Anthony Schmidt

2016-12-05

Christopher Tribble's latest article in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes has a lot of ideas to unpack concerning different approaches to EAP Writing Instruction (EAPWI) and how it is being conceived of by Jennifer Jenkins, a main proponent of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). I have attempted to address these ideas elsewhere on my own blog. This Research Bite will be concerned with the actual research Tribble did in order to address Jenkins argument that EAP writing approaches that take genre analysis as their bases are based on conformity to native English speaker standards. ELFA (ELF meets EAP), on the other hand, would be an approach to EAPWI that focuses more on communicative competence than conformity to a native speaker ideal, although the ELFA vision for EAP writing is not discussed in Tribble's article. Jenkins posits a native/non-native dichotomy of conformity which Tribble's rejects as "chimerical, unhelpful and irrelevant" (p. 34). And he demonstrates this with a small corpus study which will be discussed below.

Article

Tribble, C. (2017). ELFA vs. Genre: A new paradigm war in EAP writing instruction?. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 25, 30-44. Retrieved from sciencedirect.com.

Dichotomies

First, Tribble takes issue with "native speaker," which is something that no linguist, not even Jenkins, can clearly define, as there are a number of Englishes spoken by native speakers in various discourse communities. This is one reason why Tribble calls the concept unhelpful. Instead of the native/non-native dichotomy suggested by Jenkins, Tribble sees EAPWI based on genre analysis situated within a expert/apprentice dichotomy in which native language plays absolutely no role. Tribble claims that native academic English does not really exist. Rather, what does exist is a set of conventions developed by experts and writers with expertise within a particular discipline regardless of first language.

Study

To demonstrate this, Tribble built a corpus of research articles from international journals. This was chosen, as the writers and editorial board would likely be those whose mother tongues were not all English. He then focused on a single journal from the corpus (a biology journal called Acta Tropica). Through random sampling of 10 articles, he investigated errors (or what he called "non-canonocial" uses, or deviations from "textbook norms") in order to determine whether these authors were forced to conform to native speaker norms of language usage. He found that errors were common, about once every 60 words. He found these errors at the clause level but noted that all of the writings stayed consistent at the stage and moves level. That is, while non-standard language usages were permitted, all articles conformed not to language norms but to disciplinary norms of genre and information presentation.

Takeaway

The takeaway is, as Tribble argues, that ELFA really has no role in academic writing, as academic writing has nothing to do with conformity to nativeness but rather "expertise that is required for acceptance by specific discourse communities" which are clearly international (p. 40). While Tribble views ELF as having a positive influence on areas such as spoken communication, especially pronunciation, he does not see a need for it in EAPWI (with a genre focus), While there are limitations to the corpus study (e.g. no indication to what extent a native speaker may have assisted in writing an article), the evidence that academic writing is written by and for an international community and focuses on content rather than mother tongue is quite strong and is a strong counter to ELFA arguments.