Exploring ELF in Japanese Academic and Business Contexts

Conceptualisation, research and pedagogic implications

Kumiko Murata

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317555117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book investigates the theoretical, empirical and pedagogical issues to help us better understand what is happening with English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) communication and to activate this knowledge in respective communicative contexts. It focuses specifically on Japanese contexts and also includes theoretical and practical sections pertinent to all ELF researchers, practitioners and students, irrespective of their national or regional differences. It further attempts to connect this new field of research to established fields of linguistics and applied linguistics such as communication, assessment and multilingualism by exploring them from an ELF perspective, which is challenging but essential for the development of the field. Exploring ELF in Japanese Academic and Business Contexts: Conceptualisation, research and pedagogic implications includes chapters about:

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• English in a Global Context

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• Own-language use in academic discourse

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• English as a lingua franca in international business contexts

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• A linguistic soundscape/landscape analysis of ELF information provision in public transport in Tokyo

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• Using pragmatic strategies for effective ELF communication: Relevance to classroom practice

This book will be of interest to scholars and post-graduate students working in the fields of Applied Linguistics/TESOL. It will also engage researchers studying the growing influence of English around the world.

1 Introduction

Researching ELF in academic and business contexts

Kumiko Murata

With the acceleration of globalization, particularly in the past 10 or 15 years, the scene of communication among people who are active across borders, be it academic or business and work-related, has drastically changed, English being used as a means of communication increasingly among those who do not share the language as their first language, i.e. communication in ELF (English as a lingua franca). The situations in Asia are no exception.

In Japan as well, situations surrounding the use of ELF both by Japanese companies and universities have drastically changed, and the change has been even more rapid in the past few years. For example, more and more companies are employing international students, not only those graduating from Japanese universities but also directly from overseas as their workforce, and the ratio is on the increase. This is a change towards global mobility and greater diversity compared to the situation even a few years ago, when most new employees hired by Japanese companies were born and bred in Japan, graduating from Japanese universities (see The Nihon Keizaii Shimbun (hereafter, The Nikkei) 16 May, 18 July, 15 September, 15 and 26 October, 3 December 2011, 5 January, 2 April 2012, 29 January, 9 February, 21 April, 5 May 2013).

At the same time, increasing numbers of Japanese companies are adopting English as their corporate language (The Nikkei 31 October, 3 and 18 December 2011, 5 January, 22 March, 9 June 2012, 9 January 2013). Even in the past few years, more companies have decided to choose English as their offical language at work (e.g. The First Retailing, Rakuten, inter alia) (The Nikkei 22 June, 31 October, 18 December 2011, 5 January, 22 March 2012). In addition, many other companies have been running their board meetings in ‘English’ (e.g. Nissan, Toshiba) for some time now (The Nikkei, 10 October 2011). The main reason for this is companies need to diversify the backgrounds of their employees, partly due to the recent tendency and need for globalization of their corporate marketing strategies as their customers are increasingly more those living abroad, particularly those in newly developed or developing countries such as BRICs and VISTA, i.e. Vietnam, Indonesia, South Africa, Turkey and Argentina, and also partially because of the need to globalize their production strategies to cope with the imminent shortage of labour in the future owing to a declining birth rate and an ageing population. There is also a need to reduce labour costs to survive price wars with these newly developing countries. Companies are, therefore, transferring their factories and employees to overseas, where labour costs are still relatively reasonable, as well as hiring employees from varying linguacultural backgrounds and also sending relatively young employees overseas to educate them to be more globally-minded, competitive business people (The Nikkei, 18 January, 16 May, 18 July, 11 and 15 September, 7, 15 and 26 October, 3 December 2011, 5 and 25 January, 20 February, 22 March, 2 April 2012).

All this recent drastic change is to cope with the expansion of the global market, which is becoming increasingly borderless. Thus, not only in corporate but also in academic settings, increasingly more universities and colleges in Japan have decided to use English as a medium of instruction (EMI) in running their courses (The Nikkei, 28 February, 24 October 2011, 9 January, 20 February, 21 and 24 May 2012, 13 March 2013), which is also encouraged by the government under the name of the Global 30 Program (MEXT 2011; see also Iino 2012, and Iino and Murata, Chapter 8, this volume). Under this programme or even independent of it, increasing numbers of universities have started offering courses conducted in English to attract more international students, in order to diversify student populations to create stimulating learning environments where both Japanese and international students study together, exchanging opinions and nurturing the sense of intercultural and cross-cultural understanding (see also Mauranen 2012 and Jenkins 2014 on the increase in EMI courses in Europe and worldwide) as well as to give impetus to Japanese students to improve their global communicative ability or capability (see Seidlhofer 2011, and Widdowson, Chapter 13, this volume, for insightful discussions on communicative capability). For some universities, it is also a strategy to secure the number of students by recruiting international students in order to cope with the declining home student population in general. The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) also encourages universities to ‘internationalize’ or more recently ‘to be globalized’ (MEXT 2011; see also Iino 2012; Kubota 1999).

Despite this increasing tendency to encourage the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) on campus and at work, not very much research on what is really happening in actual situations of its use in Japan has been conducted nor has it been understood that it is ELF that these business people and students are mainly using in their communication in respective business and academic contexts. The current volume, therefore, aims to investigate the actual use of ELF communication in these contexts in Japan or in the context where Japanese users of ELF are involved and to illustrate the gap between the reality of actual use and language pedagogy and policies.

On the basis of detailed investigation and descriptions of what is really going on in these interactions, the volume ultimately aims to contribute to a better understanding of ELF use in actual situations, raising awareness of the nature of ELF interaction, to explore more plausible targets for improving or nurturing ‘ELF’ communicative ability, and to plan or reconsider educational policies or curriculum and/or syllabus designs that accommodate the need of ELF users in both academic and business contexts. In sum, this volume focuses on ELF communication in academic and business contexts and both theoretically and pedagogically explores what is going on in the use of ELF in these contexts. Furthermore, it also aims to introduce an ELF perspective to the neighbouring research fields of linguistics and applied linguistics to lead them to a new development of research from an ELF perspective. We shall now briefly review the theoretical background to this research.

The recent progress and prominence of ELF research (see works by Jenkins 2000, 2007, 2014; Mauranen 2012; Seidlhofer 2011; and those by their colleagues and research students, among many others) is remarkable, and it has brought about a completely new perspective and paradigm for the study of language, interaction and language teaching, which has long been constrained and shaped by native speaker norms. ELF research investigates communication in ELF as autonomous, legitimate, and competently and collaboratively conducted interaction, where interactants use ELF as their own and often only choice of the medium of communication with others who do not share the same language with them (see Seidlhofer 2011, and Chapter 2, this volume). This can frequently be observed in increasing numbers of business transactions conducted in ELF worldwide. The same is also true of academic settings because an increasing number of universities the world over (not necessarily limited to those located in what Kachru (1985, 1992) terms the ‘Inner’ and ‘Outer’ Circles) have started giving courses via the medium of English (EMI) with an increasing global flow of students and faculty, although people involved are not necessarily well informed or aware that their interactions in these circumstances are in fact taking place in ELF. Here, ELF is used as a tool for the achievement of users’ communicative purposes whether they are business or academic-orientated. The priority here is placed on the success in achieving their respective goals, and whether their use of English is conformed to native speaker norms or not is not a big issue or rather irrelevant. They confidently use their own version of English and participate in meaning making and sharing by cooperatively co-constructing meaning among themselves, often creatively utilizing original expressions in English, exploiting them and adjusting them for their own purposes in the process of interaction and negotiation (see Seidlhofer 2011; Seidlhofer and Widdowson 2009).

Active ELF research both in academic and business contexts has been conducted particularly in European contexts, where, in the case of the former, partially because of the ERASMUS exchange project, the mobility of students is very high. The representative work has been conducted by Mauranen (2012, and Chapter 3, this volume), who, with her colleagues, has compiled a corpus of academic ELF (English as an academic lingua franca – ELFA) and has conducted a detailed and extensive investigation on ELF use in these contexts. Similarly, House has also been working on ELF in academic contexts, where she focuses on the analyses of discourse-pragmatic features of ELF in academic advisory sessions between German advisors and international students in communicating in ELF (see House, Chapter 5, this volume, among others). Other scholars who have been working on ELF in academic contexts include Bjorkman (2009, 2011, 2012), Kaur (2009, 2011), Shaw et al. (2009), Smit (2009), Smit and Dafouz (2012), and most recently Jenkins (2014), to name a few. However, with the exception of Kaur, all are working on ELF use in European academic contexts (but see the most recent publication by Jenkins 2014, which explores ELF in international universities worldwide although more focus is placed in the UK). This also applies to those researching business contexts, such as Cogo (2012) and Ehrenreich (2009, 2011, 2012), both being based in Europe and researching business conduct in this context.

It can therefore be said that not only research on ELF in general but also the one on the use of ELF in academic and business contexts is also most vigorously conducted in European contexts and that very little is known about what is happening in the use of ELF in Asian academic and business contexts (but see Kirkpatrick 2010; Kaur 2009, 2011; and Seidlhofer, Chapter 2, this volume).

In these circumstances, this volume has two specific aims. One is to deepen understanding on the nature of ELF and ELF interaction from a theoretical perspective in general. This is mainly covered by three chapters in Part I, by Seidlhofer, Mauranen and Yano, which very aptly introduce the concept of ELF and recent progress in ELF research (Seidlhofer), the historical development of English and its relation to characeristics of ELF with its focus mostly on academic contexts (Mauranen), and the changing nature of language use and preference for the use of ‘unmarked’ lexico-grammatical systems in ELF communication (Yano).

Another aim is to introduce ELF empirical research which is ongoing, particularly in academic (Part II, Chapters 5–8) and business settings (Part III, Chapters 9–11), and also to introduce an ELF perspective into the existing research paradigm and reconsider it from this perspective (Part III, Chapter 12, and also Part IV, Chapters 13–15). Part IV introduces the perspective into language pedagogy, which starts with Widdowson’s convincing differentiation between the teaching of NS-norm-based competence and more-ELF-based capability, and its implications for language pedagogy (Chapter 13). Part IV also includes implications of testing and pragmatic research for ELF pedagogy, respectively contributed by Sawaki (Chapter 14) and Kaur (Chapter 15).

As briefly stated above, the current volume places specific emphasis on academic and business contexts, in particular, in Japan. The volume, however, interprets research in Japanese contexts broadly, and it includes research conducted on the use of ELF in academic and business contexts, but not necessarily limited to data collected in Japanese academic and business contexts (see Chapter 5 by House, who elaborates on academic sessions in German contexts and also Chapter 9 by Ehrenreich, who also illustrates German business contexts as examples although references are also made to Japanese business contexts). These also include Konakahara (Chapter 6) and Tsuchiya’s (Chapter 7) contributions, which analyse ELF use by international students, including Japanese, in academic settings in Britain. By contrast, Iino and Murata’s Chapter 8 deals with ELF use in a Japanese university setting, where English is formally designated as a medium of instruction. On the other hand, Kubota’s contribution (Chapter 10) deals with Japanese business people in interaction with Chinese business people in subsidiaries of Japanese companies in China, while Terauchi and Araki (Chapter 11) report on a large-scale survey administered to Japanese business people. Furthermore, Kubota broadens the perspective of ELF in this volume by introducing the perspective of multilingualism, whose researchers often mistakenly regard ELF research as hegemonic, promoting English as a ‘global link language’. Kubota’s chapter therefore opens up a good forum for disentangling this misunderstanding.

Another contribution that also appears, on the surface, to have very little to do with ELF research, is the one by Backhaus (Chapter 12), who explores linguistic landscape and soundscape in Tokyo’s public transport from an ELF perspective. Although Backhaus’s investigation and data have nothing to do with an academic or business context, it is worthwhile to include this contribution as it includes an exploration into public signs (written ELF) and announcements, which thus far have received relatively little attention by ELF researchers with the exception of Mauranen, who also investigates written ELF.

In dealing with ELF in academic contexts, assessment is always a thorny but important issue. In this volume, we are lucky to have a contribution by a testing specialist, Sawaki (Chapter 14), who reviews two major international academic tests, TOEFL and IELTS, from an ELF perspective. Kaur’s contribution (Chapter 15) is also invaluable, as the chapter incorporates the findings from her ELF pragmatic research into language pedagogy.

The above research areas, in particular linguistic landscape (and recently, soundscape) and assessment had traditionally been very much associated with native speaker (NS) norms, and still are, to a large extent, in respective main research areas. It is, however, important to collaborate with researchers from different research traditions for the healthy development of ELF research as its values or ways of thinking are expected to become standard practice in language education in the future (hopefully). Researchers and practitioners then surely have to deal with the issue of language assessment, and acquisition for that matter, as well as the ways in which we construct our linguistic landscape and soundscape with an ELF perspective in mind. In the following, each of these 14 contributions will be introduced in mor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• 1. Introduction: researching ELF in academic and business contexts
• Part I Conceptualizing ELF
• Part II ELF and its research in academic contexts
• Part III ELF from business and wider research perspectives
• Part IV ELF and pedagogic concerns
• Index