English as a lingua francaIn recent years, the term English as a lingua franca’ (ELF) has emerged as a way of referring to communication in English between speakers with different first languages. Since roughly only one out of every four users of English in the world is a native speaker of the language (Crystal 2003), most ELF interactions take place among non-native’ speakers of English.Although this does not preclude the participation of English native speakers in ELF interaction, what is distinctive about ELF is that, in most cases, it is a contact language’ between persons who share neither a common native tongue nor a common (national) culture, and for whom English is the chosen foreign language of communication’ (Firth 1996: 240). Defined in this way, ELF is part of the more general phenomenon of English as an international language’ (EIL) or World Englishes’. (For comprehensive overviews, see Jenkins 2003; McArthur 1998; Mel scholarships for high school students chers and Shaw 2003.) EIL, along with English as a global language’ (e.g. Crystal 2003; Gnutzmann 1999), English as a world language’ (e.g. Mair 2003) and World English’ (Brutt-Griffler 2002) have for some time been used as general cover terms for uses of English spanning Inner Circle, Outer Circle, and Expanding Circle contexts (Kachru 1992). The traditional meaning of EIL thus comprises uses of English within and across Kachru’s Circles’, for intranational as well as international communication. However, when English is chosen as the means of communication among people from different first language backgrounds, across linguacultural boundaries, the preferred term is English as a lingua franca’ (House 1999; Seidlhofer 2001), although the terms English as a medium of intercultural communication’ (Meierkord 1996), and, in this more specific and more recent meaning, English as an international language ‘ (Jenkins 2000), are also used.