Understanding the complexity of ELF attitudes: a focus on Chinese speakers

Wang, Ying (2012) Understanding the complexity of ELF attitudes: a focus on Chinese speakers. The 45th BAAL Conference: Multilingual Theory and Practice in Applied Linguistics, Southampton, United Kingdom. 05 - 07 Sep 2012.

Abstract

In the context of English globalization, there is an increasing voice criticizing the status quo whereby the minority of English knowing population, known as native English speakers (NESs), is exclusively accepted as the norm provider of English, a language that serves as a lingua franca used by people from all over the world today. A considerable body of corpus research (e.g. Mauranen 2003, Seidlhofer 2004) has justified non-native English speakers’ (NNESs’) use of English as a lingua franca (ELF), which is likely to be at odd with NES norms. However, the legitimacy of NNESs’ Englishes owes a lot to the users’ attitudes (Jenkins 2007). Given this, this study focuses on Chinese speakers and investigates the extent to which Chinese speakers’ ELF (CHELF) is acceptable in folk perspectives. The data collected among both university students and professionals illuminate ambiguity, contradiction, inconsistency and dynamics in the participants’ perceptions, validating previous studies (e.g. Jenkins 2007) on ELF attitudes in terms of the complexity nature.
This presentation will report some findings emerging in the triangulation among questionnaires, interviews and focus groups, with the focus on the complex relationships between contextual and conceptual factors, between those factors and emergent attitudes. In particular, three questions will be sought to answer: 1. how can we understand the complexity of ELF attitudes?, 2. how can we investigate the complexity of ELF attitudes?, and 3. what implications can we draw from the complexity? The discussion will lead to the conclusion that conceptual and contextual factors are interrelated and working together to influence, shape and develop the participants’ attitudes. The revealing of conceptual and contextual factors will also invite the reconsideration of the appropriateness of NES norms for NNESs.

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Download statistics