Teaching English as a Lingua Franca: The Journey from EFL to ELF

Abstract

In his plenary address at the 37th AEDEAN Conference back in 2013, Martin Dewey loosed a comment on the room that really stuck in my mind. It was high time, he suggested, for English as a lingua franca (ELF) to move from implication to application (see Dewey 2014). I loved the simplicity of his appeal and couldn’t doubt its sincerity; Dewey has been involved in ELF research since before it became known as ELF, and is also involved in language teaching and language teacher education. Of course, there is always a lag between new theories and their practical application. But the theories from the 1970s that led ELT towards communicative language teaching quickly surfaced in coursebooks such as Starting Strategies (Abbs and Freebairn 1977) or The Cambridge English Course 2 (Swan and Walter 1985). Sadly, this has not happened with ELF, and although I provided guidance to classroom practice for pronunciation teaching some time ago (Walker 2010), what might have been the starting gun for other ELF resource books now looks more like a shot in the dark.