English As A Lingua Franca Interactions Research Articles

Translanguaging in a beauty salon

Abstract This is an explanatory case study of how translanguaging offers space for practicing two shared languages: Saudi Pidgin Arabic and English as a lingua franca (ELF). It attends closely to overt types of translanguaging resources practiced by interlocutors. The study utilizes the conversation analysis (CA) approach to analyze conversations totaling 240 minutes, held in a beauty salon, between a Saudi female client and a Filipino beautician who communicated with each other using English and Saudi pidgin. The results show that the speakers’ interaction is mainly in English, but they switch to pidgin Arabic to fix misunderstandings, create humor, and engage in cooperative interaction. The study demonstrates that overt translanguaging resources employed by participants strengthen the multilingual nature of their ELF interactions, during which another contact language–Saudi pidgin in this case–can be practiced as another lingua franca. The study extends the limited literature on the nature of translanguaging in lingua franca social contexts and demonstrates the uniqueness of the translanguaging resources employed by ELF users.

Higher education students’ attitudes towards English as a lingua franca in virtual exchange settings

Abstract Mentored online intercultural and international collaboration projects using English as a lingua franca (ELF) in tertiary curricula are a valuable pedagogical approach to develop intercultural communicative competence. However, students’ perceptions of ELF in virtual exchange (VE) projects remain largely unexplored. This mixed-methods study investigates students’ attitudes towards ELF interactions in the context of online collaborations involving four countries in the Global North and South. The students participated in a six-week VE and collaboratively completed tasks set by their teachers. Results of the qualitative and quantitative data show that the students’ attitudes towards ELF interactions varied in different contexts and that the experience encouraged reflections, for instance, on students’ linguistic effectiveness in intercultural situations. The findings show a (re)evaluation of native and non-native English and attitudinal shift for some students. The results indicate that online intercultural exchanges can be a catalyst for students to reflect on international English usage and global ownership. The article provides implications for setting up ELF-VE projects regarding its potential to (trans)form ELF identities and gives advice for ELF practitioners.

Metacognitive and metalinguistic activities can raise ELF awareness: why and how

Abstract Research shows that, while exposure to English as a lingua franca (ELF) discourse and to discussion of ELF-related interactional strategies – such as rephrasing, paraphrasing and translanguaging – can help raise English language teachers’ and learners’ ELF awareness, this is often not enough nor is the value of such exposure adequately monitored. In this paper, following the principles of ELF awareness (Sifakis, Nicos. 2019. ELF awareness in English language teaching: Processes and practices. Applied Linguistics 40(2). 288–306), I suggest that raising teachers’ and learners’ awareness of and attitudes towards their own experience as users of English inside and outside of the classroom needs to be prioritised, especially in Expanding Circle teaching and learning contexts. Together with this awareness, teachers and learners need to be made fully conscious of their deeper perceptions about key ELF concerns, such as the role of the native speaker in ELF interactions, the nature of intercultural communication, etc. Such awareness can be raised through metalinguistic and metacognitive activities and questions added to existing activities/materials. To this end, I propose a framework and a series of specific step-by-step scenarios and tools for raising teachers’ and learners’ ELF awareness along these lines and present four examples of integrating such metacognitive and metalinguistic activities with those of a specific textbook.

Home culture and its effects on English as a lingua franca communication: Voices from Chinese students at a United Kingdom university.

In academic research on intercultural communication (IC), students' perceptions and experiences regarding English as a lingua franca (ELF) have been central to the discussion because they form the basis for English teaching policies and practices in multilingual and multicultural environments. Substantial theoretical research on ELF has called for a paradigm shift from emphasizing the over-simplistic correlation between language and Anglophone cultures to recognizing the legitimacy of non-native English learners' home culture in English teaching pedagogy. Nonetheless, little empirical research has been conducted to examine how ELF speakers understand their home culture in ELF communications. Relatively fewer studies have investigated to what extent ELF users' perceptions of home culture influence their IC practices. To address these gaps, this study aims to explore Chinese international students in a liberal arts university in the United Kingdom and their understanding of Chinese culture in authentic ELF interactions. In addition, the perceived effects of Chinese culture on students' IC were explored in great depth. This study adopts a mixed-method approach, including a student questionnaire (N = 200) and follow-up semi-structured interviews (N = 10). Following descriptive statistics and thematic analysis of the obtained data, the findings revealed that most participants lacked a thorough understanding of their home culture, while they considered home culture playing a significant role in ELF communications. The contribution of this study builds on work in English users' awareness of home culture in IC to identify the significance of enabling the presence of English learners' home culture in English language teaching (ELT) classrooms.

Navigating Boundaries through Knowledge: Intercultural Phenomena in ELF Interactions

Abstract This study investigates intercultural phenomena in the process of recognizing cultural boundaries in online English as a lingua franca (ELF) video conferencing-based interactions. The recorded interactions between 20 conversational pairs were analyzed by adopting conversation analysis as an analytic framework. The participants’ intercultural perspectives are demonstrated through the action sequence of verifying the recipient’s knowledge status, informing, and complimenting, which are built by adopting category relevant knowledge of the cultural backgrounds of the recipients. The findings thus suggest that the participants employ knowledge of their own cultural repertoire in exchanges with unfamiliar cultural values as they navigate boundaries based on practical reasoning. More specifically, the participants categorize one another and use their procedural knowledge about familiar cultural practices of their own and the other’s country while displaying one’s affiliation to the recipients. This study concludes that ELF speakers’ experiences of navigating boundaries during first encounters are organized according to the method they use to negotiate and accommodate their cultural affinity, which is significant as it confirms that these practices are shared beyond a particular cultural domain.

Bridging the gap between ELF and L2 learners’ use of communication strategies: Rethinking current L2 assessment and teaching practices

The emergence of English as a lingua franca (ELF) has focused scholarly attention on non-native speakers' use of communication strategies (CSs) in international communication, which places emphasis on ensuring mutual understanding. With reference to previous ELF pragmatics research, this study examined the extent to which L2 learners' use of CSs reflects that in ELF interactions in a group interaction task in Hong Kong's high-stakes public examination. Our analysis of the students' CSs use was accompanied by semi-structured focus group interviews, allowing them to reflect on their own performance and prior English learning/use experience. The findings revealed an unnatural discursive pattern resulting from the assessment task design, although some CSs were found that have been identified in previous ELF studies. Students with higher academic attainment were more capable of using some higher-level CSs and diversifying their language forms, but this was mainly because of their higher English proficiency level/motivation, exposure to English and awareness of effective communication rather than their prior English-learning experience in the classroom. The paper concludes by offering suggestions for the design of communicative tasks and language learning/teaching practices to address the misalignment between L2 students' pragmatic production and naturalistic ELF situations.

Pragmatic Accommodation Strategies in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) Communication

Accommodation is a natural and prevailing communicative behaviour in social interactions. It has been emphasised as a key factor for successful intercultural communication through English as a lingua franca (ELF). The aim of this study was to explore how accommodation might operate in ELF communication, focusing on convergent pragmatic strategies for efficient and cooperative interactions. The data were 12 hours of ELF conversations among international students in a UK university. Conversation Analysis (CA) was employed to analyse and identify sequential features of accommodation in ELF. Findings showed that participants frequently used convergent strategies such as echoing repetition, lexical replacement, and code-switching. The major purposes of convergent accommodation were mutual understanding and collaboration. For shared comprehension, speakers modified their speech to adapt to interlocutors’ linguistic capacity and cultural expectations and to be more comprehensible. The desire for mutual understanding was closely intertwined with collaboration, which showed alignment and built rapport. For successful ELF interactions, ELF speakers need to understand the pragmatic role of accommodation and use convergent and adaptive strategies to enhance flexibility and facilitate communication in ELF contexts.

Examining authenticity from an ELF perspective: the development of listening test papers in Hong Kong (1986–2018)

Abstract The present study examined the degree of situational and interactional authenticity in Hong Kong’s listening examination papers throughout the history of colonisation and globalisation (1986–2018) with reference to world Englishes and particularly English as a lingua franca (ELF) research. By means of a detailed content analysis, the evaluation of situational authenticity was based on the context of language use (e.g., speech event type, nature of interaction, identity and accent of interlocutor) in the audio samples, while the evaluation of interactional authenticity centred on the speaker’s use of communicative strategies. Our findings suggest that the speech samples generally reflected the changing situations of language use over time by increasingly adopting dialogue (rather than monologue) and locally/globally relevant language use contexts, but only included native-speaker and (from 2012) Hong Kong English accents as speech models. Despite the lack of non-standardness and speakers of different cultures in the speech samples, there were numerous instances of explicitness strategies relevant to ELF interactions throughout the sample, probably owing to the intent of the listening examination to highlight key information for the candidates. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these trends in listening paper design for the future development of English language teaching from an ELF perspective.

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

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.

A study of cognitive-experiential practices for promoting ELF communicative competence in Italian ELT classrooms

The increasing use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) calls for substantial changes in the English Language Teaching (ELT) pedagogy both in Italy and elsewhere. This chapter illustrates an ongoing research project aimed to explore the dynamics of ELF discourse in the educational domain, and ultimately, to devise guidelines for developing cognitive-experiential practices that enhance ELF communicative competence in ELT classrooms. The study investigates ELF communicative strategies through naturally occurring discussions in which school-age learners – ELF users – talk about a challenging topic under unconstrained conditions, namely without the supervision of their English teacher and without English as a Native Language (ENL) requirements. This experimental activity was performed by observing and audio recording natural spoken ELF interactions among Italian students and students of ten different nationalities participating in intercultural exchange programmes in three upper-secondary schools. The qualitative data analysis is conducted within a conversation analytic framework by means of a protocol based on conversational moves. It focuses on the cooperative practices that school-age ELF users enact to achieve effective communication. The analysis reveals that participants (i) generally orient to their interlocutors, employing pragmatic strategies that are commonly used in ELF communication, and (ii) implement languaging and interactional skills that show their authentic involvement in the spoken activity as it was designed. These findings demonstrate that school-age ELF users put into play their language resources, but also themselves as individuals with their own identity, cultural background and experiences. The results of this study may be translated into teaching practices that enhance ELF-mediated communication, promoting language and intercultural awareness

Single case analyses of two overlap sequences in casual ELF conversations from a multimodal perspective: Toward the consideration of mutual benefits of ELF and CA

Since Firth’s (1990, 1996) seminal conversation analytic (CA) work on English as a lingua franca (ELF) interactions, the substantial amount of pragmatic ELF research has explored how interactants achieve intersubjectivity and social action in translingual ELF settings from a participant-relevant emic perspective (e.g., Jenks, 2012; Kaur, 2009). However, non-verbal resources are mostly disregarded in the majority of ELF research with a few exceptions. Meanwhile, mainstream CA research predominantly investigates first language interactions, and thus ELF research is still marginalized in the CA literature (Pietikäinen, 2018b). The primary aim of this paper, therefore, is to discuss the benefit of multimodal CA to analyzing ELF interactions, while the secondary one, that of analyzing ELF data to CA scholars. To these ends, the paper adopted a single case analysis (Sacks, 1992) combined with multimodal CA (Mondada, 2018), and analyzed two types of overlap sequences in casual ELF conversations of international students in British universities. The analysis of multimodal resources revealed interactional sensitivity and deftness of the interactants in the translingual ELF settings. The findings refine the understanding of lingua franca language scenarios and show the powerfulness of multimodal resources also in translingual ELF settings. Finally, a suggestion for future research will be given.

Other-correction in next position: The case of lexical replacement in ELF interactions in an academic setting

Schegloff et al. (1977) have found the occurrence of other-correction to be highly constrained in conversation; it is generally delayed, and modulated when it occurs. Findings from research on the pragmatics of English as a lingua franca (ELF) also point to the scarcity of other-correction of linguistic form in interactions involving speakers of diverse lingua-cultural backgrounds (Firth, 1996). Taking into account the possible influence of contextual factors, the present study set out to investigate if and when accuracy is made interactionally relevant in an ELF academic setting. The data comprise 13.5 h of audio-recorded pair/group discussion of assessed academic assignments involving postgraduate students. A sequential analysis of the data revealed that correcting in the form of lexical replacement recurs in three environments: after the speaker's use of an inaccurate term, following a semantic approximation, and subsequent to an off-target utterance completion. The participants are able to skillfully negotiate lexical choice in correction sequences as they conjointly construct knowledge. The need to fulfill externally imposed requirements and achieve task goals renders other-correction in this setting an unremarkable, ordinary occurrence. The findings suggest that other-correction may be more forthcoming in some contexts than in others.

‘Your pronunciation is really good’: the construction of linguistic identities in ELF interactions among multilingual speakers

ABSTRACT Studies on the linguistic identity of multilingual speakers engaged in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) interactions have continued to grow in the past 20 years. This paper was aimed at contributing to this line of research by studying interactional data to investigate the construction and negotiation of linguistic identities among multilingual speakers of English. Data was collected from 38 ELF interactions in a university classroom located in South Korea. The analysis shows that the students’ linguistic identity in relation to English was made relevant consequent to the interactional exploitation of the two interrelated social constructs of phonology and nationality (i.e. being foreign). The findings suggest that these multilingual students negotiate and build one's linguistic identity by evaluating different ways of speaking English which in turn influence their own linguistic use. The study helps us understand how normative expectations or beliefs are expressed at the level of interaction and underscores the need for ELF awareness and development of related pedagogical tools for empowering these group of students.

Disagreement Strategies used by Speakers of English as a Lingua Franca in Business Meetings

Numerous studies have attested to the consensus-orientation and cooperative nature of English as a lingua franca (ELF) interactions. However, limited attention has been given to moments of disagreements in ELF communication, with most of the little existing work focusing on disagreements in ELF academic or informal contexts. Consequently, little is known about how ELF users display disagreement in real-life business contexts. For this reason, this study examined disagreement expressions in five ELF business meetings drawn from the VOICE corpus to understand the nature of disagreement in ELF interactions. Following the identification of disagreement instances, the study used Stalpers’s (1995) framework to investigate whether the disagreement was accompanied by a mitigation strategy that reduces its impact. It was found that the examined ELF business speakers express their disagreement in both mitigated and unmitigated forms with a marked preference for using mitigated expressions, indicating that the appropriate linguistic choice for expressing disagreements in a between-company business meeting is a mitigated disagreement form. Another main finding is the frequent use of disagreement utterances, suggesting that ELF speakers do not merely seek consensus, but they also raise objections and state their different opinions. One implication of these findings is that ELF encounters might not be as consensus-seeking and mutually supportive as suggested in previous works. Taken together, the findings of the present study extended the existing body of work on ELF disagreement and, in general, added further to our understanding of ELF interaction.

Email requests in an ELF academic setting

Abstract Email messages have become the prevalent medium in academic communication between students and faculty at Hungarian universities. Over the past decade communication with international students of diverse language and cultural backgrounds has made the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) typical in a previously culturally homogeneous setting. This paper analyzes email requests written by international students of various first language (L1) backgrounds (N = 37). The aim is to characterize requests in terms of directness, strategy use, request modification, address forms and closings. Findings shed light on three salient features of ELF requests: an overall preference for direct strategies, a limited range of internal modifiers, and uses of mostly formal, though not always academic address forms. Given the goal-driven nature of ELF interactions, the paper argues that these characteristics may serve as pragmatic strategies to preempt misunderstanding and to enhance intelligibility. Furthermore, interactants’ wish to express identity and their engagement in constructing new norms specific to their unique ELF contexts may also underlie their pragmalinguistic choices.

Intelligibility of an L2 variety in ELF interactions

AbstractThis paper investigates the occurrence of misunderstandings in ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) interactions caused by vowel pronunciation in Brunei English. The study is based on ten audio recordings, each consisting of conversations between two participants: a Bruneian (L2 speaker) and a non-Bruneian speaker. Out of a total of 152 tokens (occurrences) of misunderstandings identified, 36 of them (23.7%) are found to involve vowel pronunciation. Data analysis includes examining vowel length, the vowels offace, goat, price, mouth, monosyllabic triphthongs,trap, vowel reduction, spelling pronunciation and American pronunciation in causing misunderstandings. The findings indicate that misunderstandings may be caused by a change in vowel length and quality in 28 tokens. The study concludes that vowel pronunciation in Brunei English conversational speech, particularly in the lack of vowel length distinction and absence of diphthongs in closed syllables may occasionally lead to a loss of intelligibility in ELF settings.

ELF inThailand: Variants and Coinage in Spoken ELF in Tourism Encounters

Globalisation has a great influence on the emergence of English as a lingua franca (ELF), particularly in tourism contexts. This paper reports on a piece of research that investigated variants and coinage in spoken ELF interactions between Thai locals and foreign tourists on Koh Lanta, Krabi. The nature of tourism encounters was brief and practical. That is to say, the primary focus was to exchange tourism information athough interactional encounters also occurred. In this study, the utterances in English produced by Thai locals when interacting with foreign tourists were collected and then analysed to identify distinctive features of pronunciation and lexicogrammar, including coinage which was used commonly. The findings provide that the forms of ELF in tourism contexts more or less vary from other contexts of ELF use. The findings of this study lie in the notion that the communicative practices of ELF are context-bound communication.

Beyond intelligibility: ‘Transintelligibility’ phenomena in English as a Lingua Franca interactions

Through conversation analysis, this study analyzes the negotiation of pronunciation in English as a lingua franca (ELF) contexts among students at a Japanese university. Previous research has demonstrated that interactants in ELF contexts can repair segmental pronunciation so that they can maintain mutually intelligible pronunciation in situ (e.g., Matsumoto 2011; O'Neal 2015). The present study nevertheless claims that the phonetic negotiation of pronunciation in ELF interactions can at times go beyond the goal of restoring or maintaining mutually intelligible pronunciation. That is, phonetic negotiations can continue in ELF interactions even after the restoration or maintenance of mutual intelligibility is achieved. Although most ELF phonology studies (e.g., Deterding, 2013; Jenkins, 2000) have hitherto focused on the issue of intelligibility, interactants in ELF contexts might also orient to states beyond the maintenance of mutual intelligibility as an interactional goal. Namely, ‘transintelligibility’, or the negotiation of individually favored ways of pronouncing, can be an alternative aim of phonetic negotiations in ELF interactions. Based on the analysis, this study provides pedagogical implications regarding how to negotiate pronunciations for English language users in intercultural communication.

Superficial intersubjectivity in ELF university dormitory interactions

AbstractThe current study investigates the phenomena of “superficial intersubjectivity” occurring in English as a lingua franca (ELF) interactions at an international university dormitory in Japan. “Intersubjectivity” (Rommetveit, Ragnar. 1976. On the architecture of intersubjectivity. In Ragnar Rommetveit & Rolv Mikkel Blakar [eds.],Studies of language, thought, and verbal communication, 93–107. New York: Academic Press) refers to the shared perspective of the social world by the interlocutors. In ELF interactions where shared perspectives cannot be presumed, efforts to achieve intersubjectivity are critical. ELF research has explicated speakers’ efforts and cooperativeness to achieve intersubjectivity or avoid misunderstandings during interactions (Kaur, Jagdish. 2011a. “Doing being a language expert”: The case of the ELF speaker. In Alasdair Archibald, Alessia Cogo & Jennifer Jenkins [eds.],Latest Trends in ELF Research, 53–75. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing; Seidlhofer, Barbara. 2001. Closing a conceptual gap: The case for a description of English as a lingua franca.International Journal of Applied Linguistics11[2]. 133–158). However, few studies have investigated cases where speakers display mutual understanding during a repair sequence even when the understanding is not accurate.Approximately 37 hours of naturally occurring ELF interactions were collected and analyzed using a standard conversation analysis followed by a post-analytic researcher observation. Detailed analyses of repair sequences regarding a word suggest that in non-institutional ELF interactions the accuracy of intersubjectivity is not always prioritized. Rather, statements made by the speaker positioned as the one with relatively stronger linguistic ability seem to hold influence over the repair sequence, which prompts the interlocutor with relatively weaker ability to agree with inaccurate candidate understandings. The study suggests a connection between the positioning of speakers regarding linguistic knowledge and the construction of intersubjectivity in ELF interactions.

Investigating perceptions of English as a lingua franca in Hong Kong: The case of university students

English as a lingua franca (ELF) has received a great deal of attention in the field of applied linguistics in the last decade or so (Jenkins, 2007, 2014; Mauranen, 2012; Seidlhofer, 2011). As is currently conceptualized, ELF refers to the common language of choice among speakers from different lingua-cultural backgrounds (Jenkins, 2007; Seidlhofer, 2011). ELF does not imply a single, unified variety of English but primarily refers to language inusein contexts where multilingual speakers are involved (Cogo, 2010). In other words, ELF can be understood as social practice, with an emphasis on meaning-making processes. Much of the earlier research focused on identifying linguistic features characteristic of ELF communication (see Jenkins, 2000; Seidlhofer, 2001). But with the increased recognition of the variability and fluidity associated with the use of ELF, researchers have recently turned their attention to investigating communicative strategies which multilingual speakers employ to achieve mutual understanding and negotiate meaning in ELF interactions (see Cogo & Dewey, 2012; Jenkins, Cogo & Dewey, 2011). Furthermore, there exists a growing body of research into attitudes and perceptions of ELF communication (see Cogo, 2010; Jenkins, 2007; Kaloscai, 2009), given the impact of ELF perceptions on ELF-related communicative practices, especially with respect to issues relating to (non-) conformity to native-speaker norms.