Doing being reprehensive: Some interactional features of English as a lingua franca

Bloomsbury Applied Linguistics Seminar, 12:00 noon Wednesday, 26 January 2011

Room G16, Main Building, Birkbeck College, London, Torrington Square

FREE, ALL WELCOME

Dr Chris Jenks

City University of Hong Kong

Doing being reprehensive: Some interactional features of English as a lingua franca

Abstract

Great diversity exists in the way English is being used in the world today. It is now not uncommon to hear a Korean and a Brazilian do business in English, or a Syrian and a Norwegian debating politics in an English-speaking chat room. As opportunities to use English increase and evolve, researchers are left with the difficult challenge in understanding the many contexts in which English as a lingua franca (ELF) is used. While the current literature overwhelmingly characterizes the interaction in these settings as being mutually supportive, in this paper, I will argue that being mutually supportive is fundamentally an issue of context (e.g. the setting and interactants), rather than language. Analysis of multi-participant voice-based chat rooms show that ELF interactants are not inherently mutually supportive; on the contrary they highlight problems or troubles in communication through laughter, joking, and ridicule. These observations suggest that ELF interaction is fluid and dynamic, and provide much needed empirical data to an area of investigation that is still relatively new.