Enhancing Explicitness Through Self-Repair Practices in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) Communication

Abstract

In intercultural communication, ELF (English as a lingua franca) speakers aim to be a more explicit and clear way to achieve shared understanding. Repair is a means of achieving clarity and mutual understanding in communication. This article will examine how self-initiated self-repair operates in ELF communication with a focus on self-repair for meaning with lexical modification. The data are based on naturally occurring ELF interactions among international students in a UK university and are analysed using the Conversational Analysis (CA) approach. The findings show that the ELF speakers in the data adeptly employed self-repair strategies and specifically showed frequent use of specification, synonyms, lexical insertion, and topic negotiation within the concept of self-repair. The speakers confirm what they have said by repeating the utterance with some lexical modification or replacement, and this dynamic of self-repair makes the meaning more explicit for the interlocutors. One prominent feature of self-repair shown in the data is that the ELF speakers employ self-repair practices with the ongoing goal pre-empting potential ambiguity without the interlocutor showing signs of misunderstanding. The use of pre-empting strategies for proactive self-repair can help speakers achieve more effective and successful communication in situations involving intercultural communication.