Research

I recently completed my doctoral research project, entitled "Reevaluating the Teaching of English for Lingua Franca Communication: A comprehensive action research study". This study explored the implications of research in the applied linguistics field of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) for classroom English language teaching (ELT). It combined a qualitative linguistic methodology with an action research approach. It represents a study within the more general field of applied linguistics and the more specific subfield of ELF studies.

At the heart of the study was a pilot course held at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern, Germany, during the summer semester of 2013. This semester-long course was designed to focus on those areas of English which had been identified as particularly important for successful communication in ELF settings, including pronunciation, intercultural communicative competence, pragmatic awareness and communicative strategies and awareness-raising about the sociolinguistic situation of English in the world today. In total, eighteen participants took part in the pilot course. In keeping with the qualitative, applied linguistic focus of the study, the main source of data comprised transcribed audio recordings of classroom discourse collected during the course. The resulting linguistic corpus comprised ca. 185,000 words and was primarily analyzed following an ethnographically-informed Conversation Analysis (CA) approach. The spoken data was supplemented with data from additional sources, including annotated lesson plans, copies of teaching materials, assessment rubrics and student evaluations of the course.

Overall, the study demonstrated that it is possible and feasible to design a course adopting and adapting insights from empirical ELF research into ELT practice for a specific classroom setting. Analysis of the data collected from the different instructional strands of the course showed that some development of ELF-oriented skills, strategies and awareness had taken place in each area as a result of instruction, indicating that the design of the pilot course did indeed lead to successful learning in the areas which were the focus of the course. This is particularly encouraging, considering the short duration of the course. It suggests that even a limited amount of ELF-oriented instruction may be able to contribute towards helping learners to develop salient aspects of their communicative competence for lingua franca communication. Notably, these findings also demonstrate that multiple areas of instructional focus could be integrated successfully into a comprehensive and cohesive course, in comparison to previous studies which have largely focused on one area of instruction at a time. The study also yielded more specific pedagogical insights regarding the practical implementation of an ELF-oriented approach in the instructional areas which were the focus of the course. On a practical level, it provided insights into the kinds of options available to teachers in the selection and design of learning activities and the underlying principles of effective teaching and learning for ELF-oriented ELT. Such insights can be adapted and applied to other classroom settings, thus helping to bridge the gap between implication and classroom practice currently apparent at this stage of ELF research. On a conceptual level, it also provided insights into the intellectual challenges of adopting an ELF-oriented pedagogy facing teachers. These insights contribute on a conceptual level to the ongoing debate around the pedagogic impact of ELF and the challenges and issues that remain.