Volume 8, Issue 2 -

Research into communication strategies and ELF is a thriving area of investigation, that has so far looked into cooperative strategies leading to successful communication and mutual understanding, or how miscommunication is resolved, above all in academic as well as business ELF (BELF) contexts, and, more recently, international students’ communities. ELF interactions have been shown to be characterized by the speakers’ mutual cooperation in the co-construction of meaning. Repetition, paraphrasing, as well as self- and other-repair and pre-emptive moves have emerged as important strategies, together with the exploitation of multilingual resources and repertoires. Communication strategies, rather than a mere compensation device, are thus to be considered an essential element in the process of effective communication, in that they are strategically used by speakers as part of “communicative capability.” This paper explores communication strategies emerging from data in the Leisure subsection of the VOICE corpus. Through a qualitative Conversation Analysis approach, the analysis focuses particularly on interactional strategies employed to ensure mutual understanding and effective communication. Data have been first analysed through keywords signalling request for clarification and/or repetition, and then qualitatively focusing on how individual multilingual resources are naturally deployed and shared in the strategic co-construction of meaning and comprehension, particularly as to concepts and ideas that are lingua-culturally connoted.

This study examines linguistic feature selection and its relationship with repair sequences in a longitudinal corpus of Japanese–Filipino business ELF interactions. In the corpus, Japanese employees communicate once a month with Filipino employees via computer software to confirm infrastructure status at a Filipino company’s factories. Comparative constructions frequently appear in the corpus because of the nature of the interactions, but the kinds and frequencies of comparative constructions change month to month. This study demonstrates that early in the corpus, the speakers utilized a multitude of comparative constructions, but after 12 months, the speakers have settled on one preferred comparative construction. Furthermore, the preferred construction emerged from repair sequences, which suggests that repair is significantly related to linguistic feature selection. Accordingly, this study hypothesizes that repair sequences do far more than just resolve an interactional problem; repaired linguistic features are more likely to be selected again the next time a similar linguistic feature is relevant to the progression of the interaction.

This paper examines the learning process of users of English as a business lingua franca (BELF) from the users’ own perspective and proposes a working model as a framework to understand this process. The discussion is based on a qualitative analysis of interviews of Japanese business people who have been raised and educated in Japan and have used BELF for professional purposes. The interviews explore the linguistic challenges that they have faced in performing their work in English and how they have dealt with these challenges. The prime focus of the discussion in this paper is how BELF users transformed themselves from “learners of English in the classroom” into “BELF users” during the early stage of their professional career. With this focus, I develop a working model of BELF users’ learning process by taking inspiration from the “Experiential Learning Theory” (Kolb 1984. Experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development . New Jersey: Prentice Hall). Experiential Learning: Experience as The Source of Learning and Development . New Jersey: Prentice Hall), a widely used theoretical model of the learning process of adults, along with other theories in the field of management. The proposed model of BELF users places “learning from experience” of using English at the centre of the development of their English competence, supplemented by “learning from others” and “learning from studying.” This article concludes with pedagogical implications for professional training and higher education and beyond, as well as theoretical contributions to the understanding of English as a lingua franca (ELF)/BELF. By drawing on the detailed stories of Japanese BELF users, I present a dynamic view of the competence of (B)ELF users by considering the significant changes of their competence over time and space throughout their careers rather than a snapshot of their competence at a particular time.

Research on English as a lingua franca (ELF) has proposed a shift from ENL-based (English as a native language) to ELF-informed teaching. This study intends to add empirical evidence on Chinese business English teachers’ perceptions and understanding of the practicality of ELF-informed teaching. Based on interviews with 12 business English teachers, this study presents one main conflict and three subsidiary conflicts regarding the implementation of ELF-informed teaching in the Business English Program. The main conflict is between teachers’ general awareness of ELF and their expressed preference for native-English based teaching. The three subsidiary conflicts are between (i) ENL-based learning and ELF-informed teaching; (ii) English for tests and English for use; (iii) intervention and innovation. Following this, four barriers that impede the implementation of ELF-informed teaching are summarized. This study also discusses course-of-actions that could address the conflicts and barriers in implementing ELF-informed pedagogy in the Chinese context.

As ELF scholars warn us against treating linguistic productions of “non-native” English speakers as “errors” when they are sociolinguistically driven variation, it is necessary to investigate how speakers in Expanding Circle settings conceptualise, label and experience such uses themselves. This paper reports a qualitative study of the metalinguistic and evaluative practices of university students in Chile, Mexico and Spain. It explores how they ascribe (un)desirable meanings to different ways of speaking English as an additional language (i. e. indexical relations), whether these symbolic associations are seen to influence students’ own linguistic use, and the extent to which such indexical relations are theorised as inherent in language form or as symbolic and negotiable (i. e. metasemiotic awareness). The analysis of more than 53 hours of elicited interview talk reveals a complex web of available social meaning relations and multidirectional accounts of the effects that such meanings have on students’ linguistic and semiotic practices. Although many students display awareness of the contextual variability of social meaning-making processes (Coupland. 2007. Style: Language variation and identity . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), only a minority were able to directly challenge dominant indexical associations and stereotypical trait attributions. The findings underscore the need for English language teachers to understand their students’ semiotic goals and interpretative repertoires, firstly to avoid discriminating against sociolinguistically motivated variation in students’ English use and secondly, to provide them with additional tools to negotiate their position as speakers of English as an additional language. The paper also reflects on the implications that these findings have for how we explain variation and attitudinal ambivalence in ELF research.