30.1963, Review: English; Applied Linguistics; Computational Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Martin-Rubió (2018)

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Subject: 30.1963, Review: English; Applied Linguistics; Computational Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Martin-Rubió (2018)

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Date: Wed, 08 May 2019 13:45:49
From: Joshua Paiz [jpaiz at email.gwu.edu]
Subject: Contextualising English as a Lingua Franca

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36473277


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-4443.html

EDITOR: Xavier  Martin-Rubió
TITLE: Contextualising English as a Lingua Franca
SUBTITLE: From Data to Insights
PUBLISHER: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Joshua M Paiz, George Washington University

SUMMARY

‘Contextualizing English as a Lingua Franca’ is an edited collection that aims
to concurrently expand how English as a lingua franca (ELF) theory
conceptualizes EFL phenomena while also offering insights into ELF-aware
pedagogy. To do this, the editor, Xavier Martin-Rubió of Universitat de
Lleida, gathers contributions from ten authors on three continents. The
contributors—mostly Europeans—provide an expansive view that takes on current
issues in ELF and English language teaching (ELT). The result of this
ambitious and dipartite goal is a surprisingly compact hardcover, coming in a
little shy of 300 pages. It is a polyvocal collection in three parts that
manages to maintain the fidelity of the contributors’ independent voices in
keeping with ELF ideology. To aid in this endeavor, the editor has broken the
book into three major sections that look at the intersection of
computer-mediated communication (CMC) and ELF (Section 1), ELF across contexts
(Section 2), and the pedagogical ramifications of ELF (Section 3). In this
review, I will work through each section in turn. 

Section One of this book covers a range of CMC-related issues in ELF. In
Chapter Two, the author provides a conceptual and analytic framework for
working with ELF data that has been gathered in CMC environments, which they
refer to CMELF. Notable in this chapter is that the author (Bosso) makes a
concerted effort to address the ethical issues using data mined from (semi-)
publicly available sources like Facebook or SinaWeibo, chief of which are
informed consent and privacy protection. Chapter Three focuses on how Web 2.0
tools, such as wikis and video content, can be used to scaffold teacher
education programs in ways that facilitate an understanding of ELF
perspectives on language education. It offers a fine-grained look at the use
of these resources in a teacher education program at a Spanish university,
pointing to a net-positive effect on teacher preparation and ELF-inclusive
attitudes. In Chapter Four, the authors (Novotná, Císar̂ová, & Tufano) use
Canagarajah’s (2013) translingual approach to advocate for ELF-inclusive
approaches to raising the rhetorical awareness of students’ learning to write
in English for academic purposes (EAP) classes. Their research indicates that
using a translingual approach that focuses on cultural differences and
similarities can be helpful to student writers. 

In Section Two, the focus moves to an interrogation of how ELF is realized in
different national contexts and domains of life (e.g., the classroom, the
immigration office, etc.). In Chapter 5, the contributor discusses the
intersections of ELF and identity theory in the Vietnamese context. Their
focus is on how ELF varieties of English are used in social and academic
settings in Vietnam, and the possible impacts that this might have on the
speakers; for example, they might realize a social and academic self. Their
findings indicate a conflicted sense of self on the part of the participants
and ambivalent attitudes towards ELF varieties of English. Chapter 6 shifts
focus to the Grecian context for an examination of the so-called real needs of
the learners. It suggests that Greek ELF learners need more exposure and
top-down training on handling non-native English speakers’ production of
ELF-varieties of English. Chapter 7 moves to the Czech context and provides an
examination of students’ attitudes towards English as a foreign language (EFL)
and ELF paradigms for instruction, finding that there is the need for students
to adjust their attitudes towards “proper” English for ELF to fulfill its
emancipatory potential. Chapter 8 closes out this section by looking at ELF
interactions among migrants engaging with Italian immigration officials. It
found that phonological issues, as opposed to morphogrammatical ones
contributed the most to the communicative difficulties experienced between ELF
interlocutors in the study. 

The final section shifts to a description and analysis of ELF-informed
pedagogies for English for specific and academic purposes (ESP/EAP) classes.
This section gathers work from three national contexts—Japan, Brazil, and
Turkey. In Chapter Nine, Yaeko Hori (the author) describes an ELF-aware
pedagogical approach that attempts to aid students in acquiring transcultural
competence. This approach is based on a four-part model that moves students
from engagement with global Englishes, to reflecting on their language use,
and then on to analyzing that use in situ, before finally practicing the
communicative abilities in an ELF setting. The study suggests that this
approach was helpful in raising student awareness of the varieties of English
used across the globe, which they may encounter in lingua franca situations.
Chapter Ten moves the reader to Brazil, where the authors investigate
collaborative curriculum design. In this chapter, they advocate for an
ELF-informed pedagogy for English language classrooms in keeping with an
activist view of language learning. By tying ELT in Brazil to wider students’
rights to their own languages movements (STROL), the authors argue  that the
ELF paradigm provides a useful tool to guide language curriculum design in
what has traditionally been referred to as the EFL context (see CCCC, 1974;
TESOL, 1987). It achieves this efficacy by creating space for awareness
raising and buy-in around non-native varieties of English. Chapter Eleven
rounds out the volume with an examination of ELF instructional materials in
the Turkish context. The authors find that the use of ELF and world Englishes
(WE) paradigms equipped early- and pre-service teachers with critical tools
that allowed them to interrogate native-speaker bias in instructional
materials. The study in this chapter concludes that this approach to teacher
education enabled teachers then to find, or construct, curricular materials
that were ELF/WE informed and that were better able to speak to English as it
is used in the students’ local context.  

EVALUATION

As a young doctoral student, I was warned away from edited collections by a
trusted advisor, and now dear colleague. I have tried to not to let that
advice taint my reading of edited collections, or to blanch when I am invited
to contribute to them. As a co-editor of a collected volume, I know all too
well the challenges of quality control and project management (Silva, Wang,
Zhang, & Paiz, 2016). That being said, with a good press and diligent editors,
both book editors and copy editors at the publishing house, amazing things can
happen with this kind of book. ‘Contextualizing English as a Lingua Franca:
>From Data to Insights’, however, suffers from many of the problems that
typically plague edited collections, and these problems are exacerbated by the
publishing model of Cambridge Scholars Publishing, which researchers on sites
like researchgate.net have described as being overly reliant on contributors
to perform even basic copy editing of the texts. I will say that
‘Contextualizing English as a Lingua Franca’ is an ambitious book, collecting
research from almost a dozen national contexts, many of which are
underrepresented in the wider socio- and applied linguistics literature. That
being said, the quality of this work as presented in this book gives me pause.
In this evaluation, I will begin with the collection’s demerits and close on
the positive attributes of this text. 

Almost immediately, quality control issues become apparent in the text. On the
table of contents page of the copy that I was given for review, there are
glaring editorial errors. Specifically, the title of Chapter Six is missing
the first eight words of the title; there are only eleven words altogether.
The table of contents is critical for an edited collection because it is where
potential buyers/readers first engage with the text’s scope and determine if
it fits their needs. An error of this magnitude, which should have easily been
caught during copy editing, is a rather sizeable red flag for me as a
reviewer. Again, I fully understand the challenges inherent in edited
collections, but this speaks to a fundamental issue with Cambridge Scholars
Publishing’s production model. Many of the more established presses that I am
aware of—Oxford University Press, New York University Press, Equinox
Publishing—will have a manuscript go through a round of in-house copy editing
to avoid exactly this kind of error. Additionally, the book is missing an
index, which makes it difficult to see how ideas might cross over from chapter
to chapter, or to guide your reading, or raiding, of the text. Issues with
production quality persist throughout the book. Almost every graphical element
is grainy and difficult to parse. This is likely because the source material
for these graphics were not high-resolution images.  Also, there are
linguistic issues with the works that should have been caught during the
copy-editing stages, such as one author’s reference to “edition software” when
they likely mean “editing software” (p. 37), or the use of archaic versions of
country names, such as Rumania for Romania—which almost completely fell out of
use in the 1990s (see NGram Viewer, n.d.). (Note here, that I am not concerned
with the lexicogrammatical differences of different varieties of English
(e.g., American English and Euro English).  

There are also quality control issues with the work reported on in the
contributions. For example, two chapters take very problematic approaches to
their theoretical frameworks. Both Chapters Six and Ten uncritically blend the
WE and ELF paradigms. The authors of both chapters offer no discussion of how
these paradigms diverge from each other—treating them as largely the same—and
in doing so, they completely fail to reconcile potentially debilitating
ideological differences (see Fang, 2017), thereby weakening the analytical
power of the framework. In other places, authors fail to fully operationalize
theoretically rich terms that will inevitably have a bearing on how they
analyze their data. In yet other places, such as in Chapter Nine, there are
potential methodological issues. The research instrument is an English
language survey with rather complex lexicogrammatical structures and
theoretically nuanced items; however, by the researchers own admission the
students taking these surveys were at an elementary level of English
proficiency. Whether or not native language versions were provided
participants is not reflected in the appendices, nor is it discussed in the
methods section of the paper. 

As for the volume as a whole, it is often difficult to see the connections
between the different contributions. This difficulty can potentially be linked
many missing editorial elements that would have helped greatly, be it an
index, section introductions, or a functioning introduction to the book. The
closest this book comes an introduction is Chapter One, which is an odd mix of
an introduction, the editor’s goals for gathering these papers, and their
armchair analysis of some of their own ELF interactions, an analysis which is
seemingly presented without member-checking or any other form of validity
testing. Because of the scope and organization of the first chapter, it makes 
a very ineffective introduction to the book, leaving the reader still unsure
as to the connections between the contributions, beyond all being about ELF.
This feeling is compounded when none of the contributions reference any of the
other chapters in the volume, nor do they reference the “guiding principles”
that the editor sets out in the first chapter. All of this leads to a volume
that is difficult to see as a cohesive whole, making it feel more like a
volume of a quarterly journal than a book. Taken with the quality
issues—editorial, theoretical, and methodological— it creates a book that
raises the wrong kinds of questions once read from cover-to-cover. 

That being said, some positive notes  must be mentioned. As a Western academic
in TESOL/Applied Linguistics, I firmly believe that there is the need to
create more spaces for voices from under- and unrepresented context. As it
stands, we know far too much about ESL learners at Western universities; and
we know far too little about non-traditional learners in global contexts. This
book does an excellent job of creating just that kind of space. In this
compact 281-page tome, eight different national contexts are represented, some
of which, like Greece and Vietnam, are woefully underrepresented in the
literature. I commend the editor for purposefully creating space for under-
and unrepresented voices. Also, there are some very strong contributions in
this collection. For example, Chapter Eight provides meaningful insights into
migrant issues and the use of ELF principles, insights that can  impact policy
and practice at the national level in transformative ways that create more
equity for migrants and asylum seekers. Chapter Ten is also an exceptionally
strong contribution that models both how ELF can be used to realize
transformative and emancipatory pedagogies that create value around
multilingual Englishes and how collaborative curriculum design, led from the
bottom-up, can lead to change at the national level. Both of these chapters
provide actionable recommendations that may have relevance beyond their
original contexts. 

My final evaluation of the book is that while there are some strong
contributions and it does a praiseworthy job of creating space for
marginalized voices, because of its weaknesses, this edited collection does
not justify the price tag (61.99 GBP/81.35 USD). This book represents an
ambitious effort, but it gets stuck in a quagmire of editorial and
copy-editing issues that simply shouldn’t have been allowed to occur if proper
quality control was exercised by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 

Note: I have reached out to Cambridge Scholars Publishing about some of the
typographical errors, and they assure me that they will be addressed in future
publication runs of the book. 

REFERENCES

Canagarajah, Suresh. 2013. Translingual practice: Global Englishes and
cosmopolitan relations. New York: Routledge.

CCCC. 1974. Students rights to their own language. College Composition and
Communication 25(3). 1-32.

Fang, Fan. 2017. World Englishes or English as a lingua franca: Where does
English in China stand?. English Today 33(1). 19-24. DOI:
10.1017/50266078415000668.

Martin-Rubió, Xavier. Ed. 2018. Contextualizing English as a lingua franca:
>From data to insights. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

NGram Viewer. N.d. Google Books. Retrieved from:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Romania%2CRumania%2CRoumania&yea
r_start=1870&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2CRomania%3B
%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CRumania%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CRoumania%3B%2Cc0

Silva, Anthony J., Wang, Junju, Zhang, Cong, and Paiz, Joshua M. Eds. 2016. L2
writing in the global context: Represented, underrepresented, and
unrepresented contexts. Beijing: Beijing Foreign Language Teaching and
Research Press.  

TESOL. 1987. TESOL member resolution on language rights. TESOL International
Association. Retrieved from:
https://www.tesol.org/advance-the-field/tesol-member-resolutions/member-resolu
tions/tesol-member-resolution-on-language-rights-(1987)


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Joshua M. Paiz holds a doctorate in second language studies (TESOL) from
Purdue University. He is currently a teaching assistant professor in EAP at
George Washington University, where he also coordinates the Applied English
Studies program. His research interests include LGBTQ+ issues in applied
linguistics, Online Writing Labs as L2 writing support tools, and
sociocognitive approaches to SLA. His work has appeared in TESOL Journal,
TESL-EJ, Asian EFL Journal, and the Journal of Language and Sexuality. He also
serves on the editorial advisory board for TESOL Journal and as an associate
editor for Asian EFL Journal. He is also on the review panel for a variety of
journals in ELT and applied linguistics.





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