Keynote Speakers
Barbara Seidlhofer
Department of English
University of Vienna (Austria)
Title of Talk:
ELF Research and ELF Use: Terms of Engagement
Abstract:
ELF research has been going on in many diverse areas and has gathered considerable momentum worldwide, and there is no better place than the ELF 13 conference to witness this development. The numerous studies that are now available engage with the ELF phenomenon in various ways, and in different terms. Impressive though this diversity of enquiry is, it is worth raising the question of how we might work towards a more general conceptual synthesis which relates to how users themselves actually engage in ELF communication. So in this talk I will consider how we might abstract from particulars in order to shed light on just how ELF users negotiate their meanings and position themselves and their interlocutors when communicating with ‘strangers’. Generating clearer insights into these processes may in turn enhance our understanding of the ‘terms of engagement’ of lingua franca communication, which we have come to be so dependent on in today’s globalized world.
Brief Bio:
Barbara Seidlhofer, one of the founders of the ELF International Conference series, is Professor of English and Applied Linguistics at the University of Vienna. Her research and teaching focus on the conceptualization, description, and theoretical implications of English as a lingua franca interaction and its applied linguistic significance for ‘real world’ concerns, the nature of transcultural communication, and sociolinguistics and pragmatics more generally. Barbara Seidlhofer is the founding director of the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE), which was recently released as VOICE 3.0. She is the author of numerous publications and her books include Controversies in Applied Linguistics and Understanding English as a Lingua Franca (Oxford University Press) and Using English as a Lingua Franca in Education in Europe (co-ed. w. Tatsioka, Ferguson & Sifakis, De Gruyter). She is past editor of the International Journal of Applied Linguistics and founding and honorary editor of the Journal of English as a Lingua Franca.