ELF and multilingual justice in English language teaching practices: voices from Indonesian English lecturers

ABSTRACT

The unprecedented spread of English across geopolitical boundaries has contributed to the recurrent rise of English as a lingua franca (ELF) studies. However, pressure from native English speakers’ norms remains feasible in many English instructional activities in non-English-speaking countries including Indonesia. Using semi-structured interview with four teachers in UMI University, this article examines the perception of Indonesian English teachers towards ELF and the extent to which the ELT practices (may) accommodate multilingual justice. The findings demonstrated that teachers have a complex perception and ambivalent attitude towards ELF as they think ELF is important for the students, but, due to lack of support from institution and colleagues, they tend to orient their teaching activities to native English norms. Also, the current practice of ELT doesn’t (yet) accommodate justice for multilingual learners. A more systematic institutional policy needs to be undertaken to reinforce the teachers’ existing positive perspective towards ELF.

KEYWORDS:

• English as a lingua franca
• Indonesian English teacher’s perception
• linguistic (in)justice
• multilingual learners

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Associate Professor Ribut Wahyudi for his thought-provoking feedback and valuable comments on the ealrier draft that have helped us improve the quality of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Irham

Irham earned master degree in linguistics from Radboud University Nijmegen. He is a junior researcher at the Faculty of Humanities, UIN MALIKI Malang, Indonesia and is currently a PhD researcher at International and Comparative Education, Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Institute of Education, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. His research interest covers critical applied linguistics, EMI, corpus linguistics, and pragmatics. His article has appeared in Indonesian Journal of Applied Linguistics and MEXTESOL journal, among others. He also has contributed a chapter to be published by Nova Science. His recent work on EMI is under-reviewed by Routledge for a book chapter. He can be contacted at [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9222-230X

Miftahul Huda

Miftahul Huda is a PhD researcher at School of Linguistics and Literature, Universiteit Antwerpen Belgium. He earned his Master’s degree in English Language Education from State University of Malang. His research interests include critical pedagogy, literature and language teaching, spirituality in ELT, and English as a lingua franca. He can be reached via email at [email protected] / [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0196-9262

Rina Sari

Rina Sari is a PhD researcher at State University Malang, Indonesia and currently serves as the head of the department of English literature, Faculty of Humanities in UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang. She is interested in language education policy, democratic language assessment, and language technology

Zainur Rofiq

Zainur Rofiq completed his master degree in linguistics from Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He is the chief editor of Lingua Journal of linguistics and literature studies administered under the Faculty of Humanities, UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang. He has published some articles on pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and linguistics diversity.