Cultural and Intercultural Dimensions of English as a Lingua Franca

Prue Holmes is Reader in the School of Education at Durham University and Adjunct Professor at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests include intercultural communication and education, and language education.Fred Dervin is Professor of Multicultural Education at the University of Helsinki and holds a number of Associate and Adjunct Professorships elsewhere. His research interests include intercultural communication and education, intercultural competence, academic mobility and migration and Chinese education.

• AcknowledgmentsContributorsIntroduction                                                                                                   Part I: The Interconnections and Inter-relationships between Interculturality and ELF1. Karen Risager: Lingua Francas in a World of Migrations                                                                              2. Richard Fay, Nicos Sifakis and Vally Lytra: Interculturalities of English as a Lingua Franca: International Communication and Multicultural Awareness in the Greek Context                        3. Will Baker: Culture and Language in Intercultural Communication, English as a Lingua Franca and English Language Teaching: Points of Convergence and Conflict                                                    Part II: Grounding Conceptual Understandings of Interculturality in ELF Communication4. Chris Jenks: Talking Cultural Identities into Being in ELF Interactions: An Investigation of International Postgraduate Students in the United Kingdom                                                                              5. Anne Kari Bjørge: Conflict Talk and ELF Communities of Practice                                                           6. Jagdish Kaur: Intercultural Misunderstanding Revisited: Cultural Difference as a (Non) Source of Misunderstanding in ELF Communication                                                                                                   7. Tiina Räisänen: Finnish Engineers’ Trajectories of Socialization into Global Working Life: From Language Learners to BELF Users and the Emergence of A Finnish Way of Speaking English      8. Eric Henry: The Local Purposes of a Global Language: English as Intracultural Communicative Medium in China                                                                                                                      Part III: CommentaryJohn O’Regan: Intercultural Communication and the Possibility of English as a Lingua Franca

This edited volume is exemplary in threading together two hitherto parallel intellectual traditions – Intercultural Communication Studies and English as a Lingua Franca – innovatively and critically through a constellation of theoretical and analytical synergies. The empirical case studies across diverse settings will no doubt pave the way for future research-cum-pedagogy in the above two traditions and their intersection.