Tübingen English as a Lingua Franca
TELF is an applied linguistics research project that systematically combines conversational ELF output data with introspective and retrospective accounts by speakers and interlocutors. This combination allows for differentiated insights into the nature of ELF communication; it provides rich examples of how speakers use their “own English” to cope with the communicative challenges of a lingua franca situation.
The TELF corpus is a collection of video-recorded and transcribed discussions by mixed groups of four to six native and non-native speakers of English from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Each discussion is followed up with introspective interviews addressing the participants’ learning history, English requirement profile, and performance in the discussion. Drawing on TELF-data, our research focuses on divergences between meaning and comprehension, co-construction and monitoring, and “pushing” one’s limits of expression.
The TELF database is accessible via an online application supporting the detailed analysis of transcripts (including retrospective commentaries by participants in the form of interlinear glosses), questionnaire data, introspective interviews and retrospective accounts. A restricted demo access to the database application is available via the menu on the right.
A group of speakers are presented with a problem from a business context (the “Midwestern intercom problem”) and asked to discuss its implications. The problem is “ill-structured”, has no correct solution, but can be approached from a number of different angles. The output-corpus currently consists of 36 discussions (ca. 100,000 words) with around 160 speakers from more than 30 different linguistic backgrounds.