Despite the prevalent use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) around the globe, resources for both researchers interested in studying this growing phenomenon and teachers wishing to expose their learners to naturally-occurring spoken interactions in ELF settings are relatively limited. To this end, the presenters (and their colleagues) created the recently launched ELFJ (English as a Lingua Franca in Japan) Corpus as part of their government-funded research project (JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP18K00753) to further our collective understanding of such encounters and expand opportunities for ELF-aware pedagogy. In this talk, the presenters will discuss their motivations for creating the ELFJ Corpus and lessons they learned along the way, their hopes to expand the corpus (e.g., to include other ASEAN member states), demonstrate its features, and propose ways it could be utilized by teachers (e.g., as listening content) in the language classroom to better prepare their learners for future encounters with other English users in a linguistically and culturally diverse world.
