ABSTRACT
Written academic English as a lingua franca (hereafter ‘WAELF’) names a concept in dispute. For each of the terms and combinations of terms constituting the phrase ‘Written academic English as a lingua franca’ is increasingly being placed in question: writing, academic, academic writing, English, academic written English, lingua franca, as well as English as a lingua franca. If, conventionally, written academic English (WAE) has been understood to represent a specific, stable, discrete and internally uniform variety of written English – say, the written English of professional academics – studies of the corpus of English-medium writing by professional academics have shown that WAE is neither stable, nor discrete from other kinds of language practices, nor internally uniform (see, for example, Leki, 1995; Petraglia, 1995; Lea and Street, 1998; Thaiss and Zawacki, 2006; WrELFA 2015). And what constitutes the corpus of academic writing – even in English – has been found to include diverse genres, modes and technologies of writing, ranging from notes, emails and memoranda to university press books and the product of a broad and diverse range of kinds of writers who might likewise be understood as ‘academic’, including not only professional academics but also students at every level as well as teachers and administrators, with a wide range and diversity of ethnolinguistic as well as disciplinary and professional affiliations, backgrounds and aspirations. Further, as the various chapters in this handbook will have made clear, what constitutes English, and more specifically English as a lingua franca, is under radical scrutiny. In short, even when understood strictly as an individual entity, WAELF is wide ranging, diverse, in flux and in interdependent relation to different kinds of writing, writers, languages and language varieties. Consequently, understanding WAELF involves drawing on a comparably wide range of disciplinary areas of study.
