Promoting internationally-oriented communication through ELF in the primary classroom

International partnerships among schools increasingly constitute opportunities of intercultural contact for young people and can be seen as a point of intersection between English ‘from above’ and English ‘from below’ (e.g. Berns et al., 2007; Seidlhofer et al., 2006; Seidlhofer, 2004, 2007, 2011). This chapter illustrates findings from the “ELF and ICC” project, which involved three primary schools in the Verona area (Italy) over School Years 2009/2011, and aimed at fostering Intercultural Communicative Competence through the use of English as the lingua franca of communication among participants. Starting from class activities to raise awareness of the presence of English(es) in the pupils’ environment, the project developed through a diversified set of tasks within some broad thematic areas (e.g. ‘Christmas traditions’ and ‘Trees’, Vettorel, 2010, 2013), involving exchanges with other European primary school pupils. Findings testify to the pupils’ active and enthusiastic engagement in interaction, and display several ELF characteristics (Vettorel, 2013), among which code-switching to signal cultural identity. We will discuss how international school partnerships can thus represent opportunities to move away from a target-culture and native-speaker reference model in ELT, rather assuming an ELF perspective in taking into account the real(istic) contexts in which English(es) is employed today