Volume 6, Issue 1 -

In this study, the communication strategy use of two pairs of English as a lingua franca (ELF) users was explored in relation to two contextual factors, the communicative goal and the ELF users’ thoughts and feelings about the interactions. The ELF users were video-recorded engaging in researcher-designed tasks which required sharing information to achieve a joint goal. Subsequent stimulated recall with individual speakers targeted instances of potential or actual difficulties in understanding. Recordings and transcripts of the paired tasks and stimulated recall were used to identify communication strategies used to address difficulties in understanding. Results showed that overall, 11 different strategy types were seen across both pairs of speakers. However, the pair which achieved the shared goal showed a different pattern of strategy use and of interaction than the pair which did not achieve the shared goal. The two pairs also differed in how they attributed responsibility for successful communication. These findings, discussed in the context of previous ELF communication strategy research, highlight benefits of investigating interlocutors’ contemporaneous thoughts and feelings and the ways in which communication strategies are used during interactions.

This paper draws on the perception of English as a lingua franca (ELF) as an activity, rather than a variety, whereby speakers of different lingua-cultural backgrounds respond to the needs of the immediate communicative environment. Such dynamic and context-related nature of ELF involves collaboration and accommodative behaviour of all interlocutors. As the main focus of research on ELF has been interaction predominantly among non-native speakers of English, the present study investigates how native English speakers behave in ELF interaction, that is, whether/how they accommodate their English and what their stance is towards linguistic accommodation. Responses were collected by means of an online questionnaire, yielding 377 respondents in total, who report making adjustments when communicating with non-native speakers, most frequently by enunciating clearly, using fewer idioms and speaking more slowly. The main reasons native speakers give for adjusting their language are promoting mutual intelligibility, showing courtesy and helping the interlocutor hone their English language skills. A fifth of the respondents, however, worry that accommodation might prevent the improvement of non-native speakers’ English proficiency, be perceived as being patronising, and reduce the quality of conversation.

International business communication is sometimes perceived as being culture-neutral; however, the speakers’ linguacultural repertoires may be exploited as communicative resources in English as a Business Lingua Franca (BELF) interactions. Indeed, plurilingual phenomena can be inscribed in a view of ELF communication that sees such practices as a potential asset in intercultural communication. Multicultural competence – which may include the exploitation and integration of other linguacultures – alongside BELF competence and business-specific knowledge is identifiable as an essential skill for successful interactions on the workplace. This paper aims at exploring the domain of internationally oriented business communication in English by analyzing naturally occurring data of workplace interactions involving non-native speakers of English. Specifically, the analysis will look at how non-English linguistic and cultural elements are incorporated in ELF talk in business contexts. The Professional Business section of the VOICE corpus will be analyzed to this purpose through a qualitative approach in order to shed light on the functions of L1 and LN (other languages) cultural and linguistic elements in BELF interactions and their role in conducting successful business transactions.

Many researchers agree that multicultural teams are a “double-edged sword” with the potential for high levels of creativity and production, but also conflict. This paper argues that effective communication is vital for developing “virtuous,” rather than vicious, circles and that research into (B)ELF offers an insight into what effective communication in multicultural and multilingual teams can look like. The conceptual frame develops research into ELF and BELF by also drawing on organisational and management research to examine team processes and the role of language within them. The second part of the paper presents illustrative examples from data collected in an ethnographic study from an English-medium marketing master’s programme at WU Vienna. The students’ teamwork project comprises an international market entry simulation and can be seen as a training ground for managing both business content and team processes. The findings indicate that both the ELF context and the ELF talk furthered the development of rapport, and that the students’ “casual talk” supported their “work talk.” The paper finishes with a call for more empirical research into language use among recent business graduates and how to prepare students better for a globalised workplace.

The present paper investigates PhD supervision meetings, using material from naturally occurring speech of ten hours by PhD supervisors and students who all use English as a lingua franca (ELF) for research purposes. The recordings have been transcribed in their entirety, with conversation analytical procedures and additional ethnographic interviews with the PhD supervisors. The present paper is a follow-up to the two previous studies by the author (in European Journal for Applied Linguistics 3[2], 2015, and The Routledge Handbook of English for Academic Purposes , 2016) and focuses on linguistic competence and content knowledge as factors possibly mitigating the power asymmetry present in the interactions. The findings show no observable power asymmetries manifested in the interactions or in the interview responses by the supervisors. The analyses showed that the supervisors’ and the students’ level of linguistic competence seemed very similar, which was further supported by the supervisors’ self-reports of their own English and their informal evaluations of their students’ levels of proficiency. When it comes to content knowledge, the students overall showed very good command of their subjects, disciplinary conventions and their projects in general, further supported by their supervisors’ evaluations in the interview data. Based on these findings, it is suggested here that in ELF interactions of this particular type where the speakers have similar levels of linguistic competence and content knowledge, power asymmetries become less visible.

This article investigates the language skills and the nature of language provision required by economic migrants from Bangladesh working in the Middle East. It focuses in particular on the perceived values of the host country language (Arabic) versus English as a language franca (ELF). While there have been a number of explorations of the value of learning the host country language for migrants in terms of both labour market outcomes and wellbeing, there is a paucity of, and pressing need for, studies investigating the value of ELF for economic migrants, particularly those from developing country contexts. This article presents the findings from an ethnographic study which explores the experiences, perceptions and specific language-related issues of a diverse cohort of returnee migrants from rural Bangladesh where, despite significant migration from the area, little is known about this population’s language use and communicative needs. Our findings suggest that both the host country language (Arabic) and ELF have important functional values, but that these vary depending on interlocutors, domains of work and contexts of situation, as well as on the relative statuses (within an ecology of global linguistic value) of the two languages in different contexts. The analysis thus provides fresh and significant evidence regarding the role of language in economic migration and development for low-skilled migrants, both to and from contexts in which English has no official status. The article concludes by considering the implications for the types of language education which might be most suitable for these and other economic migrants in comparable contexts.

Drawing on the concept of ideology proposed by Voloshinov (1929 [1999], Marxismo e filosofia da linguagem: Problemas fundamentais do método sociológico na ciência da linguagem . Trad. Michel Lahud; Yara Frateschi Vieira 9 ed. São Paulo: Editora Hucitec.) and on the notion of language ideology (Woolard 1998, Introduction. In Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard & Paul V. Kroskrity (eds.), Language ideologies practice and theory , 3–47. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Kroskrity 2004, Language ideologies. In Alessandro Duranti (ed.) , A companion to linguistic anthropology , 496–517. Blackwell Publishing), this paper addresses language ideologies expressed by participants of an Academic Writing course taught to undergraduate students majoring in English and Portuguese in a public university in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The data from which participants’ language ideologies are interpreted come from two literacy events that integrate a wider set of literacy practices (Street 2000, Literacy events and literacy practices. In Marilyn Martin-Jones & Kathryn E. Jones (eds.), Multilingual literacies: Comparative perspectives on research and practice , 17–29. Amsterdam: John Benjamin’s, Street 2009, Ethnography of writing and reading. In David R. Olson & Nancy Torrance (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of literacy , 329–345. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) in which participants engaged in Moodle, the virtual learning environment of the course. Concerning students’ positions, the analysis depicts how they entextualize ELF scholars’ language ideologies to either (re/de)construct their own standard native-based language ideology about English or to reinforce this same ideology. The paper also examines the stance adopted by the professor in her responses to students’ writings in terms of both her ideological alignment with theories that challenge the role of the native speaker as English expands worldwide and her resistance to naïve and romantic views of this expansion.