ABSTRACT
Language attitude research has been popular in the field of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). However, the ontology of attitudes towards the target phenomenon of ELF has scarcely been discussed in general, and in particular, in relation to methodology (Ishikawa and Morán Panero 2016; Baird and Baird 2018). Against this backdrop, the present chapter argues that the ontological understanding in question is crucial in both methodological and analytical consequences. The chapter takes the author’s study as an example. More specifically, his study problematises attitudes not only towards an unfamiliar linguistic phenomenon but also towards unfamiliar ways of representing a familiar linguistic phenomenon. As such, it employed ‘unstructured’ interviewing as well as an exploratory analytical framework which combined qualitative content analysis (e.g., Schreier 2012) with speech functions analysis (Eggins and Slade 1997/2004). Overall, drawing on the empirical study, this chapter calls for theoretical and methodological rigour in claiming the existence or change of language attitudes.
