Lecturers’ Appraisals of English as a Lingua Franca in European Higher Education Settings

What is it about?

In this chapter we analyzed lecturers’ attitudes towards using English in European Higher Education settings. Twenty-eight university teachers were brought together from thirteen universities across six European countries for an online training for teachers in English Medium Instruction (EMI) settings. The lecturers’ written exchanges about English as an academic Lingua Franca (ELF) in one of the training modules were the target of our study. These exchanges (110 posts) were coded and analyzed using Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory, which is a model of evaluation within the general theoretical framework of systemic functional linguistics. In this framework, affect, judgement and appreciation are regarded as regions (types) of feelings in interpersonal language that reflect attitude (positive or negative). The results showed that teachers’ exchanges about ELF are interwoven with other types of English, in which they discussed different stakeholders and aspects of English, towards which their attitudes vary, which points to the multidimensionality of attitudes towards EMI. The results also show that appreciation and judgment regions were used more than affect in their language when discussing the use of English in Higher Education (HE).

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