About
Nicos Sifakis
University of Athens
Main areas of research
- Pedagogy and Education
- Theory of e-Learning
- Applied Linguistics
- English as a lingua franca
- Intercultural communication and pedagogy
- Language Teaching
Bio
Nicos Sifakis is Professor of English for Specific Purposes in the Department of English Language and Literature of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and director of the M.Ed. in Teaching English as a Foreign/International Language of the Hellenic Open University. He has published extensively on teaching and researching English as an international lingua franca (with a focus on the concept of ELF awareness), intercultural communication and pedagogy, language teaching methodology, distance education, adult education and teacher education.
Keynote Lecture
From deficiency to integration: English as a Lingua Franca, translanguaging, and linguistic theory reimagined
Outline
English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and translanguaging research have fundamentally transformed the ways in which linguistic theory conceives of multilingual communication and language architecture. This keynote examines the conceptual contributions these complementary frameworks make to theoretical linguistics. While ELF interrogates how speakers utilize English across multilingual environments, translanguaging demonstrates the integrated and fluid mobilization of the entirety of speakers’ linguistic resources: a unified repertoire rather than discrete linguistic codes. Together, these perspectives challenge the native-speaker paradigm and reveal the inherent creativity and systematicity that underpin multilingual communication outside of monolingual norms. Empirical data from ELF and translanguaging elucidate patterns such as phonological reduction, morphosyntactic flexibility, pragmatic negotiation strategies, and code-meshing phenomena that should be understood as signs of linguistic innovation, not deviation. These insights urge a re-evaluation of foundational constructs within linguistic theory, including the competence-performance distinction, the universal grammar hypothesis, and modularist models of bilingual cognition. By foregrounding authentic multilingual practices over idealized monolingual grammars, ELF and translanguaging approaches bridge the divide between core theoretical linguistics and applied concerns, providing methodological advancements for investigating language change, cognitive processing, and the real-time evolution of linguistic norms. This integrated paradigm calls for theoretical models capable of accounting for how vast populations creatively deploy their full linguistic repertoires.