University of Helsinki
Bringing together ELF and intercultural communication research
18 March 2016
Earlier this month we published The Cultural and Intercultural Dimensions of English as a Lingua Franca edited by Prue Holmes and Fred Dervin. In this blog post, the editors explain how, until now, the fields of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and intercultural communication have remained quite separate but their book brings them together.
The Cultural and Intercultural Dimensions of English as a Lingua Franca
This book is the first of its kind. It brings together two very popular, yet separate, fields of research: ELF and intercultural communication. Although these two fields have been very productive and at the centre of scholarly and societal discussions in recent decades, their potential intersection has seldom been discussed in scholarly work. We started the project because we believed that ELF without interculturality—as much as interculturality without input from studies on lingua francas—is a little-investigated area and thus represents an opportunity to question orthodoxies and enrich research in both fields.
Our understanding of interculturality acknowledges the socially-constructed nature of intercultural communication, and the limitations of discourses of “cultural difference”, “respect for other cultures” and “tolerance” perpetuated by powerful institutions, the media, and even early scholarship in the field. Interculturalists are moving beyond these conceptualisations towards more politically-informed perspectives of intercultural encounters. What consequence does this move have for lingua franca research and pedagogy, and for ELF in particular?
In his foreword to the volume, Michael Byram notes that our book “may also turn out to be controversial … and all the better so.” Yet our main objective is not to create a polemic, or to nurture or perpetuate spurious disciplinary boundaries, but to open up fertile and interdisciplinary discussions of the cultural and intercultural in lingua franca communication. The introduction and nine chapters that compose the volume, as well as the stimulating commentary chapter by John O’Regan, all discuss how “culture” and “interculturality” can be understood, theorised, and operationalised in ELF, and the implications for pedagogy. The book will therefore appeal to researchers and teachers working in the fields of intercultural communication and language, in particular ELF, and on lingua francas other than English.
For more information about this book please see our website.