ELF

The topic of language is something that we all struggle with, students, teachers, and scholars; this is due to the fact that culture does not have one stone set definition. Some scholars went as far as categorizing culture as a verb. While reading this week’s article I made connections between the difficulties encountered in the research to the definition of culture. When I begin reading Baker’s article, I had some preconceived ideas of what the article would address. Ideas that expressed the use of English all around the world, the power of English etc... Most of these ideas were somewhat of topic. Instead of looking at the cultural aspect of language of ELF I was looking at the actual language component and how widely it is spoken.

From the beginning to the end, Baker’s article continued to emphasize that little empirical data exits to determine the relationship between language and culture. At 1^st, I wondered why publish an article that contains reinforcement that little data exits? Then I realized, because the idea of culture is such a controversial topic, conducting a research might reveal little conclusions. I also thought the authors keep a continuous reminder of this to discourage the readers from only considering the ideas published in this article.

 Baker’s article The Culture of English as a Lingua Franca looks at the relationship between language and culture. The conducted study involved seven participants (one male) at the University of Thailand. The participants were all undergraduate students majoring in English who were considered to have a high English proficiency and also had more experienced with intercultural communication. Throughout the reading there was one question I keep asking myself; is language tied to a particular culture? Well I was not sure either so I tried to debate both sides. Many of us often believe that a language is tie to a culture; the most famous one is English with USA/ Untied Kingdom.  This belief is actually not correct there are many place in the world beside USA and Britain that speak English. You have Australian English, Nigerian English and etc…  I personally did not believe this but I change my mind (or became more confused) once I read page 578-579.  In the 2^nd extract, you have a conversation between Nami and Will. When Nami responded to Will saying “it’s up to you”.  If someone from the USA was to say this, this will be seen as a sight of politeness, allowing the other person to participate or give their input. But when Nami uttered this sentence, the underline motivation was not the same. The reason behind her sentence was associated with the idea/belief of Thai attitudes towards women. On the following page, there is also a comment about how Nami’s English is the language of the “new generation”. So at the end I stilled asked myself, is language related to culture? But now I am learning towards the yes directions.

The 2^nd article, I found really interesting because often/always, we look at language use in the classroom but never in the work place. The article looked at the communication in New Zealand and also talked about how working with an ethnically different group makes the research process harder. I really like the fact that the research team recorded conversation in both the natural setting and the observational setting. Overall, I found this article interesting and I was happy that for once language research was not looked at an educational point of view.