ELF researchers take issue with 'English as a lingua franca: an immanent critique'

Abstract

ELF (English as a lingua franca) as a field of inquiry has attracted a great deal of controversy since its beginning: so critiques and responses to those critiques have been a key part of its development. The reasons for this are multiple,but it is perhaps not surprising given ELF’s position, as Cook (2012) puts it, as ‘the disobedient child of two rather reactionary academic parents, variationist sociolinguistics ... and EFL pedagogic theory’ (2012: 244), and the opposition to many established conventions that such a position entails. O’Regan’s (2014) article thus represents a long tradition of critiques of ELF, which are too numerous to mention here, although it is worth pointing out that the better informed ones are rather less uniformly unconstructive than O’Regan’s. In this brief response(for a more detailed discussion see Jenkins and Baker in press), we will focus on just two of the many misinterpretations of ELF in O’Regan’s article: the portrayal of ELF as a static homogeneous field of inquiry, and the claim that ELF researchers have been unconcerned with ideological issues.