The global spread of English and the different forms and shapes that the language has taken in the most diverse settings has contributed, especially in the last decades, to develop a peculiar sociolinguistic phenomenon which has had implications on a wide range of areas; linguis- tic, political, socio-cultural, ideological as well as pedagogical. Speakers from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds have increasingly come into contact on a global scale and have adopted English as a contact language, a lingua franca, in contexts where the language is used for vari- ous communicative purposes. What communicative strategies and discourse practices speakers, belonging to different linguistic backgrounds, use to facilitate the achievement of mutual compre- hension, will be drawn attention to in the present paper. The need to re-examine what it means to learn and teach a global modern language from a different methodological perspective will be highlighted. It is therefore suggested that English as a lingua franca, ELF, needs to be investigated as a field of enquiry which requires empirical analysis, not only from a linguistic perspective, but also from a sociolinguistic one.