English language teachers’ reactions to ELF-like grammatical usages in Chinese university students’ writing

Abstract Studies of Written English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) are relatively new and less common than those focusing on spoken ELF, particularly when it comes to investigating grammatical features. This study adds to the body of research on written ELF by looking at research participants’ (Chinese and non-Chinese English language teachers) reactions to grammatical features of ELF in second language writers’ academic texts, using an open-ended acceptability judgment task (AJT) combined with a follow-up interview, which allows an opportunity for deeper insight into participants’ reasons for marking (or not marking) particular instances of ELF-like usage as unacceptable. It was found that the most common ELF features in the students’ writing was article usage. While not many of the participants marked article usages as unacceptable, one interesting finding was that some Chinese participants preferred the ELF-like usage of “the” before the noun “society.” Follow-up interview data revealed that both groups of teachers tended to refer to grammatical “rules” to justify their decisions to mark certain usages as unacceptable. This study shows that open-ended AJTs may continue to be a fruitful research method in studies of readers’ reactions to features of written ELF.