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English as a Lingua Franca: Studies and Findings
Editor: Anna Mauranen and Elina Ranta
Date Of Publication: Sep 2009
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-1296-2
Isbn: 1-4438-1296-X
English as a lingua franca has become a hot topic in Applied Linguistics and English Studies. While it has been a subject of controversy for some time, linguistic observations on actual use have largely been missing out of the debate. This is now changing fast, and the study of English as a lingua franca has become a vibrant research field. This book reflects achievements in the growing field; it presents a good selection of empirical findings, thus providing substance to arguments. It comprises contributions from pioneers and established scholars in the field, along with reports from substantial ongoing research projects.

The papers offer insights into the workings of English as a lingua franca in different contexts—conversational, academic, professional, and business situations. They tackle essential theoretical issues, analyse linguistic and interactional features of ELF, and discuss attitudes towards ELF. The studies are firmly anchored in analyses of authentic language in social interaction, some also using survey and interview data. Many papers also touch upon debates on language policy and linguistic ideologies.

This collection of papers from the key areas of current ELF research will be of interest to English linguists and applied linguists, graduate and undergraduate students of English, educational and language planners, and teachers of English.

Anna Mauranen is Professor of English at the University of Helsinki. Her current major research interests are English as a lingua franca, corpus linguistics, and modelling spoken language. Her publications focus on spoken language, corpus linguistics, contrastive rhetoric, translation, and academic discourses. She is director of the ELFA project, which has compiled a 1-million word corpus of academic ELF. Publications include Linear Unit Grammar with John Sinclair (John Benjamins 2006), Translation Universals—Do They Exist? with Pekka Kujamäki (John Benjamins 2004), Academic Writing: Intercultural and Textual Issues with Eija Ventola (John Benjamins 1996) and Cultural Differences in Academic Rhetoric (Peter Lang 1993).

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 interests include English as a lingua franca, language variation and change, and English language teaching. Her current research focuses on syntactic features in spoken ELF, on which she has published the article “The ‘Attractive Progressive’—Why Use the –ing Form in English as a Lingua Franca” (2006). She has also published on teachers’ and students’ perceptions of English in secondary education in “English in the Real World vs. English at School—Finnish English Teachers’ and Students’ Views” (2009).

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