Communicative practices in English as a lingua franca interactions: some examples from Asian university students in London

Abstract

The advent of the concept of communicative competence in applied linguistics and English Language Teaching constituted a break from previous accounts of language, as it advocated a more social view of language use. However, it was subsequently reified narrowly by the ensuing pedagogical models of communicative competence. This and the fact that English gradually became the default lingua franca in ethnolinguistically diverse contexts point to the need to reinvestigate how English is nowadays used. These observations are illustrated here with examples from naturally occurring spoken interactions of some Asian university students in London. What is shown is that the students were making use of all their linguistic resources, and they were thus achieving various communicative objectives. Such linguistic practices highlight the situated and contingent nature of language-mediated meaning-making, and resonate with the analytic sensibilities and sensitivities of the body of research on English as a lingua franca, translanguaging and superdiversity.