Developing Awareness of ELF in English Language Education

Language educators in today’s classrooms face the complex responsibility of teaching English to prepare students for a variety of requirements in the field of education and work. At the same time, they need to empower students to make use of their English resources to communicate as effectively as possible with speakers in local and global contexts where English is used as a contact language, i.e., English as a lingua franca (ELF), by people who do not speak and understand each other’s primary languages. The concept of ELF is regarded in diverse ways in various educational settings, and often it is described negatively in comparison with the norms of native-speaker English. However, this deficiency orientation is not conducive to the development of confident language users, which is an aim clearly outlined in the revised national English subject curriculum in Norway. This chapter proposes a post-deficiency approach to the teaching and learning of English, calling for a change of attitude and arguing for the inclusion of ELF discourse in learning resources, heightened genre awareness, and the development of contextually appropriate pragmatic strategies.