English as a Lingua Franca: An Immanent Critique

Applied Linguistics 2014: 35/5: 533–552 ß Oxford University Press 2014 doi:10.1093/applin/amt045 Advance Access published on 15 January 2014 English as a Lingua Franca: An Immanent Critique Department of Culture, Communication and Media, Institute of Education, University of London, London, UK E-mail: Over the past 15 years or so there has developed a school of thought within English language education and applied linguistics globally which refers to the phenomenon and use of English as a lingua franca (ELF). The thinking of ELF movement researchers has placed their work at the centre of current debates about the form, function and legitimacy of the English that is used by speakers from diverse linguacultural backgrounds when they are in interaction with one another. In this article, I intervene in the arguments of the ELF movement from the perspectives of Marxism, globalization theory and poststructuralism by means of an immanent critique. This shows that in the articulation of its discourse the ELF movement reifies and hypostatizes ‘ELF’ as a seemingly stable form, that in its ideology it exhibits an idealist rationalism which blinkers it to the political economy and class stratification of English in a globalized world, and that in its theory it combines a rationalist, positivist and objectivist epistemology with a transformationalist, postmodern and poststructuralist sensibility which is both incommensurable and undertheorized. INTRODUCTION: THE ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA MOVEMENT Over the past 15 years or so there has developed a school of thought within English language education globally which refers to the phenomenon and use of English as a lingua franca (e.g. Seidlhofer 2001, 2011, 2012; Jenkins 2007, 2009a, 2009b, 2013; Mauranen and Ranta 2009; Jenkins et al. 2011; Cogo and Dewey 2012). The ‘English as a lingua franca (henceforth ELF) movement’ (cf. Elder and Davies 2006; Holliday 2008; Berns 2009, for this term), distinguishes itself from English as a foreign language teaching (or EFL) by locating itself within a Global Englishes paradigm in which, ‘non-native speakers [. . .] and all English varieties, native or non-native, are accepted in their own right rather than evaluated against a NSE [Native Speaker English] benchmark’ (Jenkins et al. 2011: 283–4). In this manner, ‘ELF’ is seen as, ‘fluid, flexible, contingent, hybrid and deeply intercultural’ (Dewey 2007; Jenkins et al. 2011: 284), and having far-reaching implications for English language education and pedagogy and its hitherto reliance on nativized varieties. Jenkins et al. (2011) argue that, ‘The study of ELF should pay close attention to the intellectual discourse on globalization [because] ELF is simultaneously the consequence and principal JOHN P. O’REGAN 534 ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA ‘[I]mmanent critique’ uses historical context to invade the inner logic of an opponent’s theory and demonstrates how, according to language medium of globalizing processes [and therefore] part of the texture and infrastructure of globalization’ (p. 303; parentheses added). From whatever perspective one looks at this, the presence of English globally is highly apparent and, within applied linguistics and English language teaching (ELT), a significant literature exists describing this (e.g. Phillipson 1992; Pennycook 2001, 2007; Block and Cameron 2002; Fairclough 2006; Rubdy and Saraceni 2006; Canagarajah 2007, 2013; Jenkins 2007, 2009a, 2013; Blommaert 2010; Kirkpatrick 2010; Seidlhofer 2011; Block et al. 2012). English has penetrated societies and impacted upon the lives of individuals to an extent which has no parallel in human history—in education, tourism, business, trade, diplomacy, politics, development, finance, digital communications, fashion, culture and war. If the suggested estimates are to be believed (Jenkins 2013), then the Englishes spoken by native speakers in the Kachruvian inner circle (Kachru 1985) are a minority English globally, and that the number of speakers of English—of whatever kind—in the outer and expanding circles far exceeds them. To take this a step further, it is evident then that English as the de facto first language of globalization exists as a lingua franca in the world, and that it is used to mediate between speakers who do not share the same first language. This seems to accord, more or less, with the well known definitions of Firth (1996) and Seidlhofer (2001) for whom English used in this way is, ‘an additionally acquired language system’ or ‘contact language’ for communication across linguistic as well as cultural boundaries. Despite recent strategic alignments with globalization theory (e.g. Dewey 2007; Dewey and Jenkins 2010; Jenkins et al. 2011; Seidlhofer 2012, Jenkins 2013) and with the postcolonial and poststructuralist ‘plurilithic’ perspectives of writers such as Pennycook (2001, 2009) and Canagarajah (2005, 2007, 2013), this article argues that the ELF movement is ideologically conservative, is inconsistent in its arguments and is lacking in theorization. Its purpose is to explain why, and to do this by subjecting ‘ELF’—here understood as the movement of that name—to a theoretically grounded immanent critique of its major claims and ideological presuppositions. Immanent critique is closely associated with Frankfurt School critical theory (Jay 1973), although as a critical method in this tradition it may be traced back to Marx, and prior to that to Hegel. For Hegel (1969 [1812]), in any theoretical argument, ‘The genuine refutation must penetrate the opponent’s stronghold and meet him on his own ground; no advantage is gained by attacking him somewhere else and defeating him where he is not’ (p. 581). Which is to say, that if a theoretical position is to be critiqued, it is necessary to attempt to do this on the basis of the grounds and assumptions which have already been established and set in train by the position which is your object of scrutiny. The historical context in which the theory or position subsists is also important. In the words of Paul Gray, J. P. O’REGAN 535 its own standards, its self-described universal truth-claims are only a partial, one-sided, and self-contradictory reflection of conflicts inherent to the prevailing social conditions (Gray 2012: 203). In this article both the theory of ‘ELF’ and the historical context for the claims of the ELF movement are closely examined with the purpose of showing not only how ‘ELF’, as presented by the ELF movement, is theoretically inadequate to its own concept but also how by allowing the social conditions of the historical context, that is globalized neoliberal capitalism, to ‘invade the inner logic’ of ELF theory, makes it possible to highlight several lacunae and problems within the ELF movement’s theorization of English in a globalized world which are insoluble in its own terms. In addition to an historico-social orientation, the immanent critique of the Frankfurt School had a text (...truncated)