Managing understanding through English as a lingua franca

Abstract

AbstractThe paper offers insight into pragmatic aspects of English as a lingua franca (ELF) and potential implications for intercultural communication by presenting the results of research into rapport carried among Czech, English and German university students. The three cultural groups were compared in terms of their cultural independence in rapport management using multiple-choice discourse completion tasks MDCTs based on scenarios addressing specifically issues of face (face-threatening and face-saving acts), implicitness/explicitness, positive/negative politeness, and relational and transactional language functions. Their mutual and pairwise comparisons showed nuances in which the surveyed groups varied in their motivations. Though all the groups, regardless of their cultural background, overlapped in their genuine effort to make relational choices to maintain rapport, the English group manifested more relational interactions, and even at the cost of miscommunication they left the messages in the hands of a recipient. The English group tended to manifest explicitness only when there might be cost to their public status, whereas the Czech and German groups saw the value of interaction in explicit statement of the truth. They neglected the cost of face-threatening acts as they had not fully decoded the rapport impairment caused by the use of transactional interactions. The findings imply that ELF as a medium of intercultural communication needs to turn more attention to the values of the involved speakers and hearers, to equip them with competence to carefully formulate their own ideas as well as broaden their understanding of the motives of the others.