Identifying ELF: an interdisciplinary perspective on social categories in lingua franca research

Abstract Researchers have a number of methodological tools and theoretical frameworks at their disposal when examining how English language identities are constructed in lingua franca encounters, including a conversation analytic understanding of an “emic social reality”; according to this perspective, a speaker’s identity falls within the interests of a researcher if, and only when, it is made relevant through social interaction. This paper builds on this tradition by studying how language identities can be understood from multiple analytic perspectives, including from an emic perspective. Drawing from a corpus of chat room data, the study examines how the social categories used by interactants to engage in identity work, such as categories that are inherently deficit in orientation (e.g., foreign language learner), may not precisely align with the preferred categories used in the lingua franca literature, such as categories that are more positive in nature (e.g., expert language user). These observations are used to explore some of the general methodological issues that exist when situating an analysis of identity within the study of lingua franca interactions.