University of Helsinki Department of English

Studying in English as a Lingua Franca (SELF)

On this page you can find:

• Description of the SELF project
• SELF project poster
• Information on current research in the project
• Documents related to the data collection and processing

Description of the SELF project

English has become the global lingua franca of the academic world. English is the principal language of research publication, and the number of English-medium degree programmes has risen steeply. In these contexts, English is overwhelmingly used among non-native speakers. Its main role is a lingua franca, a contact language among speakers who do not share a mother tongue.

The accelerated mobility and global use of English expose the language to an unprecedented wealth of contacts with other languages and thereby potentially rapid change. To capture the changes in English as they are taking place and to understand the processes involved, we need to document uses of English as it undergoes these transformations.

Project SELF sets out to provide research-based evidence on present-day English as a lingua franca (ELF), with a focus on academic discourses in university settings. Academia has been one of the prime domains to adopt English as its lingua franca, and provides a fruitful context for exploring new developments in English: it is a demanding, verbally oriented and influential domain of language use.

SELF focuses on English-medium university studies, adopting a microanalytic, ethnographically influenced perspective on the social contexts of ELF, tapping the speakers' experience along with their language. As a large-scale sounding board for its linguistic analysis, the research utilises the one-million-word ELFA Corpus. A combination of the corpus-based and the discourse analytic approaches seeks to achieve a well-rounded understanding of current ELF usage.

Findings from the SELF project serve theoretical and descriptive interests on issues of language change and new developments in English. In addition, they serve important applications, primarily in university contexts for the benefit of students and teachers in English-medium programmes. To this end, we co-operate with the Helsinki University Language Centre (click here to go to their project Language Support for English-Medium Master's Programmes). We also expect to contribute to wider applications to teaching, translation and interpretation.

The project is funded by the University of Helsinki Funds for three years (2008–2011).

Poster

Click below to download the SELF project poster. The poster was presented by Niina Hynninen at the Professionalising Multilingualism in Higher Education conference in Luxembourg, 4–6 Feb 2010.

• SELF Poster (in English)
• SELF Poster (in German)

Current research

The main researcher in the SELF project is Niina Hynninen. Her ongoing PhD work focuses on regulation in spoken ELF interaction. She takes a situated approach to interaction in university courses, and seeks to find out how the participants manage and monitor each other's language use.

Pirjo Surakka-Cooper, who is currently working on her MA thesis, uses SELF research data to explore features of written ELF.

Jaana Suviniitty's ongoing doctoral thesis closely relates to the SELF project. She focuses on interactional features of lecturing in an English-medium programme at the Technological University of Helsinki.

Diane Pilkinton-Pihko is developing language testing practices for the same Technological University of Helsinki by approaching the testing of English from an ELF perspective.

Anna Solin is conducting post-doc research on the academic portfolio genre.

Recently the project has expanded its reach into vocational education and other professional Englishes as well.

Publications related to the SELF project can be found under Publications.

Documents

• SELF consent and background information forms
• SELF guide for naming sound files
• SELF transcription guide (based on the ELFA Corpus guide)