ABSTRACT
The intent of this chapter is to show language educators how possible it is to integrate innovative English as a lingua franca (ELF)-based language activities, such as collaborative creative writing and intercultural telecollaboration, into the English syllabus, in spite of the fact that the dominant pedagogical model in mainstream English language teaching is still firmly rooted in native-speakerism. This approach, which is based on a sociocultural perspective on language learning, aims at developing pedagogic practices that may respond to the challenge of language variation and change posed by the spread of English as the primary lingua franca in the age of globalization. Two research projects are presented in this study, whereby groups of volunteer high-school students from different languacultural backgrounds were interconnected via the Internet to create two communities of practice (CoPs). In this way, learners were involved in authentic intercultural communication and used ELF as an affordance to mediate meanings and carry out their tasks cooperatively. Several cases of participants’ nonstandard lexicogrammar items are analyzed in this chapter to show, for example, how cross-linguistic transfer from the learners’ mother tongue and creativity, two typical features of ELF, did not affect mutual intelligibility but rather allowed learners to communicate and fulfill their pragmatic goals. The chapter discusses fundamental issues concerning ELF-aware language education, such as the role of native-speaker language models, the assessment of learners’ ELF performance, and the role of the language teacher. Finally, it provides a teaching/learning activity model based on Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory (SCT) that can be implemented in the English classroom.
