The following discussions are based on tape-recorded, naturally occurring, face-to-face group conversations. The data was collected in a student hall of residence for overseas students in Great Britain and comprise 23 conversations of a total of 13.5 hours. The speakers participating in the conversations are aged roughly between 20 and 30. They are of both sexes, speak 17 different mother tongues and include both less competent and more competent speakers. The corpus, thus, is very heterogeneous, but is, nevertheless, representative of the situations which involve lingua franca communication.
Data analysis in lingua franca communication research
Lingua franca communication implies the mingling of different cultures and the associated communicative norms that apply within these cultures. Discourse produced in lingua franca English has its specific characteristics, and these make it difficult to apply existing categories proposed by Discourse and Conversation Analysis (CA), which both had originally been developed for interactions between native English and American speakers.
Below a short account of the most central unit of analysis in CA, the turn, will be given. This unit requires an investigation into the applicability of the model to lingua franca talk-in-interaction and to a discussion of necessary modifications.