Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

176 Language Planning and Education
immediately concede that on the socio-political plane they have much to commend
them. By repositioning ELF users as competent speakers of their own variety, they
would, for instance, contribute to a goal identified as desirable at the end of the last
chapter: the democratisation of English. And an ELF norm, if implemented, might
hasten the ‘de-anglicisation’ of English, a process Ammon (2001: 114) believes is
necessary if non-native academics/scientists are to have the right to their own
‘linguistic peculiarities’.
Neither can there be any objection to the ELF descriptive enterprise. It would
clearly be most useful to have more elaborate, empirical descriptions of how English
is used as a lingua franca, of what causes misunderstanding and what is redundant to
effective communication, since this would, among other things, inform the reassessment
of pedagogic priorities and allow more realistic objectives to be set.
Difficulties arise, however, when a move is made from description to prescription,
to the proposal that a set of ELF norms be codified and promulgated as a new
teaching model. One of these is that English used as a lingua franca is by its very
nature likely to be variable between users with different first languages and users of
differing levels of proficiency, and it may be more difficult, therefore, than with the
closed system of phonology to settle on a common, stable set of features capable
of constituting a prescriptive ELF model. Seidlhofer’s (2004: 219) ELF corpus, for
instance, draws on data from ‘fairly fluent’ speakers, but it is not clear what level of
proficiency this description designates, nor is it obvious against which benchmark it
can be assessed. Presumably, some qualifying level of proficiency or fluency is desired,
as otherwise an ELF norm might be derived from data supplied by speakers of an
indeterminate level of proficiency.
A wider implication here is that in identifying ‘salient, common features’ of ELF
use it may be useful to supplement corpus data with sociolinguistic fieldwork, the
reason being that while corpora are certainly useful in determining, for example, the
frequency of particular constructions over a wide range of texts, they tend to be less
informative about the contextual conditions under which a particular feature was
produced. And this surely is relevant, for if we are interested in asserting the linguistic
identity of a lingua franca variety of English and establishing a new codified norm,
we will need to determine what stability there is in the use of particular forms under
what conditions, these being questions that are more satisfactorily resolved when we
have fuller information about the speakers involved in particular communicative
events and the circumstances as well as variability of their linguistic production.
Also needing clarification is whether any eventual codification of an ELF variety
will extend beyond the spoken language to the written. As presently constituted, the
Vienna-Oxford corpus, like Mauranen’s (2003) corpus of academic lingua franca
English, is restricted to spoken data because this, in Seidlhofer’s (2001: 146) words,
is ‘at one remove from the stabilising and standardising influence of writing’, and
because spoken interaction, being reciprocal, affords greater scope for investigating
what is or is not mutually intelligible. Implicit here, perhaps, is a recognition that an
ELF model may be more credibly applied to speaking than writing, for, widely
accepted around the world there already exists, as previously observed, a fairly