Spatial repertoires and virtual communicative effectiveness: bilingual international students’ use of polysemiotic explicitness strategies to preempt and resolve English as a lingua franca miscommunication

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study reports bilingual international students’ communicative strategies to preempt and resolve English as a lingua franca (ELF) miscommunication in an English-medium virtual learning program offered by an international university in times of the global pandemic. Drawing upon 18 hours of Zoom recordings and supplementary ethnographic data, this study follows a spatial orientation [Canagarajah, S. 2018a. “The Unit and Focus of Analysis in Lingua Franca English Interactions: In Search of a Method.” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 21 (7): 805–824. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1474850] to analyze international students’ polysemiotic meaning-making practices for virtual communicative effectiveness. Key findings highlight the students’ explicitness-raising strategic moves such as indexing and reflexive pointing, repetitive highlighting, visual contrasting mediated by the mouse cursor and screen-based resources while navigating moments of (potential) miscommunication. To remedy and preempt understanding problems, they coordinate and align polysemiotic spatial repertoires across expansive spatiotemporal scales to enhance the clarity of potentially ambiguous referents, communicative topics, and key information. This study advances current understanding of bi/multilinguals’ polysemiotic translingual pragmatic ability for communicative success in lingua franca scenarios, and provides implications that help prepare international higher education for effective virtual communication, teaching, and learning in the post-pandemic digital era.