Nursing Students and the ELF-aware Syllabus: Exposure to non-ENL Accents and Repair Strategies in Coursebooks for Healthcare Professionals

As research on English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) communication increased over the years, interest has started to emerge in the pedagogical implications that the notion of ELF may have in English Language Teaching (ELT). While the majority of the body of work in this area has focused on the (English as Business Lingua Franca) (Louhiala-Salminen and Kankaanranta; Bjørge; Pullin), health care professionals may also benefit from an ELF-oriented syllabus and from ELT materials developed according to the learners’ communicative needs (Takahashi 2014) rather than the traditional RP-based model. This paper aims at analyzing the audio tracks included in two ESP textbooks targeting nursing students at a pre-intermediate level in order to determine the presence of: non-ENL accents, communication between non-native speakers, instances of meaning negotiation of linguistic accommodation. In the last section of the paper, potential activities are outlined that may contribute to fostering awareness of the need for negotiation and accommodation in the students as well as encourage them to reinforce these skills in class.