English as a lingua franca: examples from students' production and teachers' perceptions - a case study in the Italian school context

The use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) for communication in international contexts has grown to be a substantial part of young people’s daily reality outside school, and this situation is likely to have repercussions also on their performance in educational settings. A case study developing along two lines of investigation, closely interrelated, is the core of this thesis which includes examples of ELF students’ production within international exchanges, as well as of teachers’ reactions to the ELF features produced by the students and non-conformed to English as a native language (ENL). The theoretical chapter illustrates how the growing awareness of ELF as an observable sociolinguistic reality has been achieved and implemented by academic research in the past ten to fifteen years and gives a theoretical and practical description of ELF aspects based on some seminal works (e.g. Firth 1996; Firth and Wagner 1997; Jenkins 2000; Mauranen 2003; Seidlhofer 2004) as well as on other prominent studies in the areas of phonology, pragmatics, lexicogrammar, syntax and discourse organization. The following chapter deals with the teaching of English as a foreign language (EFL) in secondary schools in Italy and illustrates the most significant reforms as to foreign language education that have regarded the Italian school system during the last three decades. The issue of the students’ role as both users and learners of English and the dual function this language can retain for many of them is discussed, too. The repercussions that ELF can have for English language teaching (ELT) regarding a potential re-thinking of the subject ‘English language’ and how it is taught is considered, in the light of the current developments of English as the global lingua franca. Accordingly, I have argued that teacher education is crucial to raise awareness of ELF, as well as a reflection on the role of non-native language teachers that can trigger potential innovative changes in ELT (Lopriore 2010; Seidlhofer 2011; Sifakis 2007, 2009). As to the case study, the first line of investigation concerns occurrences of ELF features in the students’ oral production when they use English as a lingua franca, that is when they meet and interact outside educational contexts, e.g. during international exchanges. These, I have argued, can be considered genuine ELF environments where students act in the role of language users. Given that not much research has been carried out into such contexts thus far, one of the main aims of this study has been the description of lexicogrammar and pragmatics ELF instances as they have emerged from the analysis of a corpus of students’ conversations. The data consist of two and a half hours of recordings gathered during two international exchanges between young European students (Italian-Hungarian and Italian-German) using English as a shared language of communication. The conversations have been analyzed to investigate if and what ELF features were present; then, the results have been compared with both the (Vienna) VOICE corpus and the findings from previous and ongoing research in the relevant ELF literature. As to the ELF features in the students’ conversations, I have detected commonalities on lexicogrammar and pragmatics levels which have also been observed in other, larger scale ELF studies (Mauranen 2003, 2006a, 2010a; Seidlhofer 2004, 2011), for example: • Non-standard word-formation • Not marking the plural on the noun • Non-standard use of articles • Non-standard subject-verb agreement • Non-standard tense and aspect use Moreover, some lexicogrammar features have emerged which seem to be specific to the current study and belong to the syntactic area of verbal tense and aspect. The topic of accommodation strategies supported by the resourcefulness of ELF speakers which favors their production and deployment of innovative, non-standard forms, has been addressed, too. Accordingly, I have provided examples from the students’ conversations of such strategies that the ELF users in this study have exploited to guarantee successful communication in the specific situations, e.g. drawing on code-switching, repetition and laughter. The findings concerning this part of the case study are consistent with those that have been attested in previous and current ELF studies and literature. The second strand of the case study investigates teachers’ awareness of ELF as a current reality of language use and their reactions to the ELF features which appear in the students’ conversations. The constructs of attitude and beliefs and results from previous research on teachers’ attitudes towards ELF (Jenkins 2007; Sifakis 2009; Sifakis & Sougari 2005, 2010) have been briefly examined in order to have a relevant backdrop against which to set the findings emerging from this case study. The quantitative as well as qualitative data regarding teachers’ attitudes have been gathered by means of a questionnaire and a subsequent focus group to further discuss, develop and/or clarify the questionnaire results. The central issues contained in both the questionnaire and the focus group regard: • the teachers’ actual perception of ELF and its characteristics; • their reactions to examples from the students’ English, used as a lingua franca, non-conformed to ENL models as well as the related topics of nativeness/non-nativeness and reference model(s) (Ranta 2010; Seidlhofer 2011); • the topic of a more flexible and conscious approach to English and to ELT practices, closely linked to the teachers’ awareness and acceptance of ELF (Seidlhofer 2011; Sifakis 2007, 2009). The results that have emerged from this line of investigation are in keeping with those from other ELF studies conducted in similar contexts. In particular, the findings indicate, on the one hand, a conservative position held by teachers about their reference models, as yet prevalently ENL-based; on the other hand, teachers seem to demonstrate a growing degree of interest and motivation to know more about ELF, which is not always conceptually clear to them, nor practically identified by most. They also appear willing to challenge their current attitudes, especially as a result of a more informed awareness of the issues that an ELF-based perspective can contribute to promote, by provoking a re-analysis of their professional views and protocols.