´ELF´ as medium of learning in a hotel management programme

As part of a general trend in education, more and more programmes (also in Austria) use English as medium of learning. In a growing number of them, the participants, lecturers and students, make use of English as a lingua franca (ELF), i.e. they speak various first languages (L1s), come together in a non-EL1 environment, and use English as their only shared medium of communication. Through English, these culturally and linguistically heterogeneous groups do not only manage to negotiate meaning, but, as they spend considerable time together, also discursively create their own culture. While ELF has attracted linguistic research interest for twenty years from phonetic, lexico-grammatical, pragmatic, conversational and discourse analytical perspectives, the present project is the first to focus on ELF in education. Its aim is to connect (descriptive) linguistic insights with (interpretative) applied linguistic concerns in a longitudinal naturalistic study of a two-year ELF-medium post-secondary educational programme in hotel management organised by and situated at a Viennese hotel school. This applied linguistic, quasi ethnographic investigation will be guided by the following research questions: (a) What are the main characteristics of classroom discourse in this ELF instructional setting? (b) In which ways does classroom interaction construct, and get constructed by, the learner group`s culture throughout the two years? (c) What are the students` and lecturers` views on ELF as medium of learning and in which ways are these reflected in, and constructed by, classroom discourse? Besides this so far untackled research focus, this project is also innovative as regards research methodology: discourse analysis of written and spoken data (`objective` data) will be connected with `subjective` evaluations of the students and lecturers concerned. Finally, this study aims at developing a model of ELF classroom discourse. The scope and orientation of the project also allow for application as the study aims at providing systematic information on the ELF interactional patterns of a tertiary, professionally-oriented instructional setting and will thus contribute to a more realistic view of what ELF use can look like in such situations. This, together with the theoretical understanding of how lecturers` and students` evaluations of ELF interact with their language use, can be used by programme administrators and lecturers in working on their curricula or preparing in-service training.