IATEFL/ TESOL 2016

IATEFL/ TESOL WEB CONFERENCE

Topic : English as a Lingua Franca

Presenter: Jennifer Jenkins

with Jennifer Jenkins

The topic of session one online conference is english as lingua franca.  The things we can learn from the topic presented is about the English Lingua Franca (EFL) similect instead of World Englishes (WE) Variety. She maintained that ELF communities, unlike traditional speech communities, are not made up of speaker with a share language background but of speakers from different L1s. in multilingual research, SLA and ELT are standing still, a range of overlapping developments in multilingualism research and especially into translanguaging and demonstrating gap even in surrent ELF thinking. Furthermore, translanguaging posits that bilinguals have one linguistic repertoire from which they select features strategically to communicate effectively. ELF Current definitions don’t allow for situations where English is known to everyone in the interaction but isn’t actually used or is only used minimally.

Some possible future of English: 1. Convergence (we all speak American English); 2.  Divergent (Latin syndrome, English will develop into many mutually incomprehensible varieties); 3. No future (another language will take over); 4. A Chinese future (influence from the largest speaker of English in the world, Chinese English); 5. English as multilingual franca.

This topic is very interesting. We know that English Lingua Franca become more popular in today’s classroom. English as tool of comunucation not only use in English class but also in non-english class. It is a necessity because many literature of science written in English. Many students learn English to know and to understand the text of the literature. As the result, they become more familiar with English term and start to use English in their communication. Even though there are some mistakes in practicing, they still use English as a Lingua Franca confidently. It means that ELF becomes a mode of communication.

The thing we learn from the presenter is that she has fully prepared for her speech. She is also aware with the audiences’ cultural diversity which came from different country. In simply, she has good ethical speaking.