ABSTRACT
English has become the international language of scientific communication, and over the last two decades many researchers have proposed considering teaching English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), or in the context of academia, English as a Lingua Franca Academic (ELFA). This chapter focuses on the corpus-based studies of ELFA and its implications. It starts with a review of current state of ELF research as well as an investigation of core issues and topics pertaining to ELF in academic writing in corpus-based studies. Then, it summarizes the communicative roles realized by lexical and syntactic features in ELFA writing by synthesizing findings from corpus-based empirical studies. Based on the review, the chapter suggests that teachers concentrate on teaching English writing for effective and explicit academic communications.
