Lexical Variation and Translanguagism in an ELF Aware Perspective: Attitudes and Concerns

EU educational policy underlines the need to rethink language teaching (EU, 2017, 2019) in multilingual classrooms and to help learners meet the demands of the increasingly globalized world. This implies raising language teachers’ awareness of the emerging instantiations of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) – a multilingual means for English-medium communication – of its lexical variations and of innovative language teaching practices, such as translanguaging. Pragmatics and lexicogrammar in ELF are interconnected, but teachers are rarely encouraged to reflect upon this connection and to integrate it in their teaching. Inset courses for EL (English Language) teachers, mostly non-native speakers, are therefore suitable contexts for enhancing awareness of authentic language use. This is the goal of the ENRICH Course, aimed at empowering EL teachers to learn about ELF and devise ways of integrating it in their English classrooms. The paper reports on activities, forums and lesson plannings within the course that encouraged teachers to identify and discuss lexical variations in ELF, as well as the use of translanguagism in multilingual English classrooms, so as to revisit their own teaching habits.