Perspectives on English as a Lingua Franca

This Textus issue investigates diverse theoretical and practical perspectives on the use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in international and intercultural communication. Starting from the assumption that in using ELF people from different linguacultural backgrounds appropriate the language and exploit its virtual meaning potential without conforming to native speakers’ norms of usage, this issue seeks to examine specifically how ELF users interact among themselves, how they understand each others’ ELF variations, and what kind of problems naturally arise when one set of native usage conventions, that users transfer to their ELF, comes into contact, and into conflict, with another. This issue proposes to explore the relevance of such questions to spoken and written communication occurring in a number of domain-specific contexts of particular relevance to Italian settings, including: international business negotiations, migration/welfare unequal encounters, institutional/diplomatic/forensic mediation, language teaching, and the cross-cultural discourses of tourism and the media. Since the awareness of the socio-cultural and political impact of ELF use in today’s globalized world is relatively recent, prominence will be given to the investigation of how ELF communication can be enhanced by strategies of meaning co-construction and register hybridization, and how it can be instead hindered by ELF accommodation failure. The methodological approaches adopted can be brought to bear on the fields of: sociolinguistics and language policy (investigating ELF in relation to language variation and identity in multilingual societies); cognitive linguistics and lexicogrammar (exploring processes of transfer of typologically different L1-features to ELF); translation, interpreting and intercultural mediation; language pedagogy/assessment; the methodology of ELF description (concerning the collection, analysis and interpretation of data). The ultimate aim is to open up this area of enquiry to a critical debate so as to further a fuller understanding of ELF as a crucial dimension of today’s international communication.