ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA AND INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION: COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES AND MEANING NEGOTIATION IN ELF TRANSCULTURAL CONTEXTS

In ELF contexts both linguistic and cultural practices cannot be taken for granted, but they need to be jointly negotiated by interactants to create a shared frame of reference. Therefore, in this dissertation I suggest the expression ‘ELF Transcultural Communication’ to highlight the necessary link between ELF research and Intercultural Communication studies and I propose ‘ELF Transcultural Competence’ as a new model of reference for the skills that are necessary to effectively and appropriately achieve the speaker’s communicative goal(s) in ELF transcultural contexts. Following this perspective, the ability to negotiate mutual understanding and to strategically manage the interaction is fundamental. Hence, the study aims at investigating how communication strategies are used in ELF Transcultural Communication in the meaning making process and in the negotiation of cultural concepts and at exploring how their use can be included in an ELF-aware pedagogy. First, an overview of research on ELF and on Intercultural Communication is provided, discussing the concepts of language and culture as complex systems that emerge in interaction. Successively, traditional conceptualisations of Communicative Competence and Intercultural Communicative Competence are called into question, remarking their unsuitability for ELF transcultural contexts. In turn, the framework of ELF Transcultural Competence, based on the concepts of ELF Competence and Intercultural Awareness, is discussed as a more appropriate model for these contexts. The use of communication strategies in ELF Transcultural Communication are then outlined, discussing how meaning and understanding are negotiated and co-constructed in interaction and the relevance of communication strategies in these processes. The communication strategies that are analysed in the data have been selected from ELF literature on the topic: backchannels, lexical anticipations, lexical suggestions and corrections, over multilingual resources, reformulations, repetitions, and spellings. The data set of the dissertation is based on two ELF corpora, the VOICE-Leisure sub-corpus and the ViMELF corpus, and has been analysed through a mixed method approach that combines Conversation Analysis and descriptive statistics. The findings confirm what has been observed in ELF studies on the topic and they show that communication strategies are productive tools to actively co-construct mutual understanding and to negotiate meaning in interaction, playing a fundamental role in ELF Transcultural Communication. In addition, the strategic moves examined show a frequent co-occurrence, with several functions performed at once, showcasing how meaning can be negotiated in different ways, and how strategic communication is a fundamental aspect to consider when investigating ELF interactions. Finally, the discussion of the pedagogical implications is presented. The inclusion of the use of communication strategies aimed at strategically managing interaction in an ELF-aware pedagogy is introduced and illustrated through some practical activities.