Page 108 - Cyberculture and New Media

The Challenge of Intercultural Electronic Learning:
English as Lingua Franca

Rita Zaltsman

Abstract
This is a study of the use of English as a language of intercultural
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communication (as a lingua franca) in virtual global educational settings.
The work is based on the discourse analysis of the cross-cultural online
seminar IKARUS: Teaching and Learning in Virtual Learning Environments,
supported by the European Commission, as part of its project on distance
education. The linguistic problems of English as a lingua franca of virtual
educational settings are related to cross-cultural communication between
contextually different cultures (juxtaposition high/low, cultural dichotomy of
West-East). The linguacultural aspects of intercultural online learning are
examined and the issues of “electronic English” are discussed. The paper
concludes with the most relevant findings of the study.

Key Words: Cross-cultural communication, e-learning, discourse
analysis, cyberculture, English, lingua franca.

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1. Introduction
English as a lingua franca (ELF) is a medium of communication
between people of different native languages for whom English is a second
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language.
English has become the language most commonly used for
international communication, mainly due to historical reasons: the quantity of
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English speakers in the world (according to David Crystal, 1.7 billion
people, only 340 million of whom are English native speakers) considerably
exceeds the quantity of French or Spanish speakers. It is expected that within
the next few years the number of people speaking English as a second
language will exceed the number of native English speakers: the global
English language learning market is one of the fastest growing educational
markets in the world and it continues to increase exponentially.
World languages have been affected by English (e.g. French: le
Web, les hackers, le chat), although for some languages the acquisition of
English borrowings was not an absolute necessity: in Dutch, for example, its
number is limited. Results from large scale interviews also show that most
native speakers of Dutch do not experience the strong position of English as a
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threat to their native language.