Communicating Strategically in English as a Lingua Franca

Book excerpt: There have been noticeable demographic changes recently in the use of English around the world. English as a medium of communication is now the contact language of native speakers from many diverse speech communities who interact with each other in multilingual contexts. The use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) and its implications has become a hot topic in applied linguistics and English studies. Communicating Strategically in English as a Lingua Franca reflects the growing interest in achieving communicative effectiveness in ELF situations and provides a comprehensive account of recent empirical findings in the field of ELF. It analyzes and interprets the author's own large corpus of naturally occurring spoken interactions and focuses on identifying innovative employments in the communicative strategies and pragmatics of speakers involved in ELF interactions. In doing so, this book makes a considerable contribution to the growing field of empirical studies in ELF. It explores the usage of pragmatic strategies and highlights their significant role in communicative effectiveness in ELF interactions. In showing the processes of classifying communication strategies involved in the identification of newly observed communication strategies, this book will be of great interest to English linguists, applied linguists, graduate and undergraduate students of English, English Language Teaching material developers and teachers of English.