Exploring ELF: Academic English Shaped by Non-native Speakers

Cambridge Applied Linguistics

by Anna Mauranen

This book explores the emerging area of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in academic settings.

The emergence and recognition of English used as a Lingua Franca (ELF) offers new opportunities for investigating language change and language contact. This volume explores the use of English in an academic context and between speakers from a range of language backgrounds, and is the only book to date to present spoken academic English from a non-native speaker perspective. Data examined from the one-million-word English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings (ELFA) corpus provides an in-depth account of how speakers use and shape the language through dialogue in intellectually and verbally demanding situations.

282 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 2012

About the author

Anna Mauranen is Professor of English at the University of Helsinki. Her main research focuses on English as a lingua franca, modelling spoken language, corpus linguistics, and academic discourses. She is co-editor of Applied Linguistics and founding co-editor of the Journal of English as a Lingua Franca. She is currently director of a collaborative language and brain research project <"Chunking in language: units of meaning and processing (CLUMP)>", corpus-based research projects on spoken and written academic English as a lingua franca (ELFA & WrELFA, www.helsinki.fi/elfa ), and the director of a research consortium on Global English.