(Reserve)
When we talk about intercultural communication, this includes various kinds of contact and conversation between interlocutors from different cultures: native / non-native and non-native / non-native communication as well as communication via an interpreter. My presentation will be concerned with the second and it attempts to describe what is characteristic on non-native / non-native small-talk interaction, and how knowledge of these characteristics may influence an analysis of lingua franca communication, the ultimate aim of which should be to describe what can help make intercultural communication successful.
Communication in lingua franca English (ELFC) always implies contact between non-native speakers of the language and these - of course - need to be considered as learners. Their communicative behaviour reflects the stages of their different interlanguages. At the same time, apart from being learners of either British or American English, the participants of such conversations are representants of their mother culture, which influences their conversational behaviour. We must therefore attempt to interpret characteristics found with lingua franca communication as phenomena of both culture and interlanguage. Such an interpretation may rest on the following assumptions:
LF communication involves at least three, sometimes even four cultures;
LF communication always implies interaction via a dynamic interlanguage;
Because of 1) and 2), LF communication has specific characteristics, which differ from those of native / non-native communication.
The examples I will present here are taken from a corpus of data I collected for my dissertation. They have been analysed for discourse-structural phenomena such as topic development, turn-taking, back-channels, but also for politeness phenomena. My approach has been based on discourse analysis, but will need to be complemented by further methods of analysis, as the results question whether an analysis based on just one of the existing approaches can satisfyingly explain why ELFC succeeds or fails. The analysis of the data will show that some of the categories used in discourse analysis cannot easily be applied to ELFC. For example the concept of turn-taking needs to be modified, as speakers tend to collaboratively complete turns.
References:
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