Corpus-based Study of Institutional Academic ELF in the Expanding Circle

This paper reports on an ongoing project focusing on institutional (vs. disciplinary) academic English as a Lingua Franca as it is used on the websites of European universities. This ELF variety is used to present degree programme descriptions, syllabi and in documents providing information on a wide range of administrative and organisational matters (Biber, 2006). A monolingual comparable corpus (called acWaC, academic Web as Corpus) is currently under construction using semi-automatic web-as-corpus methods. acWaC will contain texts in English posted on the Internet by British and Irish universities and by universities based in European countries belonging to the expanding circle, where English has not acquired any special institutional status and is considered norm depending. The rationale behind text collection is opportunistic, coherent with the web-as-corpus approach adopted: a balance is sought between the need to maximize coverage of national varieties and corpus size/ease of collection. The expected size of the whole corpus should be around 10 million words. Preliminary investigations of a smaller, more carefully controlled corpus of degree programme descriptions targeting a similar population revealed lexical and phraseological features distinguishing institutional academic ELF from the native/original benchmark. In particular, distinctive patterns emerged with respect to the use of evaluative lexical bundles and superlative adjectives, expression of stance and engagement, and modality (Bernardini et al., 2009). The paper reports on a study seeking confirmation of these genre-specific findings in the larger, more representative acWaC corpus. The results are interpreted against the background of increasing EU-wide efforts towards the internationalisation of higher education, which promote the role of institutional academic ELF (Archibald et al. (eds), 2011). This process is subject to different institutional and cultural constraints in the national academic systems involved, which are reflected in the varying degrees of deviation from the native norm found across EU countries.