Perspectives of senior pre-service English teachers of a university toward Engish as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in Lebanon. (c2015)

Abstract

In the contemporary era of glocalization, the English language is being demanded to achieve the ‘unity’ through ‘diversity’ of the world as an international linguistic medium. For the newly emerged mission of the English language, English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) paradigm advocates the adaptations of English according to speakers’ local culture and language within the boundary of international intelligibility. This study rudimentarily scaled the awareness and opinions of senior pre-service teachers of a university about ELF in order to measure the feasibility of ELF as a potential provider of norms for ELT in Lebanon. The university and the students from Education and English departments were selected through convenience sampling. Self-constructed questionnaires were conducted on 43 students and 10 of them were also interviewed for the in-depth understanding of the opinions. The collected data were respectively analyzed through descriptive analysis in SPSS and through thematic analysis. Findings revealed that few in number were aware of ELF and that though the respondents agreed on ELF at a theoretical level, the agreement has not reached the practical level: The participants had a clear understanding of the instrumental purpose of teaching English and a keen understanding of the desire to preserve and express their culture and identity in communication in English. However, most of them gave in to the mono-centric and norm-bound ‘Standard English’ paradigm when it came to practical linguistic examples of ELF. Recommendations are suggested for conducting further research to replicate the study on a larger sample as well as to conduct empirical studies on the Lebanese variety of each feature of ELF which will contribute to and hasten the establishment of ELF common core.