‘So where we are?’ Spoken lingua franca English at a technical university in Sweden BEYZA BJÖRKMAN On the effectiveness of ELF as a medium in spoken interactions of engineering students

THIS ARTICLE discusses the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) by engineering students and its effectiveness in content courses at a technical university, reporting the preliminary results of part of a study that investigates authentic and high-stakes speech events at a Swedish technical university. The main aim of my research is to find out what kind of divergence from standard morphosyntactic forms of English if any leads to disturbance, i.e. breakdown, in ELF speech. The findings reveal commonalities in usage. Engineering students, the speakers in this ELF context, seem to have developed certain common procedures to communicate effectively. The results of the project in the present paper are predominantly in line with the previously reported commonalities of ELF. There are, however, additional non-native-like usages in this study. The non-standard usages here fall into three categories: (1) non-standard usage that leads to disturbance, (2) successful reductions of redundancy; and (3) devices that increase comprehensibility. The analyses show that non-native-like usage of morphosyntactic structures does not lead to ‘overt disturbance’ in dialogic speech. It may be difficult to say whether ELF is an effective medium in general, but my findings do indicate that it is effective in this context.

Introduction Universities in Europe today are becoming increasingly multilingual. Most countries in Europe have chosen to participate in the

Bologna process, which has led to academic mobility and a number of student exchange programs. With visiting scholars and exchange students, European universities are becoming increasingly diverse linguistically (Ljösland, 2007). Among the aims of the Bologna Process are ‘to make European Higher Education more compatible and comparable, more competitive and more attractive for Europeans and for students and scholars from other continents’ (EU website). The main aim of the Bologna process is ‘to establish a common European area for higher education by 2010’ (NHSU Website). Since English is the most widely studied language, it is the best known second language. Consequently, the ‘common’ European area for higher education has evolved in such a way that English has become the ‘common language’. It BEYZA BJÖRKMAN is a lecturer in English at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, where she teaches technical English to undergraduate and graduate students. She has been teaching EAP/ESP since 1995. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis with the title ‘Spoken lingua franca English in tertiary education at a Swedish technical university: an investigation of form and communicative/pedagogical effectiveness’ at Stockholm University, Department of English. Her work focuses on morphosyntax and usage issues.

doi: 10.1017/S0266078408000187 English Today 94, Vol. 24, No. 2 (June 2008). Printed in the United Kingdom © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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is actually not stated anywhere that this common language has to be ‘English’. But it is the natural choice. There are obvious advantages in making English the medium of instruction: mobility, employability and competitiveness/ attractiveness, which are all among the objectives of the Bologna Declaration. In fact, English has become the overwhelmingly dominant language in academia worldwide (Graddol, 1997, 2006; Muhleisen, 2007; Truchot, 2002), and there has been an increase in English-medium teaching in Europe in general. This is very much the case for Scandinavian countries. It is still true that English is used more at postgraduate levels compared with undergraduate levels, but the number of undergraduate courses offered in English has increased significantly in Sweden, in the third and fourth years together with the number of international Master’s programs offered. In Norway, the situation is quite similar. A total of 22.5 per cent of the modules at the University of Oslo are now offered in English (Ljösland, 2007:398).

Research on English as a lingua franca The speakers in academia in Europe speak English in lingua franca contexts where English serves as a vehicular language through which speakers from different first-language backgrounds communicate a message, carry out a task, solve a problem etc. Lecturers teach in English when exchange students are present. Students work through English when they are working on a project with students from other countries. These users are not ‘learners’ of English, but ‘speakers’ of it. They simply need a tool to get the work done, since in such contexts it is content that counts rather than form. Only in contexts where English is the object of study can they be referred as ‘learners’, which is when one could talk about ‘form’ being the focus. This is also one of the reasons why the terms ‘interlanguage’ and ‘language errors’ do not apply in the ELF context. ‘There is a need to investigate what ELF users actually do when they communicate with each other – rather than what has been assumed they need or (should) do’ (Jenkins & Seidlhofer, 2003). ELF research in general, unlike SLA, treats these non-standard forms not as errors but divergent forms or ‘features’. Although our knowledge of what is happen-

ing in a variety of ELF contexts is still relatively small, the number of research projects investigating lingua franca usage of English seems to be growing. Earlier work that started in late 1980s and early 1990s with small-scale projects (e.g. Knapp, 1987; Firth, 1996) has given way to today’s more comprehensive work and corpora (e.g. Jenkins, Seidlhofer, Mauranen). Jenkins’s ground-breaking work on the Lingua Franca Core (LFC), the ‘core’ and ‘non-core’ areas on intelligibility, is now very wellknown. Her work is based on partly recordings and partly field observation and deals with one level of the language: phonology. The VOICE (Vienna Oxford International Corpus of English) corpus, a large corpus project led by Seidlhofer, is of spoken English only and has recordings of about 1 million words of mainly European English from professional, educational and informal contexts. Findings from this corpus work have provided invaluable information on the lexico-grammar of ELF usage (Seidlhofer, 2004:220). It is important to describe ELF usage in various contexts, and so far work on ELF has dealt with different levels of language, scope, mode and region etc (Mauranen, 2007). However, the number of projects that have dealt with the usage of ELF in academia is not particularly large yet. Juliane House has led three projects in this area. These are (i) the ‘Covert Translation’ project (House, 2003a) which investigated ELF influences textual norms in parallel text production and covert translation; (ii) the ‘Communication in ELF’ project which investigates authentic and simulated ELF interactions of international students at Hamburg University (House, 2003b); and (iii) the ‘English as a medium of instruction in German universities’ project on ELF as the language of instruction and its ‘diglossic’ relationship with German (House, 2003a). In addition, Erling investigated English in the German university classroom with respect to globalization, and additive bilingualism (Erling, 2004). More work is emerging from different countries in Europe with data from various university contexts as English becomes the medium of instruction, with most of this emerging as PhD work. A number of these projects deal with ELF usage in engineering contexts. Suuvunity (forthcoming) is looking at English as the lecturing language in the Forest Products Technology Department at Helsinki University of Technology, while Airey (2006) has

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investigated the effects of teaching physics in English instead of Swedish. The ELFA (English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings) corpus work, led by Mauranen (2007), is the largest project on ELF usage in academic contexts and is very influential for a number of reasons. First of all, the data in the corpus is completely authentic, i.e. none of it has been elicited for research purposes. Also, the criteria used are external. Thirdly, it deals with ‘academic’ contexts and therefore helps us understand how academic discourses function when English is increasingly becoming the language of instruction in higher education in many countries in Europe. Finally, the recordings are from high stakes academic events and not ordinary exchanges. The present study on the effectiveness of ELF as a medium in engineering education in Sweden has followed the same criteria of compilation as those for Mauranen.

An ELF setting in Sweden: A Swedish technical university This paper focuses on the morphosyntax of spoken ELF, reporting the results of a research project that investigates spoken lingua franca English in tertiary education in Sweden, where English is used in textbooks at most levels and in lecture and seminars at higher levels. After presenting the context, examples will be given of features that are characteristic of the speakers’ usage of English. The setting is a university in a large city in Sweden which is responsible for about one third of Sweden’s technical education and research. There are approximately 3,000 employees, who are predominantly Swedish, and 20,000 students. English is used extensively in this setting, to allow for academic mobility of students and scholars, among other reasons. This university is also an active participant in leading international student exchange programs, giving students studying in Europe, Asia and Africa the chance to partake in joint Master’s programs. In 2006, there were around 1,500 exchange students at the site and thirty four Master’s programs were offered in English (as opposed to only thirteen in Swedish). The number of international students in the Master’s programs is quite large: about 50 to 75 per cent of all students in the Master’s courses fall into this category. As the numbers reveal, this setting is a true lingua

franca context, where teachers and students have different L1 backgrounds and use English to communicate with each other on a daily basis. The data used for the present paper comprise recordings of student group work from six different departments and twelve different schools at the site. This part of the corpus makes up twenty-eight hours of the ninetythree hours of recordings in total (the other two parts being forty-eight hours of lectures and twenty-three hours of presentations). All group-work sessions are from content courses and all have been digitally recorded and analyzed for the present project. The subjects come from twenty different first-language backgrounds. 50 per cent of them were exchange students from different countries and 50 per cent were Swedish.

The investigation For the investigation of the dialogic material, all the occurrences of morphosyntactic nonnative-like usage (‘incorrect’ word forms and correctly formed words used in syntactically deviant constructions) from the student groupwork sessions were identified, noted down and transcribed. The focus was on ‘commonalities’ which might be candidates for features of ELF if it were considered a variety (Prodromou, 2007; Seidlhofer, 2008). The criteria in the study for a feature to be a commonality are that the feature occurs in different types of speech events, is used by different speakers with different L1 backgrounds and also that it occurs at least ten times. Cases of non-native-like usage are grouped as ‘disturbing’, i.e. causing overt comprehension problems and ‘non-disturbing’, i.e. causing no comprehension problems. The ‘disturbing’ category is further divided into ‘irritating’ and ‘non-irritating’, to examine attitudes and listener friendliness using the data that will be obtained through interviews and questionnaires. This paper will report only the results from the dialogic speech events, i.e. student group-work in content courses. The analysis shows that most of the features reported in ELF research earlier are present in the material. The present paper has additional findings that have not yet been reported elsewhere at the time of writing, which will be exemplified here. Table 1 compares the findings from this study with the general findings

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Table 1: A comparison of the general ELF findings and the findings in this study in the dialogic material. General ELF findings

Findings in this study

Words with new meanings

Yes

‘Overuse’ of common verbs

Yes

Uncountable nouns used countably

Some cases

who/which (interchangeable) Very few cases

lytic comparative. The students come up with non-standard forms in word formation, e.g. boringdom, discriminization, forsify, levelize, to stable (adjective form used as a verb), comparing (used as a noun) etc. When it comes to the analytic comparative, there are numerous examples in the material like more big, more easy, more clear etc. Altogether forty-one cases of morphological non-standard usage were found in the dialogic corpus, none of which caused overt disturbance in communication. Syntax

Problematic article use

Yes

Question tags invariable

Yes – but with ‘Yes?’ and ‘No?’

Left dislocation

Yes

Prepositions

Yes

Tense and aspect issues

Yes

The phrase level

—

Negation

—

Problematic plurals: Not marking the plural on the noun

—

Question formulation

—

Comparative/ superlative forms (incorrect)

Some of the most interesting examples of nonstandard usage are at the NP level, among them ‘not marking the plural on the noun’, ‘problematic usage of articles’ and ‘incorrect plural forms/issues related to countability’. The most interesting commonality in this material perhaps is ‘lack of plural marking on nouns’, considering the fact that speakers are engineering students who have to deal with numbers and formulas and perform calculations on a daily basis. Some examples of this are:

that have been reported on in ELF research so far. The simple list of all the findings as in Table 1 was reviewed in the next stage; the ones that did not fulfill the criteria or were not within the morphosyntactic category were left out. The remaining features were classified as ‘Morphological’ and ‘Syntactic’. The findings in the syntactic category were grouped at phrase and clause levels, and the phrase level was further divided into ‘Noun phrase level’ (NP) and ‘Verb phrase level’ (VP). In the next section, examples of non-standard usage categorized as explained above in Table 1 will be given along with the number of occurrences per category. Only examples will be given; all the occurrences will not be listed. Morphology

In the syntactic part, the commonalities are at three different levels, as stated above. Altogether there are 178 cases of non-standard usage of English.

…200 degree… …two type of… We have four parameter. …two more condition. Over 10 meter… …ten glass vessel.

In all these examples, the plural meaning is indicated by the number before the noun, but the noun is in the singular form instead of the plural. There are other examples of this unmarking of the plural: …all the detail… …just to get result. There are some difference…. ..several conclusion… There are other reason.

When it comes to the usage of articles, there are cases where the article is superfluous or incorrect, e.g.

At the morphological level, the commonalities are non-standard word formations and ana38

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The poor people use… I have a exam.

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There are cases where the article is missing, e.g. …solve the problem as ? whole, This is ? more tricky one, But they have ? very good subway system, It’s not ? effective solution.

There are also cases where some is inserted in the article slot, e.g. We need to give some proposal. Did you get it from some sources on the Internet? In high school, you do some examination report.

At the VP level, the main cases of non-standard usage are ‘Subject-verb disagreement’, ‘Tense and aspect issues’ and ‘Passive and Active voice problems’. It is no news that L2 speakers sometimes omit the third person singular –s. The material in the present study also has examples of this. When it comes to tense and aspect issues, we see non-native-like uses of the progressive, again a common feature in ELF, recently reported by Ranta (Ranta, 2007). Most of the examples are meant to refer to scientific or technical facts that are always true, but the progressive is used instead of the simple form, e.g. A power system is called a power system, because it is using different generator systems.

Passive voice, which is used often in engineering discourse, can also be problematic, e.g. But we affect by the flow.. Some of these graphics devices can attach to your pc... It can be happened that… The clause level

The clause level also has three interesting cases of non-standard usage: ‘Incorrect question formulation’, ‘Negation’ and ‘Left dislocations’ the latter described earlier by Mauranen and Swales (Mauranen, 2007; Swales, 2007). To start with, there are numerous cases of nonstandard question formulation in the corpus, observed both in Wh- and Yes/No questions: How many pages they have? So where we are? Why it is black? What other equation I would use? Why the function looks like that? We should go through every topic?

An intriguing area is raising of negation from the subordinate clause to the main clause. There seem to be many examples of this non-

standard negation in the material: It looks not good. (cf. It doesn’t look good.) I think he won’t be here.(cf. I don’t think he’ll be there.) This point is supposed to not move. (cf. This point is not supposed to move.)

Left dislocations are other examples of nonstandard usage in the dialogic material. This over-explicitness seems quite common in the material. What the speakers do is to include the pronoun and the noun that it refers to in the same sentence: This rate you have it. Diffusivity you need it. This report we’ll do it later. The composition of the liquid it’s the same,.. All these chemical reactions they are reversible.

Commentary All the above examples are from naturally occurring, authentic high stakes spoken exchanges. As is clear from the examples, there are numerous non-standard usages of English in various categories that could be potentially problematic and are ‘incorrect’ according to any grammar book. One might expect frequent disturbance during the speech events due to frequent divergence from standard forms. However, my analysis suggests that there are very few cases of overt disturbance overall. See Table 2 for a summary. Table 2: ‘ND’: ‘Non-disturbing’; ‘D’: ‘Disturbing’ Morphosyntactic features

Overt disturbance

Non-standard word formations

ND

Analytic comparative

ND

Not marking the plural on the noun

ND

Double comparatives and superlatives

ND

Usage of articles

ND

Subject-verb disagreement

ND

Tense and aspect issues

ND

Passive/ Active voice problems

ND

Incorrect question formulation

D (11/24)

Negation

ND

Left dislocations

ND

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It is quite significant that among the eleven morphosyntactic non-native-like usages exemplified above, the only structure that caused overt disturbance, i.e. miscommunication, was question formulation. So, the only overt disturbance was in syntax, at clause level. Disturbance occurred when some of the speakers involved failed to register that a question was being asked. No differences between different types of questions, i.e. Wh- vs. Yes/No questions were observed. Communication was disturbed in eleven of the twenty-four cases of non-standard question formulation. In five of these, the speakers employed ‘self-repair’ and in the other six, ‘repetition’ for problem handling. Self-repair in all cases led to successful delivery of the question. Repetition in four cases led to more repetition of the same question, which did not repair disturbance. So repetition alone as a strategy did not suffice. Although there was no overt disturbance in the usage of the other features investigated, in some cases, non-standard usage led to ‘Other repair’. Some speakers produced the standard form right after the non-standard form was uttered. Since none of the speakers were learners of English at the time and since the recordings did not take place in language courses, the reason is likely to be irritation, i.e. the nonstandard form irritated the other speakers involved. The success of ELF communication seems to depend on two factors. The first one is the situation. The speech event type here provides the speakers with a great deal of contextual information. All of the recordings in the dialogic material discussed here were student groupwork sessions. All the students involved had the same frame of reference, had received instructions on the task or the expected outcome of the group work, knew about the task they were working on to a lesser or greater extent, had course books, and they could see each other at all times. All of these naturally automatically lower the risk of disturbance. The situation could be different in monologic speech events, e.g. lectures or presentations, where questions are not as frequent as they are in dialogic speech events like groupwork. The second factor has to do with the nature of lingua franca features. At first glance, all the non-standard usages here are ‘errors’. However, the nature of these ‘errors’ reveals more than merely divergent forms. The nonstandard usage in the present paper can be

grouped into three categories: (1) non-standard usage that leads to disturbance in communication, e.g. non-standard question formulation; (2) successful reductions of redundancy, e.g. not marking the plural on the noun and (3) devices that increase comprehensibility, e.g. left dislocation and unraised negative. Apart from the first group where there is breakdown in communication, the other two seem to be strategies speakers in lingua franca settings employ to get the message across. From this respect, transparency seems to be a typicality of usage of English in settings where it is used as a lingua franca.

Conclusion The results overall are in line with the findings of earlier ELF research in the sense that there is a considerable number of cases of non-nativelike usage but very few cases of overt disturbance in communication based on morphosyntax. English thus seems to be an effective medium of communication in this high-context environment and in this type of speech event. This study investigated overt disturbance only. In such highly-international ELF contexts, where there are twenty different L1s, it is necessary to consider covert disturbance as well as overt disturbance. If non-standard usage is frequent and if it leads to irritation and later on distraction, it might adversely affect communication and lead to disturbance. Furthermore, the problem might be what speakers do not or cannot say rather than what they do say. Therefore, covert disturbance will be investigated in the next stage of this study. There is simply need for more description from a variety of ELF contexts to be able to understand the underlying features of ELF interaction. ! References Airey, J. 2006. Unpublished licentiate thesis. Uppsala: Uppsala University. Erling, E. 2004. ‘Globalization, English and the German university classroom: A sociolinguistic profile of students of English at the Freie Universität in Berlin’. PhD thesis. Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Edinburgh. European Commission. 2007. ‘Education and training; The Bologna process towards the European higher education area’. Online at http://ec.europa.eu/ education/policies/educ/ bologna/ bologna_en.html (Accessed 4 February 2008).

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Mair, ed. The Politics of English as a World Language: New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 107–18. Prodromou, L. 2007. ‘Is ELF a variety of English?’ In English Today 90, 23(2), pp. 47–53. Ranta, E. 2006. ‘The ‘attractive’ progressive: Why use the -ing form in English as a lingua franca?’ In Nordic Journal of English Studies, 5(2), pp. 95–116. Seidlhofer, B. & J. Jenkins. 2003. ‘English as a lingua franca and the politics of property’. In C. Mair, ed. The Politics of English as a World Language: New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 139–57. Seidlhofer, B. 2004. ‘Research perspectives on teaching English as a lingua franca’. In Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 24, pp. 209–39. —. 2008. ‘Giving VOICE to English as a lingua franca’. Plenary talk given at GlobEng conference, University of Verona, Italy, 14–16 February. Suvuniitty, J. ‘English as a lingua Franca: A tool for educating engineers’. Forthcoming PhD thesis. Helsinki University of Technology. Swales, J. 2007. ‘The MICASE corpus of American speech’. Talk given at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, 18 October 2007. Swedish Agency for Networks and Cooperation in Higher Education. 2006. ‘The Bologna Process in Sweden: A new degree system’. Online at http://www.nshu.se/english/page/4687/ thebolognaprocess.htm (Accessed 5 February 2008). Truchot, C. 2002. ‘Key aspects of the use of English in Europe’. Language policy Division, Council of Europe, Starsbourg. Online at http://www.coe.int/T/E/Cultural_Cooperation/ education/Languages/Language/Language_Policy/ Policy_development_activities/Studies/List.asp (Accessed 5 February 2008).

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