Doing being applied linguists: the importance of experience
SEVEN CASE STUDIES
Assessing English as a lingua franca
One of the by-products of the global spread of English in the second half of the twentieth century is the lingua franca phenomenon. Like other imperial languages before it, English has taken on the role of world language but the variety of English used widely among non-native speakers of English (NNS) is, claims Barbara Seidlhofer (2001), not English but English as a lingua franca (ELF). It is, she claims, a new international variety for which empirical evidence exits in the Vienna–Oxford corpus of ELF, that is English used among NNSs (in Europe) professionally rather than personally. Catherine Elder and I were invited to consider the possibilities of assessing such a code. Our contribution is now published (Elder and Davies 2006). We argued that the development of tests cannot take place while there is uncertainty as to the norms of ELF. And when ELF norms reach the point of being structurally stable enough for codification purposes and hence operationalizable in the form of language tests, they would then have the power to disenfranchise non-‘standard’ speakers of ELF, much as current tests of standard English do.
Our conclusion was not optimistic. We accepted the good intent of those involved with ELF but considered that ‘what is currently a proposal for legitimization of non standardness and affirmation of NNS identity could risk becoming a new monolithic standard with all the attendant consequences for those lacking the command of the code’. Of course, if we accept Joseph’s expansion to Arnold’s ‘imagined communities’ then the very existence of ELF as a NNS–NNS vehicle of communication demonstrates the possibility that a national language can shape national identity, in addition to the reverse process.
For applied linguistics, the ELF project is further evidence for the importance of reducing emphasis in language tests on the linguistics code which can, after all, offer only partial explanations for the communicative phenomena we try hard to capture in our tests and further refinements in our understanding of the pragmatics of particular intercultural and cross-cultural encounters. Furthermore, it forces us to recognize that, when used in interaction, language is not an abstract construct but is embodied in people.
