. For this reason, ELF corpora such as the Vienna-Oxford
International Corpus of English, or VOICE (see Seidlhofer and Widdowson, this
volume) either exclude NSs of English from their data collection or, as in the case of
VOICE, restrict the number of NSs that can be present in their data (e.g. VOICE
stipulates a maximum of ten per cent in any interaction). This ensures both that NSs
do not distort the data with an untypical number of ENL forms or (wittingly or
unwittingly) act as norm-providers, making the NNS participants feel under pressure
to ‘speak like them’.
This brings me to another area where the literature is not always straightforward: the
differences between traditional EFL and ELF. While some scholars and English
teaching professionals regard ELF (or EIL, English as an International Language, as it
is sometimes called) as merely the international spread of NS English norms (this is,
in effect, what EFL entails), ELF researchers see things very differently. The
following table sums up the differences between their ELF perspective and an EFL
approach: