“We have a grandios saison gespielt” – English as a lingua franca in media sports interviews
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Antje Wilton
Antje Wilton is a senior researcher and lecturer in English and Applied Linguistics at the University of Siegen, Germany. Her research and teaching focuses on social interaction, including conversation and discourse analysis, English as a global language, language in the media, and forensic linguistics. She is Publications Coordinator for the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) and co-editor of the book series forum
Angewandte Linguistik .
Abstract
This paper presents a study investigating the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) in media interviews of a specific kind: the focus is on post-match interviews with football (soccer) players. Professional football with its dynamic and fluctuating transfer market is increasingly internationalised and thoroughly mediatised, frequently requiring athletes and journalists to use English when interacting in front of the camera for the benefit of the media audience. The study is based on a small corpus of videos and transcripts of post-match interviews conducted with German football players in English. It uses a conversation analytic approach to explore the mutual influence of language use and genre characteristics on a structural, linguistic, interactional and media level. Post-match interviews are a dialogic media genre with distinctive features that contribute to the genre’s essential functions of reporting, evaluating and collectivising, and differentiate it from other types of interview such as the political, the news or the expert interview. The paper will illustrate and discuss how communicative, interactional and linguistic strategies are employed by participants to master the challenges of a specific type of ELF institutional, media and professional interaction.
Zusammenfassung
Der Beitrag präsentiert eine Studie, die die Verwendung des Englischen als Lingua Franca in einer bestimmten Form von Medieninterview untersucht: der Fokus liegt auf Fußballerinterviews direkt nach dem Spiel. Der Profifußball mit seinem dynamischen und fluktuierenden Transfermarkt ist internationalisiert und mediatisiert und verlangt daher von Sportlern und Journalisten die Verwendung von Englisch vor der Kamera, wenn ein internationales Publikum adressiert wird. Die Studie basiert auf einem kleinen Korpus von Videos und den dazugehörigen Transkripten von Interviews, in denen deutsche Fußballspieler auf Englisch befragt werden. Die Studie verwendet einen gesprächsanalytischen Zugang im Sinne der ethnographischen Gesprächsforschung, um den gegenseitigen Einfluss von Sprachverwendung und Genrecharakteristika auf struktureller, interaktionaler und medialer Ebene zu beleuchten. Die Interviews stellen eine dialogische Mediengattung dar, die distinktive Merkmale aufweist, die zu den Kernfunktionen des Genres beitragen (Berichten, Bewerten und Vergemeinschaften) und die sich von anderen Medieninterviews wie dem politischen oder dem Experteninterview unterscheidet. Der Beitrag zeigt und diskutiert, wie kommunikative, interaktionale und linguistische Strategien von den Beteiligten angewendet werden, um die spezifischen Anforderungen einer institutionellen, medialen und professionellen Interaktion unter der Verwendung von Englisch als Lingua Franca zu meistern.
About the author
Antje Wilton is a senior researcher and lecturer in English and Applied Linguistics at the University of Siegen, Germany. Her research and teaching focuses on social interaction, including conversation and discourse analysis, English as a global language, language in the media, and forensic linguistics. She is Publications Coordinator for the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) and co-editor of the book series forum Angewandte Linguistik.
Appendix: GAT2 transcription conventions
Adapted from Selting et al. (2011).
| [ ] | overlap and simultaneous talk |
| = | fast, immediate continuation with a new turn or segment (latching) |
| and_uh | cliticisations within units |
| :, ::, ::: | lengthening, according to duration |
| Accentuation | |
| SYLlable | focus accent |
| sYllable | secondary accent |
| !SYL!lable | extra strong accent |
| Pitch jumps | |
| ↑ | smaller pitch upstep |
| Final pitch movements of intonation phrases | |
| ? | rising to high |
| , | rising to mid |
| - | level |
| ; | falling to mid |
| . | falling to low |
| Loudness and tempo changes with scope | |
| <<acc> words> | accelerando, increasingly faster |
| <<p> words> | piano, soft |
| In- and outbreaths | |
| .h / h., .hh / hh., .hhh / hhh. | in- / outbreaths according to duration |
| Pauses | |
| (.) | micro pause, estimated, up to 0.2 sec. duration appr. |
| (-) | short estimated pause of appr. 0.2–0.5 sec. duration |
| (--) | intermediary estimated pause of appr. 0.5–0.8 sec. duration |
| (---) | longer estimated pause of appr. 0.8–1.0 sec. duration |
| Other | |
| ((coughs)) | non-verbal vocal actions and events |
| <<coughing> words> | descriptive/interpretative comment with indication of scope |
| (words) | unintelligible passage |
| (xxx) | unintelligible passage with number of syllables |
| \ | restart |
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© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- “We have a grandios saison gespielt” – English as a lingua franca in media sports interviews
- South Korean perceptions of “native” speaker of English in social and news media via big data analytics
- Cultural awareness in an Iranian English language classroom: A teaching intervention in an interculturally “conservative” setting
- Hedges in Russian EAP writing: A corpus-based study of research papers in management
- Impacts and implications of English as the corporate official language policy: A case in Japan
- Developing shared communication practices: A study of BELF in multinational team meetings
- Book Reviews
- Davydova, Julia: Quotation in Indigenised and Learner English: A Sociolinguistic Account of Variation
- Hickey, Raymond: English in the German-Speaking World
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- “We have a grandios saison gespielt” – English as a lingua franca in media sports interviews
- South Korean perceptions of “native” speaker of English in social and news media via big data analytics
- Cultural awareness in an Iranian English language classroom: A teaching intervention in an interculturally “conservative” setting
- Hedges in Russian EAP writing: A corpus-based study of research papers in management
- Impacts and implications of English as the corporate official language policy: A case in Japan
- Developing shared communication practices: A study of BELF in multinational team meetings
- Book Reviews
- Davydova, Julia: Quotation in Indigenised and Learner English: A Sociolinguistic Account of Variation
- Hickey, Raymond: English in the German-Speaking World
