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the needs of academic discourse, and the kinds of textual plagiarism which are (and arenot) disruptive of the community’s activities’ (p. 166).

This is a book that deserves be widely read, not only by researchers on written discourse,teachers of academic writing and supervisors, but more generally by those with responsibil-ity for drafting and implementing plagiarism policies within the academic community andperhaps in other fields as well. It is generally written in a very accessible style, althoughthose without a language background may have some difficulty with the treatment of cita-tion in Chapter 3 and the linguistic analysis of Chapter 4. However, there are two areaswhere I think the content would have benefited from more detailed treatment. First, itwould have been useful to provide more detailed suggestions for pedagogical activities inthe final chapter. Second, and more importantly, the data reported here relate only tonon-native speakers of English. It is a pity that Pecorari did not repeat her analysis withnative speaker subjects, as this would have further strengthened her case. These are minorcriticisms. Discussions of plagiarism are too often characterised by anecdote, preconcep-tion and emotion. The value of this book lies in its provision of empirical evidence to backup its central argument. Pecorari has opened up the topic of plagiarism to clear and dispas-sionate scrutiny and it is to be hoped that the academic community will take up her sugges-tion of engaging in a constructive conversation on appropriate source use.

Maggie CharlesLanguage Centre, University of Oxford,

12 Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6HT,United Kingdom

E-mail address: maggie.charles@lang.ox.ac.uk

doi:10.1016/j.system.2008.09.001

English as a Lingua Franca: Attitude and Identity, Jennifer Jenkins, Oxford University

Press, Oxford (2007) xii +284 pp;English as a Lingua Franca: A Corpus-Based Analysis, Luke Prodromou, Continuum,

London (2008) xiv +295 pp

Despite sharing their main title, these are two very different books, in focus, approachand style. They do share a propensity for confusing acronyms and words that my spellchecker has had to learn to recognise. So we have ELF of course (English as a LinguaFranca) and ENL (English as a Native Language); ELF is now Jenkins’ preferred termover EIL whereas for Prodromou they are interchangeable. We have the LFC (the LinguaFranca Core) and VOICE (The Vienna Oxford International Corpus of English). We havethe issue of what to call the ‘new native speaker’ – Jenkins goes for ‘proficient ELF speak-ers’ and Prodromou for SUEs (successful users of English). Prodromou’s main interest isin idiomaticity, Jenkins looks at different linguacultural contexts. The lion’s share of Pro-dromou’s book is taken up with an analysis of TWPs (two word phrases), and the differingfrequency and use that L1 and L2 speakers put them to.

Jenkins, as her subtitle makes clear, is looking at NNS teachers and their attitudes toELF. She is honest enough to conclude that assumptions she had made earlier aboutNNS’s desire for membership to the ELF circle were wrong, as her research makes evidentthat the benchmark most aim at is still a native speaker accent. She has moved on from theanalysis of NNS-to-NNS exchanges in her earlier book on the phonology of English as anInternational Language, but is still to some extent on the back foot since the LFC is notyet fully described or codified. Prodromou’s title is perhaps not as clear as it could be sincehis main interest is in idiomaticity as the feature that L2 users have the most difficulty inacquiring. Most of his book is taken up with contrasting, from corpus-data, NS and SUEuse of TWPs and the effect this has on their fluency. Unlike Jenkins, who is defending ELFas a legitimate means of communication (based presumably on a prescriptive code), hisapproach is descriptive of the way SUEs make English and its idioms their own in all sortsof different ways, that in no way impede their fluency.

Jenkins explains early on that one of her main motivations in writing her book was toexplore the misinterpretations of her ELF pronunciation proposals.

It is my hope that the research findings in this books, in so far as they reveal the lan-guage attitudes, beliefs, ideologies and identity conflicts that underlie many of thenegative responses to ELF, will contribute towards a reappraisal that will enableELF, one day perhaps, to be offered as a pedagogic alternative to (but not necessar-ily a replacement for) EFL. (p. xii)

Her approach is thorough and comprehensive, with surveys of all the relevant research, alarge scale questionnaire study in expanding circle countries, and in-depth interviews withNNS teachers of English. As a result of so many detailed references and analyses, her bookis possibly a little opaque. Prodromou is more direct and personal, and more witty. We hearabout his own linguistic development, his own misuse of idioms and his SUE friends.

With corpus linguistics on one-side and ELF on the other, I found myself caughtbetween two stools. . .or on the horns of a dilemma, sitting on the fence. . .or what-ever the appropriate idiom was in such cases. After 30 years of teaching English,training teachers and writing ELT textbooks, I was uncertain what I should teachand test my students. It was time to do some research of my own. (p. x)

Nevertheless, the two authors overlap and cross-refer as they spar with each other. Jen-kins dissects an article by Prodromou in her early chapter on ELF and ideology, where sheworks at deconstructing representations of ELF. (It is probably no coincidence that thesame article had already been used by Seidlhofer in her chapter on the spread of GlobalEnglish in Controversies in Applied Linguistics (2003).) Prodromou’s second chapter called‘Uncovering ELF’ is an amusing analysis of the collocates (and the colligation and seman-tic prosody) of ELF in a corpus he has created from six recent articles published by Jen-kins and Seidlhofer. His aim is to reveal the controversial and political nature of the issuesraised in the ELF debate to which he will return in his final chapter.

In both books there is a refreshing move away from the phonology and lexico-grammarof ELF to, in the one case, attitudes, and in the other, idiomaticity. In each case, the focusis also helpfully on a specific group of users – the NNS teacher in Jenkins’ case, the ad-vanced user in Prodromou’s (the fact that his focus is on advanced users means that theirdifferent and often creative use of idiomaticity is refreshingly not attributable to inter-lan-guage or learner ‘errors’).

676 Book reviews / System 36 (2008) 673–681

Both writers in their early chapters set the scene for their research and their reporting of it.Jenkins’ first two chapters look at what ELF is and how it has been misrepresented. Prodro-mou in his Part 1 looks at the relationship between idiomaticity and fluency, and the debateover the role of the NS in ELF, making it clear that he agrees with the Bakhtinian idea that:

. . .All spoken language is in various degrees dialogic – it is shared language and wecannot open our mouths without ‘quoting’ previous language use. By extension, L1and L2 varieties of English are in constant dialogue. (p. 89)

Both writers attribute to themselves post-native speaker approaches to SLA, wherelearners are not necessarily conceptualized as failed native speakers, and foreground therole of identity and the socio-cultural context rather than focus on inter-language and fos-silization. However, Prodromou early on points to what he calls the ‘idiomatic puzzle’.For a corpus-linguist like himself, idiomaticity is at the heart of spoken grammar and isthe key to native-like fluency. In contrast, for ‘ELF scholars’, such a concept is at bestirrelevant and often indeed an obstacle to mutual intelligibility.

Prodromou may well be targeting Jenkins, though here her position on the intelligibilityversus identity debate is gradually refined. Her research chapters (on language attitudes ingeneral and previous research into ELF attitudes, on elicited attitudes towards ELF andfinally to how new identities are formed through ELF) lead her to an awareness of howattitudes to ELF help mould the identity of speakers:

Accent attitudes play amajor role in the wayNNS perceive their own and others’ Eng-lish accents, and may ultimately be found to override more basic intelligibility consid-erations, as well as to interact in complex ways with L2 English identity factors. (p. 90)

. . .NNS teachers may have very mixed feelings about expressing their membership ofan international (ELF) community or even an L1 identity in their L2 English. (p. 231)

Prodromou’s Part 2 uses his data from his small SUE corpus of 200,000 words and com-pares it to data from CANCODE and the BNC. In this way he teases out the different uses(and avoidances) that L2 users make of the TWPs – particularly ‘sort of’ and ‘you see’. Hispenultimate chapter on unilateral and creative idiomaticity brings him back to defining thefeatures of native speaker competence (which are culturally based in the native speaker’simmersion from childhood in conceptual knowledge – such as games, nursery rhymes, andjokes) and therefore to the limits of non-native competence. (Interestingly, Medgyes (1994,p. 14) had already identified these same features as markers of what he calls ‘pseudo-natives’).

Prodromou goes on to outline the paradox, whereby L2 users do not seem to have thesame rights as native speakers and, as a consequence, the same linguistic features andexamples of creativity produce opposite effects in L1 and L2 speakers, thus interestinglyexplaining their avoidance:

It is possible that the relative lack of certain kinds of idiomaticity in SUEs is theresult, not of a lack of ‘competence’, but an intuition, on the level of performance,as to where the limits are, as far as idiomaticity is concerned. (p. 239)

In their final chapters, both writers can be seen to want the empowerment of the NNSvis-a-vis the NS – the difference lies in the fact that for Prodromou, NNS and NS havestakes in the same language, and SUEs’ creativity with that language should be valued justas much as that of the NS; for Jenkins, the NNS should be free to use ELF instead of ENL:

Book reviews / System 36 (2008) 673–681 677

But if ELF is one day codified and its status as a legitimate means of communicationis acknowledged, then we shall be able to talk about Teaching English of Speakers ofOther Languages: teaching the ELF of proficient L2 users themselves. (p. 252)

So, while Jenkins concludes by seeing that not much has changed since her earlier con-cerns with the need for a change of mindset, one in which departures from ENL are nolonger seen as deficient and accommodation as a strategy is taught and rewarded, her con-tribution here is to help teachers of English come to terms with the new role of English as aLingua Franca and adapt themselves and their professional practices to this new reality.

On the other hand, Prodromou feels that the research conducted in his book:

suggests that ELF speakers will poach on L1 linguistic territory when it suits themand when they are able to do so. Their use of phraseology will be different from,but on an equal footing with, their L1 user counterparts. (p. 251)

and he concludes

In the end, ELF risks sending the student stuttering onto the world stage, with lim-ited linguistic resources. (p. 255)

The ELF debate, which can be said to have been started by Jenkins (2000) and mostrecently has seen Rubdy and Saraceni (2006) and then Kirkpatrick (2007) join in, contin-ues to be a hot topic.

References

Jenkins, J., 2000. The Phonology of English as an International Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford.Kirkpatrick, A., 2007. World Englishes: Implications for International Communication and English Language

Teaching. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Medgyes, P., 1994. The Non-Native Teacher. Macmillan, Basingstoke.Rubdy, R., Saraceni, M. (Eds.), 2006. English in the World: Global Rules, Global Roles. Continuum, London.Seidlhofer, B. (Ed.), 2003. Controversies in Applied Linguistics. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Katie GrayDepartment for Continuing Education,

Rewley House, 1 Wellington Square,

Oxford OX1 2JA, United Kingdom

E-mail address: katie.gray@conted.ox.ac.uk

doi:10.1016/j.system.2008.09.002

Lessons from Good Language Learners, Carol Griffiths (Ed.), Cambridge University Press,

Cambridge (2008). xii + 336 pp

Do we really need another book on Good Language Learners? Especially one in theform of a festschrift for an article by Joan Rubin in TESOL Quarterly over 30 yearsago, ‘What the ‘good language learner’ can teach us’ (Rubin, 1975). I am not really afan of festschrift collections: the constant homage, the uneven writing, the contrived nat-

678 Book reviews / System 36 (2008) 673–681