Unit 1-23. Interpretation of meaning in successful lingua franca interaction

Section 1. Guidelines for reading texts on the use of international English in European business

The insights gained from ELF research during recent years have made a considerable impact on the conceptualization of English as an international language and have told a lot about interactional practices and pragmatic strategies successful ELF speakers use. These insights into successful ELF usage are gained from the observation and analysis of spoken data, and there are very good reasons for doing so. The fact that much of what we know about ELF today comes from researching spoken interactions, at one of the central principles governing such spoken interactions – the principle of turn-taking is arguably a central issue to be investigated in ELF. But despite the huge body of work on turn-taking, in general, and the immense growth of research on ELF over the last few years, turn-taking management in English as a lingua franca remains still very much unknown territory.

Christiane Meierkord’s study analyses informal non-native speaker (NNS} – non-native speaker conversation to see what types of NNS errors lead to what types of NNS response constituting negative input available to the NNS. This study further examines the differential effect of the NNS response on subsequent NNS speech in a given conversation.

Text 1-23. INTERPRETING SUCCESSFUL LINGUA FRANCA INTERACTION

(Based on Christiane Meierkord’s analysis of non-native/non-native small talk conversations in English)

Christiane Meierkord received her Ph.D. in English linguistics at Düsseldorf University in 1996 for her thesis on English as medium for intercultural communication. Since 1997 she has been a lecturer at Erfurt University where she pursues her post-doctoral research project on Routine expressions and structures in child, adolescent and adult English learner language. Her major research interests are: English as international lingua franca, varieties of English, methodology of Discourse and Conversation Analysis and research into learner language.

Introduction

Until recently, most of the research on intercultural communication has focussed on native /non-native speaker interaction both in the context of immigration and minorities and in intercultural politics and business. Interaction among non-native speakers of a language, however, has not received much attention. When speakers do not share each other's language but can resort to a third language for communicative purposes, they use a lingua franca, a language which is the mother tongue to neither of them. This paper is concerned with this latter type of intercultural communication.

A lingua franca may be any natural or any artificial language which is used among speakers of different mother tongues. It may be used either intra nationally, like e.g. English in India or Nigeria, or inter nationally e.g. English between Germans and Japanese. Whereas speakers of intra national lingua francas have often acquired these as nativized second languages and use them in a variety of domains, most participiants in inter national lingua franca conversations need to be regarded as learners of a language they use for restricted purposes only. Because of the diverse linguistic and cultural background of speakers, conversation in lingua franca English is rather heterogeneous. In the course of this paper, the most noticeable features of lingua franca English small talk conversation will be discussed. Suggestions will be made for both the analysis and the interpretation of intercultural conversations involving speakers who do not form a stable speech community and who, therefore, need to negotiate the norms for every individual conversation depending on the specific participants.