An analysis of polyadic English as a lingua franca (ELF) speech: A communicative strategies framework

• Speakers in ELF settings use communicative strategies for effective communication.
• Here, the strategies are categorized as self and other-initiated in a taxonomy.
• Comprehension and confirmation checks, and clarification requests are employed frequently.
• Speakers use other-initiated strategies as often as self-initiated strategies.
• Breakdowns are rare because speakers make their utterances explicit and check confirmation of previous utterances.

This paper reports on an analysis of the communicative strategies (CSs) used by speakers in spoken lingua franca English (ELF) in an academic setting. The purpose of the work has primarily been to outline the CSs used in polyadic ELF speech which are used to ensure communication effectiveness in consequential situations and to present a framework that shows the different communicative functions of a number of CSs. The data comprise fifteen group sessions of naturally occurring student group-work talk in content courses at a technical university. Detailed qualitative analyses have been carried out, resulting in a framework of the communication strategies used by the speakers. The methodology here provides us with a taxonomy of CSs in natural ELF interactions. The results show that other than explicitness strategies, comprehension checks, confirmation checks and clarification requests were frequently employed CSs in the data. There were very few instances of self and other-initiated word replacement, most likely owing to the nature of the high-stakes interactions where the focus is on the task and not the language. The results overall also show that the speakers in these ELF interactions employed other-initiated strategies as frequently as self-initiated communicative strategies.