University of Helsinki Department of English

English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings (ELFA)

The ELFA project investigates English as an academic lingua franca. The project is devided into three subprojects:

• The ELFA Corpus project
• The SELF project
• The WrELFA project – NEW!

The ELFA Corpus project has completed the compilation of a one-million-word corpus of spoken academic English as a lingua franca (ELF). The ELFA Corpus is now available for research. Click here to read more!

The project "Studying in English as a Lingua Franca" (SELF) seeks to relate the linguistic perspective to a more qualitative one, in search of interactive and adaptive processes in action from the point of view of the speakers themselves. It thus complements the ELFA corpus approach by taking a more close-up view of ELF as it is used in university contexts. Click here to read more!

The Written Academic ELF (WrELFA) project is a new opening in the ELF research field. In the project, the ELFA team compiles a database of written academic text. Click here to read more!

Collaboration

The ELFA team joined the Global English (GlobE) consortium in the beginning of 2010 and continues research on ELF within the new network. To read more about the GlobE consortium, go to http://www.uef.fi/globe.

ELFA project group

ELFA group in the First ELF Forum 2008, University of Helsinki.

Front row, left to right: Maria Metsä-Ketelä, Elina Ranta, project director Prof. Anna Mauranen, Jaana Suviniitty and Pirjo Surakka-Cooper; Back row: Niina Hynninen and Anna Solin

ELFA group in the Fourth International Conference of ELF 2011, Hong Kong Institute of Education.

Left to right: project director Prof. Anna Mauranen, Niina Hynninen, Diane Pilkinton-Pihko and Henrik Hakala.

Not in the photos: Our current research assistant Ray Carey.

Navigating the ELFA project site

To navigate the ELFA project site, use the navigation bar on the left or click the links below:

• For a general description of the ELFA project, see ELFA Project description
• For the subprojects, see
  • ELFA Corpus
  • SELF
  • WrELFA
• For publications in the ELFA project, see Publications
• For links to related research projects, see Related sites
• For contact information, see Contact

You can also find information on the 1st international conference on ELF, the ELF Forum, held in Helsinki in March 2008, by clicking 1st ELF Forum 2008.

Citing the website

Please cite this website as http://www.helsinki.fi/elfa.