English as lingua franca: a brief report on the education of communication professionals in a Brazilian University

This paper deals with the opportunities and challenges experienced by Brazilian undergraduates who are required to pass credits in English as a foreign language (EFL) before earning their degrees in Journalism; Public Relations; or Radio, TV and Internet Studies. The EFL lessons follow a content-based/content-and-language integrated approach, and the students and the teacher-researcher are first-language speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, which is the language of instruction in all the other courses at the university. By looking at samples of student production in English and their testimonials, the objectives in this paper are: (1) to illustrate how some Brazilian professionals in training deal with tasks that allow them to practice EFL/English as Lingua Franca (ELF) while talking and writing about politics, environmental education, and entertainment, and (2) to point to challenging aspects of professional/intercultural communication as experienced by these participants. This classroom, case study in foreign language education may help gain new insights into the complexities of ELF (Leyland, 2011; Seidlhofer, 2011) for young professionals pushed into global working life (Räisänen, 2013), particularly as far as language and intercultural communication are concerned. Qualitative data suggest that the opportunities and challenges associated with communication in EFL/ELF help learners realize the need to study in more detail a range of topics they could be taking for granted in their overall education. In addition, the participants in this small scale classroom research seem to notice that critical knowledge of content matter plays a unique role in their perceived competencies to communicate in EFL/ELF.