Data were collected in spontaneous lingua franca communication. Participants were 13 adult individuals in two groups with the following first languages: Spanish, Chinese, Polish, Portuguese, Czech, Telugu, Korean and Russian. All subjects had spent a minimum of six months in the U.S. and had at least intermediate knowledge of English before arriving. Both Group 1 (7 students) and Group 2 (6 students) participated in a 30-minute discussion about the following topics: housing in the area, jobs, and local customs. The conversations were undirected, and uncoached. Subjects said what they wanted. No native speaker was present. Conversations were recorded and then transcribed, which resulted in a 13,726 word database.
After a week participants were given the chance to listen to their conversations and were asked to discuss their thought processes using a “think aloud” technique.
Data analysis focused on the types of formulaic units. The questions to answer can be summarized as follows:
How does the use of formulas relate to the ad hoc generated expressions in the data?
What type of fixed expressions did the subjects prefer?