Lit Review: Part 1

Ok, so I have to get this exposé thing done since it's almost a year since I took leave to do my PhD and over a year since I 'officially' started with Bochum. I had originally thought I'd write a 3-page summary, but then searching the net, found a description of an exposé for Heidelburg written by Andreas indicating it should be 15 pages! That's actually fine, and probably good because it will be more like a one-year 'what I've done' type thing. However, to do this, as suggested by Markus, I really needed to take a good look at what has already been written in the literature. So that's what I've been doing.

The fact is, it takes me quite awhile to read, take notes, etc. When I was in Dusseldorf, I spent a day searching on the net and downloading files. Now I'm going through them. I haven't carefully read through Basharina's work, but she did her PhD on an exchange using ELF, without focusing specifically on ELF, and it was asynchronous and text-based. Then I moved on to the abstracts from the last ELF conference. Lots focused on language-related issues like core English, several others on business-related contexts, and very few, actually none, on telecollaboration, but a few on CMC. So this is where I've gotten so far...

Saw a presentation by Anne Ike. Couldn't find anything on the Web so I wrote to her. She sent me the following article:

• Ife, Anne (2008) Negotiating Variable Proficiency Levels in Lingua Franca English. In: O. Martí Arnándiz and M. Pilar Safont Jordà (eds.) Achieving Multilingualism: Wills and Ways, Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Multilingualism (ICOM), pp. 34-47.
• Studies 7 students, 2 NS and 5 ELF, comm. at being, middle and end of a classroom session to look at NS/proficient speaker dominance, turn-taking, etc.The way she counts, carries out research, etc. could be very useful for my study.
• Related to dynamic interpersonal specificity as discussed by Kenning (below).
  

Went back to the ELF abstracts and found an interesting one from Cem Aptelkin. Searched the Web for his name and came up with this:

• Aptelkin, C. (2010) Redefining multicompetence for bilingualism and ELF. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 20(1): 95-110.
• Very recent article that provides a convincing argument for why using ELF in in ESL,EFL teaching contexts is jusfiable and preferable. Makes no explicit reference to any kind of context such as telecollaboration, but his arguments could be used to argue for ELF in telecollaboration.
  

I managed to set up the auth-proxy to get access to online journals through UniPD and so I decided to search IJAL from today back to 2006. Found some articles and downloaded them. The first one I read, I found very useful:

• Kenning, M-M. (2006) Evolving concepts and moving targets: communicative competence and the mediation of communication. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 16(3): 363-388.
• The article is very complex and theoretical, rather than empirical or practical. The author explains: "Approaching the updating of communicative competence from a technological rather than a socio-political perspective, it argues that the conventional notion of what it is to be communicatively competent is predicated on a near equation of communication with face-to-face interaction that has become undermined by the growth in mediated communication of the past decades. Communicative competence must be broadened to accommodate and reflect the many different types of communicational practices around the world (Chapelle 2001: 1–2). (p. 364)".
  

Now on to the next ones!