Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

New Englishes and teaching models 175
Whether or not these aspirations are actually attainable is, of course, another
matter and remains in doubt. Much depends on the priorities of educational
authorities, on public attitudes, political will and the resources available. What we
can be more confident of is that the struggle to reconcile diversity with international
intelligibility will continue to provoke debate over the models that are most
appropriate in teaching English around the world.
6.5 A LINGUA FRANCA CODA
So far in this chapter the focus has been on the claims for educational recognition of
the New Englishes of outer circle societies. 10 But there is another context of English
use to consider, to which recent literature (Jenkins 2000, 2004; Seidlhofer 2001,
2002a, 2002b, 2004) has called attention: the use of English as an international
lingua franca, which cuts across outer and expanding circle speakers, and is, Jenkins
claims 2000: 195), the most frequent use of spoken English around the world.
Just as increased tolerance has been extended to the New Englishes of the outer
circle, so – argue Seidlhofer and Jenkins (2003: 142) – should a greater degree of
independence from native speaker norms be accorded to users of English as a lingua
franca (ELF), many of whom, as residents of the expanding circle, 11 will hitherto have
been taught with almost exclusive reference to a British or American standard
English mode. The argument in essence, then, is for a new normative model –
a lingua franca (ELF) model – and the reasons are not very dissimilar to those
advanced in support of the New Englishes: as an international language English can
no longer be the exclusive property of its native speakers; many learn English not to
interact with native speakers but with other lingua franca users, and the importance
of English in their lives is such that it constitutes an element in their personal
identity; and these bilingual users deserve to be identified not as deficient speakers of
a British or American native-speaker English but as competent, authoritative users of
their own self-sufficient variety.
The trouble is, however, that there is at present no authoritative description of
English as a lingua franca (ELF) available that would allow the promulgation of an
alternative teaching model, never mind the redesign of curricula, and it is for this
reason, to fill what she calls a ‘conceptual gap’, that Seidlhofer (2001: 146) has
initiated the compilation of an ELF corpus (the Vienna-Oxford ELF corpus).
Complementing previous research by Jenkins (2000) on the phonology of English as
an international language (see above), and work on the pragmatics of ELF by House
(1999) and others, this is intended, among other things, to extend knowledge of the
lexico-grammatical aspects of ELF spoken interaction between what Seidlhofer
(2001: 146) refers to, rather imprecisely, as ‘fairly fluent users’. The immediate
research objective (Seidlhofer 2001: 147; 2004: 219) is to identify ‘salient, common
features of ELF use’, features that are ‘unproblematic in ELF communication’ even
while ungrammatical in standard L1 English. The long-term goal, though, is the
codification of an alternative ELF norm.
Turning now to a brief evaluation of the cogency of these proposals, we can