Nice session yesterday, thanks for your engagement and enthusiasm! Special thanks also to Chris Jenks and Seong Jeon for their contributions. Chris' point was well made - about ELF interactions being characterised as largely collaborative in nature, and the need to extend the database, but it's important to remind ourselves that this point has already been made in the literature (see my 2009 'Doing not being ..' paper, for example). But Chris is right that we need to study ELF in a wide range of settings.
I hope you're beginning to get a feel for the hows and whys of conducting empirical research on ELF interactions.
More from me very shortly, once I've had some breakfast.
I've got this feeling that the focus of ELF research should be on the interactional/pragmatic aspect, rather than on linguistic form. ELF linguistic form may be too chaotic and arbitrary to be captured. Suppose a "lingua franca core" does exist - how will Jenkins and Seidlhofer distinguish a successful ELF user from an ELF learner in terms of their "core" proficiency? Will they say there is a "sub-ELF" because so many people can't even produce the "core" form that is a reduced menifestation of the "standard"? Proponents of the standard ideology may easily point out that those ELF linguistic features identified so far are common mistakes/erros made by all learners of English; to standardise ELF on the basis of these mistakes/errors may prove absurd. What is more important, and thus worthier of research, may be how ELF users get things done with their limited repertoire of languistic resources.
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