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Article published In:
Asian Perspectives on English as a Lingua Franca and Identity
Edited by Chit Cheung Matthew Sung
[Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 26:2] 2016
► pp. 238–259

Constructing the global citizen

An ELF perspective

| Michigan State University

Building on research on identity (e.g., Norton, 2013), intercultural communicative competence (e.g., Byram, 2008) and English as a lingua franca (e.g., Dewey, 2012), this article examines how the notion of a global citizen was constructed in a school-based ethnographic study involving students from Asia who were recipients of a Singapore government scholarship. Identity construction in this English-medium school was traced across four levels — national, school, classroom, and group interactions — in order to analyze the ways in which global citizenship was realized. Findings from the multiple data sets revealed that while a skewed interpretation of the global citizen was conceived at the school and classroom level, group interactions among students yielded promising indicators of how intercultural communication as mediated through English as a lingua franca could help produce students who are open minded and work actively to build relationships with others. The article closes with a discussion of possibilities for designing pedagogy to develop global citizenship education.

Keywords: identity, cosmopolitanism, intercultural competence, English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), global citizen
Published online: 30 August 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/japc.26.2.04dec
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