ELF as multilingual “edulect” in a bilingual university

Abstract

AbstractThe role of English at European universities outside English-speaking countries has recently been so dynamic and complex as to merit elaborate acronyms and frameworks of comparison to capture the actual diversity involved in each case of using English, for example in what Dafouz and Smit (Dafouz, Emma and Ute Smit. 2014. Towards a dynamic conceptual framework for English-medium education in multilingual university settings.Applied Linguistics37[3]: 397–415) subsume under English-medium education in the international university. This contribution, however, looks at ELFFRA, English as a lingua franca in academic settings at the bi- and multilingual University of Fribourg, Switzerland. When English first became officially acknowledged as an additional academic language in 2005, being preceded by a period of “unruly” emergence, it was often the marked case, even in and for its local disciplinary speech events. Its current use at UFR as the default in some English-medium study programmes is by no means uniform or monolingual either. Meanwhile in the promotion of bilingualism in French and German, English is mostly “included” – reminiscent of the semiotics of the 2005 nonce coinage of “bi(tri)lingualism.” This contribution will revisit ideas about the “edulect” role of ELFFRA (Schaller-Schwaner, Iris. 2017.The many faces of English at Switzerland’s Bilingual University: English as an academic lingua franca at the institutionally bilingual University of Freiburg/Fribourg – a contextual analysis of its agentive use. Vienna: University of Vienna doctoral thesis) but look for it in unusual and under-researched places where it is indeed “included” viz. in beginners’ university language courses teaching the local languages French and German. First explorations will be shared and discussed with a view to what this might mean for ELF(A) and edulect.