Enriching the University ELT Curriculum with Insights from ELF.

The worldwide spread of English is one of the many different developments
closely connected with the phenomenon of globalisation. This
term, which is now recurrent in contemporary rhetoric and is a keyword in
both academic and popular discourse on the economy, society, technology
and culture “[…] can be taken to refer to those spatio-temporal processes
of change which underpin a transformation in the organization of human
affairs by linking together and expanding human activity across regions
and continents” (Held and McGrew 2007, 15).
The intensification of worldwide relations inevitably calls to the fore
the question of the choice of the language to be used for contacts among
people living in widely different places in the world. Lingua francas, that is
“contact languages used among people who do not share a first language”
(Jenkins, Cogo, and Dewey 2011, 281) have been in use for a long time
and Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and other languages were once used for this
function. In present times, the task of being a Lingua Franca to be used
universally has fallen upon English.
English has therefore become the dominant language in the higher
education sector in Europe, as can be seen from objective indicators such
as the growing number of degree programmes which use English as a
medium of instruction (Gotti 2014; Dearden 2015). In this way it is easier
to attract foreign students. But equally important is the wish to prepare
students for the global workplace.
As a consequence of observable