Attitudes toward English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and its position in contemporary English language curricula in Sweden

Sammanfattning: As a result of various historical, political, economic and sociocultural factors, English today witnesses a unique situation as its non-native speakers represent a clear majority in the world. This has implications for the ownership of the English language as such, the linguistic rights of its speakers and the points of departure for English Language Teaching (ELT) worldwide. The study of the use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) challenges nativespeakerist norms through research in a wide range of linguistic fields such as lexicogrammar, phonology and pragmatics, suggesting various pedagogical alterations. Although ELF is now a prolific area of research, studies in Swedish upper secondary language education from an ELF perspective, remain a scarcity in the literature. The present paper engages in surveying teaching attitudes toward ELF in Swedish upper secondary education among Swedish and Anglophone International Baccalaureate (IB) teachers and in two contemporary syllabi, namely Swedish (ELT) and IB syllabi. The questionnaire given to the two aforementioned groups of teachers suggest that ELF-friendly teaching descriptions best suit their students even though both groups believe that teaching descriptions based on native speaker norms and varieties represent the most appropriate approach. The critical discourse analysis of the two syllabi suggests that ELF is approached in different ways in the two systems: the Swedish ELT curricula may be perceived as rather ELF-friendly because native speaker norms, deviations and errors, grammaticality and idiomaticity are almost non-existent, whereas the IB revolves around linguistic prescriptivism and native speaker norms to a larger extent. The present study argues that English language curricula in Sweden should be informed by research on ELF.