English as a Lingua Franca (ELF): Croatian L1 Students' Perspectives

The current paper presents the results of a research which aimed at establishing the attitude of Croatian L1 students towards the role of English as a global international language. In particular, the focus is to examine whether their perspectives reflect the notion of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) by means of a three-part questionnaire designed to investigate: (a) students' attitudes towards the role of ELF as a contact language among non-native speakers ; (b) their attitudes to English pronunciation ; and (c) students' perspectives on the lexico-grammatical features of ELF. The research was conducted on a sample of 320 undergraduate university students from the Faculty of Economics and Tourism «Dr Mijo Mirković» of the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, including full-time first- and second-year students (median age 20). The participants largely recognize English as a global language that has far surpassed the needs of a single cultural and linguistic circle, and acknowledge the role of ELF as a useful tool in establishing efficient intercultural communication with other non-native speakers of English. Overall, students are quite pragmatically oriented and liberal towards non-native English accents, while gender and self-assessed English proficiency play a significant role in determining what exactly constitutes the ability to efficiently communicate in ELF contexts. The third part of the survey revealed interesting insights into the participants' view on ELF lexico-grammar, where a rather weak correlation between students' evaluation of accuracy (i.e. objective knowledge) and intelligibility (i.e. subjective comprehension) of the eight distinct features of ELF indicates a quite articulate perspective that deviations from the Standard English norm do not necessarily represent a serious impediment to establishing successful ELF communication. The current findings support the idea that domestic students already see themselves as users of ELF, with important practical implications for ESL (English as a Second Language) and EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teaching. Such results can help us better understand the various student profiles and their needs in foreign language acquisition, as well as to deepen our understanding of the relationship between students' proficiency in English and their views on what is “required”, “proper” or generally defined as desirable in language production. The author discusses potentials of implementing strategies to reflect such insights into English language teaching.