Contrastive rhetoric

part of the global Englishes paradigm "according to which most speakers of 
English are non-native speakers ..., and all English varieties, native or non-native, 
are accepted in their own right rather than evaluated against a NSE benchmark"
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. 
Key to the ELF approach is viewing users of ELF as accomplished multilingual 
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Jenkins, J., Cogo, A., & Dewey, M. (2011 ). Review of developments in research into English as a Lingua Franca. 
Language Teaching,
44(3), 281-315. 

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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
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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 
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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.

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38 
relevant to the ELF paradigm. For example, Dewey discusses
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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
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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 
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Dewey, M. (2007). English as a lingua franca and globalization: an interconnected perspective.