言語選択

言語選択

Center for ELFCenter for English as a Lingua Franca

A pioneering
ELF pedagogical center

Message from the Director

Welcome to Tamagawa University’s Center for English as a Lingua Franca (CELF) homepage. The center was established in 2014 for campus-wide study of English for global communication.

Why study English as a global lingua franca when ‘standard’ English, derived from a shared first language in the United States or the United Kingdom for example, is the focus of much attention in teaching and learning? An increasingly large majority of English communication throughout the world occurs among speakers of different first languages in linguistically and culturally diverse and variable circumstances typical of ELF communication.

In response to such widespread changes in English communication, in collaboration with interested researchers and teachers in Japan and beyond, we explore ELF-aware approaches to teaching and learning, emphasizing language use in intercultural and transcultural communication rather than the form English takes in ‘native’ speech communities.

We gratefully acknowledge the work of CELF Founding Director, Professor Dr Masaki Oda, who wrote to students:

“You will not be penalized for not being able to imitate ‘native speakers’ perfectly. Instead, we will constantly reflect what you can do, and gradually improve English as it is used in the real world, step by step.”

Whatever your interest in English, we invite you to consider the implications of ELF as you browse through Tamagawa University’s CELF pages.

Director, CELF　 Paul McBride

Faculty

Faculty members

  • Director

    McBride, Paul

  • Associate Director

    Dimoski, Blagoja

  • Chaikul, Rasami
    Cote, Travis (Primary appointment in the College of Tourism and Hospitality)
    Kuroshima, Satomi, Ph.D.
    Leichsenring, Andrew, Ph.D.
    Milliner, Brett
    Mogi, Yuta, Ph.D.
    Nakamura, Sachiko, Ph.D.
    Novikova, Natalia, Ph.D.
    Okada, Tricia, Ph.D.
    Stevenson, Robert
    Yujobo, Yuri Jody

  • Founding Director

    Oda, Masaki, Ph.D.

    (CELF director: April 2014 - March 2019)

    (CELF director: April 2014 - March 2019)

Part-time faculty members

  • Around 40 instructors from around the world

Multilingual faculty members

To our knowledge, Tamagawa University’s Center for English as a Lingua Franca (CELF) is among the world’s first centers to apply ELF research to teaching English and teaching though English for academic purposes.

Even though native-speakerism and associated provincialism are strongly ingrained in Japanese society (e.g., Houghton & Rivers, 2013), CELF has valued diversity on a global scale in the communication experiences of its teaching staff. They are originally from across the world, and at present, largely from Asia, Australasia, the Americas, and Europe. Whether full- or part-time, new applicants are scrutinized for scholarly appreciation and pedagogical application of ELF research and intercultural background, along with academic qualifications and teaching experience.

CELF policy and practice supersede distinction between ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ English speakers. Instead, the founding director Masaki Oda clearly states that “monolingual English-speaking teachers would not meet the needs of our ELF program” (Oda, 2019: 265).

Faculty’s countries of origin
(As of 2024)

20 countries

Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, Germany, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Russia, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States, and Vietnam

Faculty’s first or strongest
languages (As of 2024)

17 languages

Czech, English, Finnish, German, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Malay, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Sinhalese, Slovak, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai, and Vietnamese

References

Houghton, S., & Rivers, D. J. (Eds.). (2013). Native-speakerism in Japan. Multilingual Matters.
Oda, M. (2019). Beyond global English(es). In K. Murata (Ed.), English-medium instruction from an English as a lingua franca perspective (pp. 259-270). Routledge.

History

Tamagawa University’s English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) program started in 2013, with around 1,000 students at the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Tourism and Hospitality. The summer and winter ELF sessions, as well as special ELF classes for 12th graders at Tamagawa High School, also started in the same year.

Tamagawa University’s Center for English as a Lingua Franca (CELF) was established in the following year, and it has offered English education to an increasing number of students across the humanities and sciences:
approximately 1,500 students in 2014, 2,500 in 2015, 2,700 students in 2016, and 2,800 students in 2019 onwards. In 2019, the ELF program became the integral part of curricula in all the eight Tamagawa colleges (i.e., Humanities, Agriculture, Engineering, Business Administration, Education, Arts, Arts and Sciences, and Tourism and Hospitality). In 2023, the CELF diversified its program by offering 17 courses across four academic levels to 17 departments in eight colleges.

CELF is not just a pedagogical center to design, implement, and evaluate the university-wide English program. It also serves as a research center.

Ever since 2015, CELF has organized monthly workshops for its faculty and staff, inviting scholars from both inside and outside the university. Before the COVID pandemic outbreak in 2020, CELF special faculty development events featured scholars from overseas, and specifically from Austria, China, Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand, and the UK. In these workshops and events, CELF faculty members and scholars actively shared ELF-aware research and teaching ideas, some of which have also been distributed and further developed through CELF academic forums and publications.

On 5 March, 2015, the first CELF Forum took place under the title of Language teaching in the Asian context. On 22 August, 2017, in collaboration with ELTama (a group of Tamagawa alumni English teachers at the Graduate School of Humanities), CELF hosted its first annual CELF-ELTama Forum for English Language Teaching (ELT) to connect ELF research with ELT in Japan and overseas. In late August every year, prominent scholars in the ELF field give a plenary talk for this event series.

Meanwhile, CELF launched its journal called The Center for English as a Lingua Franca Journal in April 2015. After publishing its sixth volume in April 2020, CELF decided to take over the Sciendo (De Gruyter Poland) Open journal of Englishes in Practice from the University of Southampton, UK. In 2021, CELF started to publish both The Center for English as a Lingua Franca Forum and Englishes in Practice, the former reviewing research and pedagogy at CELF, and the latter disseminating pioneering research related to global communication among English users.