An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

4.6 Assessing English as a lingua franca
One of the by-products of the global spread of English in the second half of the
twentieth century is the lingua franca phenomenon. Like other imperial languages
before it, English has taken on the role of world language but the variety of English
used widely among non-native speakers of English (NNS) is, claims Barbara
Seidlhofer (2001), not English but English as a lingua franca (ELF). It is, she claims,
a new international variety for which empirical evidence exits in the Vienna–Oxford
corpus of ELF, that is English used among NNSs (in Europe) professionally rather
than personally. Catherine Elder and I were invited to consider the possibilities of
assessing such a code. Our contribution is now published (Elder and Davies 2006).
We argued that the development of tests cannot take place while there is uncertainty
as to the norms of ELF. And when ELF norms reach the point of being structurally
stable enough for codification purposes and hence operationalisable in the form
of language tests, they would then have the power to disenfranchise non-‘standard’
speakers of ELF, much as current tests of standard English do. 
Our conclusion was not optimistic. We accepted the good intent of those
involved with ELF but considered that ‘what is currently a proposal for legit -
imization of non standardness and affirmation of NNS identity could risk becoming
a new monolithic standard with all the attendant consequences for those lacking the
command of the code’. Of course, if we accept Joseph’s expansion to Arnold’s
‘imagined communities’ (see 4.5 above) then the very existence of ELF as a
NNS–NNS vehicle of communication demonstrates the possibility that a national
language can shape national identity, in addition to the reverse process.
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For applied linguistics, the ELF project is further evidence for the importance of
reducing emphasis in language tests on the linguistics code which can, after all, offer
only partial explanations for the communicative phenomena we try hard to capture
in our tests and further refinements in our understanding of the pragmatics of
particular intercultural and cross-cultural encounters. Furthermore, it forces us to
recognise that, when used in interaction, language is not an abstract construct but is
embodied in people.