English as a Lingua Franca and wikis as new affordances for the language classroom. The case of cooperative writing and fanfiction

The academic debate around the nature of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is intimately connected to its implications in the field of English Language Teaching (ELT). Therefore, a major challenge for applied linguists and educators involved in ELT is to incorporate today’s glocal emergence of ELF into the traditional school curriculum, which entails redefining English as a subject, its goals and its pedagogic approaches. The aim of this paper is to present a research project whose main purpose is to overcome the artificiality of communication within the narrow limits of the English classroom, and allow Italian high school students to use ELF as a sociocultural affordance to carry out authentic communicative activities online, through cooperative writing and fanfiction. This study has shown that web-mediated learner’s performance serves as a catalyst for the convergence of the scholastic study of English as a foreign language and the effective use of ELF.