ELF and World Englishes: Different dishes, or different cuisines?

This week I am reviewing Seidlhofer's (2009) article articulating her concern with the tendency among some in the academic world to separate ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) from the World Englishes (WE) paradigm discussed by Braj Kachru (1985). Some scholars, it would seem, even find the two views incompatible (Seidlhofer, 2009). However, as Seidlhofer effectively argues, the two paradigms have more in common than one might think: they are both dedicated to subverting the current monolingual paradigm which currently holds sway over much of the world and elevates "native speaker varieties" of English such as North American, British, and Australian English(es). Although WE and ELF differ in terms of which of Kachru's "circles" each is primarily concerned with (WE tends to focus on the Outer Circle while ELF is primarily concerned with the Expanding Circle), this distinction should not separate the two fields of scholarship, according to Seidlhofer.

To be sure, tensions exist between WE and ELF. Through Bamgbose (1998), Seidlhofer makes an argument for the eventual descriptive codification of ELF. Already we see a conflict with the  theoretical bent of Canagarajah (2007), who de-emphasizes standards because each NNS-NNS interaction is something made up on the spot, the particulars of which are negotiated by the participants as the interaction unfolds. Kachru (1985) himself, on the other hand, does not eschew prescriptivism or codification, even endorsing it in some contexts.

With respect to writing in the academy, I tend to agree with Kachru: I don't believe it works well to extend Canagarajah's theory, based as it is on spoken interaction, to second language writing. If we theorize, for example, the submission of an article by a non-native writer to an English language journal as such an interaction (albeit a textual one), we instantly have problems because of the power differential between writer and audience. Unlike interactions among ELF speakers, where every participant is on equal footing linguistically, the two parties in the writer-journal interaction are grossly unequal. This inequality makes the interaction less a conversation between individuals and more a form of "institutional talk" (Cameron, 2001) in which the supplicant is constrained as to what sort of interactive moves he or she is allowed to make.

To ground this theory a bit, if the journal holds all the power in determining what sort of linguistic deviation it will tolerate in submissions accepted for publication, then there can be no negotiation - prescriptivism is handed down or not, according to the whim and ideology of each individual publication. However, if there were a codified standard for written English that conformed to an ELF/WE and not a monolingual paradigm, a submission could not be rejected for deviant use of articles or omission of the singular third person marker morpheme -s, because these minor deviations do not serve as barriers to communication. In other words, while codification constrains, it also grants rights to the speaker/writer which otherwise would not be available.