Communication strategies and co-construction of meaning in ELF: Drawing on “Multilingual Resource Pools”

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.