Elina Ranta, University of Tampere

Elina Ranta is a researcher in the ELFA (English as a Lingua Franca in Academic settings) project at the University of Tampere. Her main research interest lies in the verb-syntactic features of spoken ELF on which she is currently preparing her doctoral thesis. She has published on the grammatical features of ELF (2006, 2009), teachers' and students' views of English at school (forthc.), and has co-edited a book (together with Anna Mauranen) on the empirical findings of ELF: English as a Lingua Franca: Studies and Findings (CSP 2009).

Models for English Grammar at School?

In this talk, I will be looking at some findings on the syntactic features of spoken ELF that have arisen from my research into the 1-million word ELFA corpus, and ponder on the implications of these to English teaching and testing at large. While it is perhaps not advisable to set features of 'ELF grammar' as a teaching model per se, the empirical findings should clearly be taken into account when deciding what is considered acceptable in English tests internationally. Moreover, in the curriculum development the findings can provide a basis for prioritizing teaching goals. On the whole, the features of 'ELF grammar' found in the ELFA corpus suggest a re-conceptualization of what we see as a 'learner error' and what is actually just a feature of spoken English grammar (world-wide). Awareness of the distinction should help ELT practitioners to make more informed judgments on their students' accuracy in spoken English.