An unwelcome guest: the Non-NNS at the lingua franca table

Firth & Wagner (1997) called for a reconceptualization of the research agenda within Second Language Acquisition (SLA), advocating “enhanced awareness of contextual and interactional dimensions of language use”, a more participant- relevant perspective, and a broadening of the database. ELF studies have done a great deal since to problematize the idealized native speaker (NS) as a target model for non-native speaker (NNS) language users. However, by excluding the NS from what are described as ELF interactions – where ELF is “a mediating language that is not a mother tongue [L1] for any of the interactants” (Firth & Wagner, 2007), the etic NS/NNS dichotomy has effectively been maintained, although reconceptualized as NNS/NNNS (non non-native speaker). This paper argues that a broadening of the ELF database to include all kinds of English language users would allow for a more robust, participant-relevant, explication of ELF practices to be produced. Using recordings of naturally occurring interactions in multilingual, multicultural domestic settings, I will demonstrate how language users, including ENL speakers, orient to what have been described as ELF practices, with neither NS nor NNS orienting to ENL norms, nor treating non-ENL norms as problematic.