A VYGOTSKIAN APPROACH TO ELF IN THE ENGLISH CLASSROOM

Bridging the gap between academic research on English as a lingua franca (ELF) and English language teaching (ELT) has become a major challenge, especially since classroom English has increasingly been examined as a source of insight into complex phenomena such as second language acquisition (SLA) and deviations from standard norms in learners’ use of English. Although applied research shows that teachers often adopt a more open attitude towards the emergence of ELF in authentic intercultural discourse, they still tend to resist changes concerning the legitimacy of learners’ noncanonical use of English. Many teachers question whether it is truly possible to distinguish clearly between acceptable ELF features and errors that are simply part of the learning process. Furthermore, they often argue that incorporating ELF into classroom practice poses significant challenges for current assessment criteria. I argue that an integrated approach—combining Vygotsky’s (1934/1986) sociocultural theory (SCT) with conceptbased language instruction (C-BLI) (Lantolf; Poehner, 2014)—can help teachers support learners in conceptualising linguistic notions (e.g., lexicogrammatical categories such as case, number, gender, tense, mood, and aspect) in a scientific rather than intuitive way. This fosters a deeper understanding of language that goes beyond superficial rule-ofthumb knowledge. From this point of view, language awareness entails that students should understand how cognitive concepts are verbalised in similar or different ways through the lexicogrammar systems of their L1 and English.