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Raising awareness of ELF in an internationalising university

Raising awareness of ELF in an internationalising university. Rachel Wicaksono Centre for Languages and Linguistics York St John University, UK. Outline. International students are often blamed for communication problems in UK university classrooms where English is a lingua franca ?

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Raising awareness of ELF in an internationalising university

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  1. Raising awareness of ELF in an internationalising university Rachel Wicaksono Centre for Languages and Linguistics York St John University, UK

  2. Outline • International students are often blamed for communication problems in UK university classrooms where English is a lingua franca? • This is despite emerging evidence that it is sometimes UK students who lack the language awareness necessary for effective international communication? • This presentation contrasts two different approaches to language awareness and makes some practical suggestions for materials developers.

  3. Who speaks lingua franca English? English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) refers to the use of English as a medium of communication between peoples of different languages (VOICE/FAQ, 2009).

  4. Monitoring each other’s language multilingual communities have known [this] all along: language learning and language use succeed through performance strategies, situational resources, and social negotiations in fluid communicative contexts. Proficiency is therefore practice-based, adaptive and emergent…. The speakers are able to monitor each other’s language proficiency to determine mutually the appropriate grammar, lexical range and pragmatic conventions that would ensure intelligibility (Canagarajah, 2007 pp. 923 - 925).

  5. Teaching ‘international English’ Research is also beginning to show how bad some native speakers are at using English for international communication. It may be that elements of an [English as a lingua franca] syllabus could usefully be taught within a mother tongue curriculum (Graddol, 2006 p. 87). (See also Smith, 1983; Rajagopalan, 2004; Wicaksono, 2012).

  6. ELF in an internationalising university • International students are blamed for communication problems in UK university classrooms where English is a lingua franca? • Emerging evidence that it may be UK students who lack the language awareness necessary for effective international communication? • Definitions of language awareness? http://www.languageawareness.org/web.ala/web/about/tout.php

  7. Attempts to raise language awareness? • Five-domain framework for the description of approaches to language awareness-raising: affective, social, power, cognitive and performance (James and Garrett, 1991). • Aims, methods and outcomes of two different approaches to language awareness-raising, in EFL/TESOL (Andrews, 2007) and in UK English language secondary school teaching (Carter, 1990).

  8. UK schools A general language awareness involves at least: (a) awareness of some of the properties of language; creativity and playfulness; its double meanings. (b) awareness of the embedding of language within culture. Learning to read the language is learning about the cultural properties of the language. Idioms and metaphor, in particular, reveal a lot about the culture.

  9. UK schools (c) a greater self-consciousness about the forms of the language we use. We need to recognise that the relations between the forms and meaning of a language are sometimes arbitrary, but the language is a system and that it is for the most part systematically patterned. (d) awareness of the close relationship between language and ideology. It involves ‘seeing through language’ in other words (Carter, 1994, cited in Andrews, 2007).

  10. EFL/TESOL Traditionally (c ) has been the cornerstone of curricula in L2 education, where, whatever the disagreements about the role of explicit knowledge of grammar, a focus on the forms of language and the relationship between form and meaning is generally uncontroversial (Andrews, 2007 p. 13).

  11. LA in an internationalising university What are the benefits and drawbacks of these two contrasting approaches in the cosmopolitan environment of an internationalising UK university….where the dividing lines between the Englishes of EAL students and the Englishes of UK students are blurred??

  12. Practical suggestions? • Require students to collect examples of ‘authentic’ English as a lingua franca use (including interactions in which they were involved…). • Design tasks which require students to consider the operation of the 5 domains: (affective, social, power, cognitive and performance) in their data. • Require students to compare and contrast their findings with each other, and to reflect on their task achievement and their roles/relationships/linguistic identities.

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