English Language Franca (ELF) and the possible future of English by Jennifer Jenkins, Director of the centre for Global Englishes, University of Southampton (Presented in IATEFL/TESOL Web Conference)

1. What I have learnt from the topic presented

English as a Multilingual Franca (EMF) is multilingual communication in which English is available as a contact language of choice, but it is not necessarily chosen. In other words, EMF refers to multilingual communication settings in which English is known to everyone present, so it is always potentially in the ‘language mix’, but in which people may choose to use a different language from English (partly or entirely), or a combination of other different languages.

Early influences on ELF Research:

1.       Language attitudes/ mutual (noun) intelligibility (Wolf 1959)

It seems to be very interested to understand the language attitudes. Phonological/phonetic accommodation skills are equally important for the ELF students.

2.       Speech/communication accommodation theory (giles a all)

Accommodation involves the way people adjust their language. People have a conversation to make their partner understand about what they say and intend to get an attention.

3.       World Englishes: legitimizing non –native English (es)

The EFL students particularly have the different languages and they are trying to adapt English as their own language, for example the pronunciation. Many native English pronunciation features found in the data not to contribute to intelligibility in ELF communication.

Some ideological positions about non-native English, for example fallacies “that in the outer and expanding Circle, English is essentially learned to interact with native speakers. In a major conceptual difference, in contrast to the national, geographically definable WE varieties, ELF by definition transcends language boundaries, so cannot be geographically definable and its resulting fluidity means we cannot talk to ELF ‘varieties’.

In our age of actual/virtual mobility and the resulting super diversity, there is too much emphasizes on English and not enough emphasis on the role of the other language spoken by the majority of English users.

There are some potential implications of EMF:

1.       The crucial distinction for competence

2.       There is a need to test skills in multilingualism for English Language Assessment.

3.       ELT needs to incorporate into teaching methodology

2. What is the relationship of the conference topic and today’s classroom?

This conference helps to develop our knowledge in presenting a topic in a conference and how to organize it.  It also gives some contributions in writing a good manuscript.  

4.       What are things we learn from the presenter?

 From the presentation, the speaker had prepared all the things well. It showed from the presentation slide, she organized the topic from the main to the specific idea. She also put some bolds in words or sentences which are important to help the audience got the main idea easily. The presenter also has a good ethic in delivering her speech; she conveyed her apology if in the middle of the presentation will be some technical distractions occurred.