Is English as a Lingua Franca the way forward in teaching English?

Thanks to its worldwide spread around the globe during the 20th century, the English language managed to become “the most widely taught, read and spoken language that the world has ever known” (Kachru and Nelson 2001; cited in Kuo, 2006). Among the many consequences of this rapid development, the role of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is definitely the most interesting and debated one, especially when it comes to explore new ways of teaching this language. Even though the debate about ELF has been going on for years among the linguists community, this topic is still unknown to the majority of the public opinion, even if the number of people that uses ELF on a daily basis it is enormous. Indeed, ELF is characterized by many unique features, with the main one being the shift from nativelikeness to international intelligibility. Consequently, this dissertation aims at examining students’ and teachers’ attitudes towards the possibility of teaching English as a Lingua Franca in the near future. The hypothesis at the base of the study is that, because of the globalized and interconnected reality we all live in, new generations of L2 learners do not really care about sounding like native speakers as much as it happened in the past. At the same time, this dissertation will take into consideration the level of proficiency in English (according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Language scale - CEFR) as a potential discriminating factor when talking about ELF. In order to provide an actual demonstration of these statements, English speaking students and teachers of “Mediazione Linguistica Interculturale” at the University of Bologna (at the Forlì campus), were introduced to a survey about this topic. In particular, the questions investigate not only the average knowledge regarding ELF, but also the participants’ opinion on new teaching techniques and perspectives.