Griffith University, Australia

Title: English as a Lingua Franca in Asia: Suggestions for ELT/ELF Policy and Pedagogy

Abstract

In this presentation I shall review recently conducted research studies which used data from the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) ACE. ACE is a corpus of some one million words of naturally occurring data of English used as a spoken lingua franca by Asian multilinguals. 8 data collection teams across Asia worked together to collect and transcribe the corpus. ACE is now freely accessible and stored at the Hong Kong Institute of Education.

The studies looked at the cultural settings of topics discussed in the ACE corpus, the marking or non-marking of tenses and the communicative strategies of ELF speakers. The presentation will conclude with proposals, based on the research findings, for regional ELT or ELF policy and pedagogy.

Bio

Andy Kirkpatrick is Professor in the Department of Languages and Linguistics at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. He has lived and worked in many countries in East and Southeast Asia, including China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Myanmar and Singapore. He is the author of English as a Lingua Franca in ASEAN: a multilingual model (Hong Kong University Press). He is the editor of the Routledge Handbook of World Englishes. His most recent books are English as an Asian Language: implications for language education, co-edited with Roly Sussex and published by Springer, and Chinese Rhetoric and Writing, co-authored with Xu Zhichang and published by Parlor Press. He is founding and chief editor of the journal and book seriesMultilingual Education, published by Springer, and has recently been appointed editor-in-chief of the Asia Journal of TEFL. He is Director of the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) project.