Angelika Breiteneder, University of Vienna

Angelika Breiteneder is a part of the project team that designed and compiled the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE). She has published on the methodological challenges of compiling a corpus of spoken ELF as well as ELF in Europe, with a special emphasis on its lexis and grammar. Angelika is currently researching into pedagogic implications of ELF research for her PhD.

From product to process: Changing objectives for teaching English

At the time of the Third International Conference of English as a Lingua Franca, ELF research has developed into one of the most vibrant fields of linguistics, with an ever-increasing number of scholars tackling a wide range of questions about the nature of ELF. While there is general agreement that descriptions of ELF also have implications for the ways in which objectives are defined for the subject English, what these implications are in particular is still an open question that calls for further exploration.
Building on previous ELF studies and my first-hand experience in compiling VOICE, the present paper warns against the unmediated transfer of descriptive findings into the classroom for reasons that have to do with the nature of corpus data more generally and that of naturally-occurring ELF in particular. Based on the understanding that ELF is not chiefly a product but rather a dialogic and dynamic process, it rejects the idea of a uniform ELF norm in order to replace ENL models in the classroom. Instead the paper argues in favour of a flexible process – rather than a codified product – approach to defining objectives for teaching ELF and explores ways in which this could be put into practice.