Volume 13, Issue 2

It is well established in Conversation Analysis (CA) that overlapping sequences are a common occurrence in spoken interactions. These often occur near Transition Relevance Places (TRP) in turn-taking management but are used also for cooperative and non-cooperative purposes. The former includes backchanneling and collaborative completion, whereas the latter involves competition for the floor, topic change, or expression of disagreement or strong opinions. This study aims to expand on existing investigations of cooperative and competitive overlaps in Business English as a Lingua Franca (BELF) interactions. The analysis was carried out on nine speech events of the Professional Business section of the VOICE corpus, focusing on simultaneous sequences including a number of selected pragmatic markers. A Conversation Analysis approach was adopted to analyze the resulting occurrences and identify the functions and purposes of overlaps in BELF communication. Findings show that overlaps may have multiple purposes, both cooperative (agreement, backchannelling, collaborative completion) and competitive, where disagreement is expressed and clarifications and corrections are made. Such overlaps, however, do not appear to be perceived as face-threatening by other participants, reinforcing the unmarked quality of disagreement and stance expression in high-stakes business interactions.

The dynamic expansion of internationalization and widespread implementation of English-medium instruction in higher education has sparked extensive interest in the use of English as a lingua franca in academic settings (ELFA). The emergence of English as a tool for global communication among multi-linguacultural speakers poses significant challenges to English for academic purposes (EAP), which necessitates developing new pedagogical practices informed by ELFA-aware insights. In response to this reality, this study relies on classroom observations to examine to what extent the EAP pedagogy currently implemented in a pre-sessional program in UK higher education is compatible with ELFA-aware principles. Classroom observation data is viewed in light of semi-structured retrospective interviews with the observed pre-sessional tutors to explore their insights regarding ELFA-aware implications for the development of EAP pedagogy. The research findings inform that even though pre-sessional tutors indicate preference for ELFA-aware pedagogy, there still exist various challenges to the adaptation of ELFA-aware principles in practice. Considering this point, this study underscores the central role of teacher education in providing support and guidance for EAP practitioners to address the challenges related to the global spread of ELFA in EAP pedagogy development. To bridge the gap between the pedagogical implications from ELFA research and practical classroom application, a series of recommendations are also provided for EAP practitioners to critically engage with ELFA awareness as a promising opportunity for making pedagogical changes.

The paper examines English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) communication from a relevance-theoretic perspective. Communication in English as a Lingua Franca is a type of interaction in which multilingual speakers use a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic means to achieve mutual intelligibility and maximum communicative effectiveness. The interaction of the ad hoc and dynamic conditions results in the development of properties that become typical for communicative encounters, where successful communication and mutual intelligibility are the goals. ELF interaction is thus characterized by the presence of properties relating to communicative success and mutual understanding, often making these communicative encounters ‘distinct’. The paper argues, drawing on spontaneous spoken production of Ukrainian, Russian and Polish speakers of English, that ‘distinct’ properties of ELF interactions emerge due to the realization of the Principle of Relevance. If the Principle of Relevance guides speakers in their search for appropriate communicative strategies and means of expression, then this supports the view that communication in English as a Lingua Franca follows the principles of any human communication and contributes to conceptualizing ELF as natural human communication. As non-native speakers of English understand the nature of ELF interactions and its scope, namely participants’ limited communicative resources and mismatches in the common ground, they explicate and simplify their utterances, switch to other languages shared by the hearers, and accommodate to the hearers in terms of vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. Doing so, speakers intuitively follow the Cognitive Principle of Relevance and the relevance-theoretic production strategy, allowing their interlocutors to process utterances and make inferences at low costs. The emergence of ELF-specific features, relating to achieving mutual intelligibility and maximum communicative effectiveness, such as the explicitness of proposition, accommodation, paraphrase and translanguaging are explained in terms of explicatures in the areas of free enrichment, reference assignment, disambiguation and ad hoc concept construction that contribute to providing a comprehensible input to the hearer. The paper is exploratory in suggesting directions that ELF research could further pursue.

In this digital age, platforms such as OmeTV and Omegle have transformed intercultural communication by facilitating random video chats between individuals from diverse backgrounds. English functions as a lingua franca (ELF) in these interactions, bridging cultural and linguistic divides. While research has shed light on humor’s effectiveness in easing social interactions, its specific role in initial intercultural online video chat interactions between ELF speakers remains unexplored. This study addresses this gap by investigating how humor fosters rapport between ELF speakers in this context. A purposive sampling method is used to select a subset of 25 OmeTV/Omegle video chat interactions on YouTube. These videos showcase previously unacquainted ELF speakers engaging in intercultural communication in an online video-mediated context. This study employs sequential analysis to examine the interactional dynamics of these conversations with a focus on the role of humor in fostering rapport. The analysis reveals how collaborative humor construction and early initiation of humor contribute to closer interpersonal relationships. Additionally, the cumulative escalation of humor and a unique strategy targeting humor at both speaker and recipient promote effective rapport building. These findings illuminate humor’s bridging function in initial intercultural online video chat interactions, and provide insights into digital intercultural communication dynamics and practical guidance for navigating such encounters.

In this paper the feasibility of a novel method for estimating revision difficulty of academic texts to be published in English as a lingua franca (ELF) is examined with the purpose of optimizing revisors’ workflow and performance. In doing so, we also address the complex issue of linguistic standards in ELF academic productions from a new perspective. The method of automatic round-trip translation (RTT), which consists in machine-translating a text into another language and back into the source language, is applied in conjunction with BLEU, an automatic text similarity method traditionally used in machine translation evaluation. The similarity between a manuscript and its round-trip translation is calculated to obtain a priori evaluation of revision difficulty, and the efficacy and reliability of the method are tested. Alongside with the experimental research, some theoretical issues regarding ELF and the practice of revision in the hyperglobalized context of international academic publishing are discussed. The results of the experiments show that the RTT-based method can be successfully used to estimate revision difficulty. The variety of data used in the experiments demonstrates the applicability of the method beyond the cases under study. Some limitations and further developments of the study are also briefly discussed.