Conceptual Transition from English as a Foreign Language to BELF

Abstract

Business professionals, who use English language in their daily interactions at global corporate companies in Turkey, have been educated within the paradigm of teaching and learning of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). However, as most of their interactions in business world take place with speakers of other languages in multilingual/cultural settings, these professionals' use of English language as Lingua Franca (ELF) may commence to function in different domains with different purposes and communicative outcomes within the paradigm of BELF. However, to our best knowledge, how business professionals in Turkey use and conceptualize English language in their daily business domains and how they position themselves as users of English and BELF have not been investigated. With this aim in mind, we conducted a research with 19 business professionals working at global companies in Istanbul. The data was collected through a survey administered with 19 business professionals and semi-structured interviews with five informants working in top positions at those companies which serve global customers. The findings of the study revealed that business professionals in Turkey are in a state of flux between the two paradigmsi.e., EFL and ELF toward the construction of BELF because EFL and ELF co-exist in their minds.

Applied linguistics and language education research in Turkey: 2016–2022

“…This degree of openness was much less evident in Geçkinli and Yılmaz's (2021) survey of nearly 600 EFL students who agreed that adhering to nativespeaker norms was not necessary when interacting, yet they still showed reservations about incorporating ELF into language classroom practices. A similar mixed attitude was found in a very different community, that of Turkish business professionals working in multinational corporations (Altınmakas et al, 2019). Similar to the teachers and students in the foreign language education realm, these professionals revealed that they were in a stage of flux, expressing a shared linguistic solidarity when engaging with other Business English as lingua franca (BELF) speakers, but still valuing highly native-speaker norms and considering 'inner circle' varieties of English as standards to be approximated.…”

“…5.4. Teaching English as a lingua franca (ELF) and World Englishes (WE) Among the relevant studies that have been published in recent years, most seem to focus on attitudes towards ELF/WEs, either in relation to participants' current awareness and openness towards ELF/ WEs (Altınmakas et al, 2019;Cesur & Balaban, 2020;Çeçen & Serdar Tülüce, 2019;Geçkinli & Yılmaz, 2021;Yücedağ & Karakaş, 2019), or in relation to the changes in attitudes following specific training, out-of-class communications in English, or experience abroad (Biricik Deniz et al, 2020;Irgın, 2020;Kaçar, 2021;Kemaloğlu-Er & Bayyurt, 2022;Uğurlu et al 2022). Çeçen and Serdar Tülüce (2019), for example, examined pre-service EFL teachers' attitudes towards speakers coming from the three 'circles' of English (Kachru, 1985).…”