An investigation of how Taiwanese university students position their own English within the framework of global Englishes?

Many English as a lingua franca (ELF) researchers have highlighted the need for attitude studies in order to find out more about ELF speakers' orientations to their own English and other non-native English speakers' (NNES) Englishes. However, most of ELF attitude studies that have been conducted so far have focused on NNES English accents. In addition, ELF research in the context of Taiwan has been scant. In order to contribute towards filling those gaps, this paper reports on an investigation of Taiwanese university students' perceptions of ELF, including their own group's English at the levels of accent, lexis and grammar.The study involved questionnaires, interviews and focus groups in order to get a bigger picture of Taiwanese university students' attitudes towards ELF. The questionnaires were conducted to obtain a broad and general picture of Taiwanese university students' attitudes towards ELF, including Taiwanese English, and to identify potential interview participants. The interviews were carried out to explore in greater depth the reasons underlying their perceptions. The purpose of having the same participants taking part in interviews and focus groups was to see whether they would change their attitudes, and/ or develop new ideas, through the dynamics of focus group discussion. In addition, university students including English-major students and other-major students from three different universities in Taiwan participated in the study, so as to enable me to find out whether there are any differences in perceptions of Taiwanese English for ELF according to major.The results of the study show that English-major students tend to put more emphasis on the 'purity' of native English norms in their production of English, than do the other-major students. In addition, the majority of the participants appear to hold a more positive attitude towards Taiwanese English accent than towards Taiwanese English lexicogrammar in the context of ELF. I explore those findings in relation to the participants' identity positions, their ELF experiences, their understanding of a link between the forms of Taiwanese English and its functions, their understanding of language change and development as natural processes, and the influence of native English (speaker) ideology on their positions.Finally, I discuss how the study contributes towards providing Taiwanese English users with a better understanding of ELF, and Taiwanese English-policy makers/ Taiwanese English teachers with a better understanding of university students' learning needs in relation to ELF