Guidelines for extensive reading of ESP texts on the use of English for European business
Christiane Meierkord’s analysis of non-native-/non-native interaction in English is based on the corpus of students’ small talk conversations. The corpus reflects demographic characteristics of the speakers, who were grouped together by the factors of cultural similarity and the speakers' communicative competence. The aim of the study was rather to characterize the speakers’ lingua franca English in general terms of quantitative conversation analysis. The speakers’ discourse structure is considered to consist of an opening, a core and a closing phase. Their lingua franca communication is argued to be a form of intercultural communication characterised by cooperation rather than misunderstanding. Christiane Meierkord’s data reveals that lingua franca English is highly heterogeneous, which causes problems for the application of traditional approaches to conversation in native speaker discourse.
Text 2-23.CROSS-CULTURAL AND INTERCULTURAL DATA ON
NON-NATIVE/NON-NATIVE LINGUA FRANCA INTERACTION
(Based on Christiane Meierkord’s analysis of non-native-/non-native small talk conversations in English. Continued from Text 1-23)