Multilinguismo, CLIL e innovazione didattica - Libera Università di ...

Cristina Mariotti
to their academic status (lectures, seminars and other sessions with teacher
and students). All English as a lingua franca (ELF) studies prioritise communicative
effectiveness over ‘correctness’ (Jenkins 2011: 928).
ELF is a broad label, an ‘umbrella term‘ that is often used in literature to refer
to all types of discourse that take place in settings where speakers do not
share the same L1. At its simplest, English as a lingua franca is a way of
referring to communication in English between speakers who have different
first languages, but it can include native speakers of English (or English
monolingual speakers) (Seidlhofer 2001, 2006; Jenkins 2007). This definition
rests on the fact that nowadays the largest group of users of English is formed
by those to whom English serves, on a daily basis, as a ‘contact language’
(Firth 1996). This community of practice has no geographically identifiable
boundaries (Seidlhofer 2010) and reflects the latest figures on the spread of
non-native speakers of English, according to which roughly only one out of
every four users of English in the world is a native speaker (Crystal 2003,
Maley 2010). In ELF studies it is assumed that non-standard forms produced
by non-native speakers are acceptable and constitute specific features of what
some have come to consider a variety of English. Others, like Maley (2010),
Mollin (2007), Prodromou (2008) and Saraceni (2008) strongly oppose this
perspective.
Notwithstanding the need to describe variation in the spoken productions of
the academic community of practice, it is important to underline that academic
communication comprises different discourse genres and that the lingua
franca framework may not be the only or the optimal one to account for every
type of exchange that takes place in higher education settings where English is
used to communicate.
For instance, the spoken productions of lecturers who convey subject-matter
contents using an L2 might be effectively investigated adopting the framework
of English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI), also shared by the Integrating
Content and Language in Higher Education (ICLHE) 1 and Content and
1 The ICLHE is an association of individuals concerned with all aspects of the Integration of Content
and Language in Higher Education (cf. http://www.iclhe.org/).
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