37
and multicultural communicators with a range of associated knowledge, skills and
attitudes.
This is seen as a direct contrast to the EFL (English as a foreign language)
paradigm which regards L2 English users as deficient in comparison to a NES
baseline. Rather than the mastery of a single variety of English, proficient ELF
users are seen as successful negotiators of variety.
Indeed there is a growing consensus that what is shared in accounts of ELF
is not stable identifiable linguistic features but rather inherent variety". As
Seidlhofer
explains, ELF research does not consist of "spotting and counting
discrete features but of looking for insights into variability and potential change
that the increased use of English as a lingua franca makes possible". Therefore,
ELF can be seen as taking a genuinely emergentist position on language, in which
language is seen as always in process with no fixed end point. This emergentist
perspective is echoed by
Pennycook when he proposes
63
that "ELF research ...
seeks to show how English is always under negotiation".
Thus in ELF studies there is a concern with the processes of communication
rather than a fixed 'end product', ".it may turn out that what is distinctive about
ELF lies in the communicative strategies that its speakers use rather than in their
conformity to any changed set of language norms". Some of the communicative
strategies which have been identified as salient in ELF include pragmatic skills
such as accommodation, cooperation and code switching, language awareness and
intercultural
awareness, including the ability to mediate and negotiate between
different communicative norms.
The ELF paradigm has crucial implications for our understanding of the
relationship between culture and language. In explicitly rejecting the NES and the
national in accounting for language use we are forced to reconsider the link
between language and socio-cultural contexts. The post-modern fluid, dynamic and
emergentist positions on culture and language outlined earlier are clearly the most
63
Pennycook, A. (2009). Plurilithic Englishes: towards a 3D model. In K. Murata & J. Jenkins
(Eds.), Global
Englishes in Asian contexts : current and future debates (pp. 194-207). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
38
relevant to the ELF paradigm. For example,
Dewey discusses
64
the manner in
which ELF must be viewed as a fundamentally global phenomenon in which no
one community or nation can be seen as owners of the language with cultural
identification and production transcending national or even trans-national
classification.
Baker explicitly deals
65
with the cultural dimension to ELF
communication, suggesting that there will be no one culture of ELF but rather
cultures as emergent resources with users moving between and negotiating
individual, local, national and global references and forms. From a theoretical
perspective, Baker draws
on the ideas of global flows, and the associated
movement between local and global communities and communities of practice.
Baker also presents empirical data demonstrating proficient ELF users discussing
and negotiating cultural references and communicative norms in a highly fluid
way. Such approaches problematise taking a solely national account of culture and
offer an alternative non-essentialist perspective on culture in which culture is still
seen as a valuable category in interpreting communication. ELF research thus
provides IR with an example of the manner in which culture can be theorised as a
relevant category in understanding intercultural communication
which avoids the
essentialism of received culture and incorporates many of the insights from critical
post-modern approaches.
ELF and written language. Most empirical research in ELF has focused on
spoken language and although many of its insights into intercultural
communication through English are of interest, we might question its value to a
field whose main concern is written texts. However,
ELF research has been
interested in academic contexts from the very beginning, as has CR/IR, with both
the VOICE (Vienna Oxford International Corpus of English) corpus and the ELFA
(English as a lingua franca in academic settings) corpus comprising large amounts
of data from such settings. Nevertheless, the concern has not been with written
texts. More recently, though, this has changed, with
ELF scholars increasingly
64
Dewey, M. (2007). English as a lingua franca and globalization: an interconnected perspective.
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