A Study Of English As A Lingua Franca In Asia From The Perspective Of Alignment Theory

At the beginning of the twenty-first century,Professor Jennifer Jenkins published her book “The Phonology of English as an International Language”(2000)and Professor Barbara Seidlhofer delivered the thesis “Closing a conceptual gap: The case for description of English as a lingua franca”(2001),which had made a great contribution to the development of ELF in the field of applied linguistics and English teaching.Besides,the appearance of Anna Mauranen's article “The corpus of English as a lingua franca in academic settings”(2003)has contributed to the construction and analysis of English as a lingua franca corpus.Currently,the study of ELF has developed into an independent field,which has yielded substantial results.However,most of the researchers only pay attention to the aspects of phonology,grammar and the attitude towards ELF.The majority of the studies are focused on economy and academic areas.With the development of globalization,interactions between folks of different countries are more and more frequent.So English as a lingua franca in daily life is worth studying as well.Alignment can be classified into two kinds according to its definition.From the perspective of sociocognitive linguistics,alignment is the means by which human beings dynamically adapt to,flexibly depend on and co-construct a kind of ever-changing mind-body-world environment to demonstrate the intersubjectivity.Whereas from the psycholinguistic perspective,alignment means interlocutors align and cooperate with each other automatically so as to conclude a situation model,which is called the interactive alignment model.This study tends to take the psycholinguistic approach to analyze the phenomenon of alignment.This study,based on the scene of daily life,attempts to analyze the dialogues between advanced non-native English speakers in Asia with the guidance of alignment theory.It mainly focuses on two questions.Firstly,what alignment activities do the advanced non-native English speakers in Asia use in daily communications? Secondly,compared with the low-proficient English speakers,whatbreakthroughs are achieved when advanced non-native English speakers in Asia involve themselves in alignment activities?According to the experimental studies by Abby Dings and Marta Tecedor,it has been found that alignment activities exist in communications between elementary language learners and native language speakers.With the improvement of language proficiency,the alignment activities will increase,leading to gradually advanced interactive competence.However,there is no specific classification of alignment activities till now.Dings and Tecedor mainly study the alignment activities of elementary Spanish learners.Dings supposes that there are three categories of alignment activities: assessments,collaborative contributions and collaborative completions.Based on the studies by Snyder Ohta(2001),Kyoko Masuda(2011)and Dings(2014),Tecedor concludes four kinds of alignment activities,which are acknowledgements,assessments,collaborative contributions and collaborative completions.The Asian Corpus of English is one of the three largest corpora of English as a lingua franca.It was accomplished by a team headed by Professor Andy Kirkpatrick in Griffith University,Australia.This study extracts twenty texts in the leisure part of ACE(nearly 100 thousand words),involving forty participants,who are all advanced non-native English speakers in Asia.With the help of conversation analysis,the criterion that is used for extracting samples is based upon different topics in each text.After analyzing dialogues between the forty participants,the author finds there are a lot of alignment activities,which can be classified into five kinds: acknowledgements,assessments,collaborative contributions,collaborative completions and affiliations.Besides,compared with the studying results of Dings and Tecedor,advanced non-native English speakers in Asia prefer to use complex alignment activities,like formulation,addition,utterance overlapping,affiliation,etc.The author hopes this study could have some implications for the further English teaching.More actual English-using circumstances in non-native English speaking countries should be added in textbooks as learning materials.On the other hand,besides stressing the importance of fundamental knowledge,teachers should alsoconcern the cultivation of interactional competence and the use of alignment activities,which will increase the efficiency of communication dramatically.