English as a lingua franca in spoken genres in the international university: introduction

Beyza Björkman
2018 Journal of English as a Lingua Franca  
English has long been the lingua franca of academic settings. As many readers of this journal will know, since World War II, English has established for itself a solid place as the dominant lingua franca of science through which most academic and scientific activity takes place (Crystal 2013). In Europe, its position got even more stabilized after the Bologna Declaration in 1999 when an agreement was made to establish a common European higher education arena (EHEA) by 2010. Now in 2018, we can
more » ... ee that this aim has been reached to a large extent with a very large number of English-medium instruction (EMI) programs (Wächter and Maiworm 2014), allowing students to study in other countries than their home ones through exchange or degree programs, and staff to practice academic mobility in different ways. All these students and staff, often if not always, use English as their lingua franca in their everyday practices, often in high-stakes situations. The literature on EMI has focused heavily on non-English speaking countries with scholars reporting from different parts of Europe (e.g. Hultgren et al. 2015; Hynninen 2016; Smit 2010; Wilkinson 2013) . English is of course used as a lingua franca also in universities in English-speaking countries. In Englishspeaking countries, it of course has a different history of being a lingua franca with the local language being the same as the most dominant lingua franca, and there are certainly different dynamics involved for speakers of other first languages who use English as their lingua franca at e.g. a US university. 1 Speakers are also exposed to English in daily settings associated with ordinary people, accounting for a considerable portion of their interactions. I have argued elsewhere that, with regard to studies of English as a lingua franca (ELF), the sociolinguistic realities of each country and region must be considered, making the geographical divide an organizational criterion key (Björkman 2016). Other
doi:10.1515/jelf-2018-0019 fatcat:izo4bfp4rzhpba7vpy45naz3wu