English is unquestionably the world language of academia--yet its most notable characteristic, being predominantly used by non-native speakers, has not seriously been taken on board in ESP descriptive studies. The project English as an academic lingua franca (ELFA) based at the University of Helsinki investigates academic discourses, branching out into two parts: one is the ELFA (English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings) corpus project, whose major achievement is the 1-million-word ELFA corpus of spoken academic discourse. The other part is SELF (Studying in English as a Lingua Franca), a project with a micro-analytic orientation, which aims at capturing participant experience of ELF in a university environment. This research note describes the rationale and the design of the ELFA corpus, and introduces recent research in the project. (Contains 2 figures.)