construction of identity in one essay in a third grade ESL class. Though
generalization may not be the chief aim of such studies, he wonders what
their relevance is.
Aneta Pavlenko has changed her perspective on the post-structuralist
views on identity:
Post-structuralism had a mixed effect on thefield. On the positive side,
it opened new directions for scholarly inquiry and enriched our under-
standing of the social, political and economic aspects of second language
learning and use. On the negative side, it gave rise to a lot offluff, that is,
meaningless“studies”that continued to make the same point over and
over (identities are multiple and dynamic) and contributed little if any-
thing to our knowledge base. If there is anything I regret about my
career, it is contributing to this trend–if I could“unpublish”some of
my own identity work, I would happily do so.7.2.4 The spread of English and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)
A pervasive trend has been the spread of English all over the world. Jodi
Crandall points to the many“unintended consequences”.Different schools
of thought and action on this topic have emerged, such as the English as a
Lingua Franca (ELF) group and the World Englishes group. One of the
informants who writes extensively about this issue is Tove Skutnabb-Kangas:
Of course I am worried about the completely uncritical subtractive
spreading of English. People could learn English additively and it has
been shown with massive, both smaller and large-scale studies that
mother-tongue-based multilingual education leads to good results (which
subtractive submersion doesn’t do) –still the work of apologists of
subtractive English (or other “big” languages) continues. Politicians
don’t read research. AL hasn’t been helpful in this.One of the growing areas of research in the last decade is on the develop-
ment of English as an international language to ELF. One of the main leaders
is Barbara Seidlhofer, who has set up various projects together with her
colleagues in Vienna, including a corpus of ELF interactions. One pedagogic
implication of ELF research is the questioning of the native speaker as the
sole goal or reference in English language teaching. The essence of the ELF
movement is the removing of the native speaker as the goal or reference in
language learning. The focus on the native speaker is still prevalent, despite
many publications denouncing it. The focus on the native speaker is also
visible in the wordings of the Common European Framework of Reference
(CEFR)“can-do”statements, which makes this framework less relevant for
ELF. ELF speakers are essentially using the language to get things done and
Trends II 79