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Characteristics of successful lingua franca English conversation

On the level of pragmatics, the informal register of English as an international lingua franca differs from the native speaker varieties BrE and AmE regarding both discourse structure and what is usually referred to as politeness phenomena. The special characteristics have been shown (cf. Meierkord, 1996 und 1998) to comprise the following:

Regarding discourse structure, apparent differences can be observed on all levels of discourse with the informal variety of lingua franca English in this corpus. Unlike BrE or AmE native speakers, lingua franca speakers do not link opening and closing phases to the core phase of the conversations by using illocutions like extractors (e.g. 'I'd better be off now.'). Rather, pauses occur between conversational phases, especially at the end of a conversation, to mark the transition from one phase to the other. Participants also prefer safe topics such as talking about the meals and life in the hostel, about their jobs or university classes. They keep the individual topics very short and tend to deal with them rather superficially. Most topics in the corpus were changed after less than ten turns had been devoted to them.

The participants' speech displays frequent and long pauses both within and in-between turns. At the same time, simultaneous speech occurs. The instances of overlap, however, vary considerably. Some speakers do not overlap with their interlocutors at all, whereas others frequently talk simultaneously with other participants of the conversation. Those who do so are all very competent speakers. Altogether though, stretches of simultaneous speech in lingua franca English are shorter than those Oreström (1983) has observed with BrE native speakers, i.e. they are two words long as compared to the native speakers' three word overlaps.

There is also considerable use of politeness phenomena, i.e. routine formulae in opening and closing phases, back-channels and other gambits. Speakers hardly vary in the actual choice of the routine formulae they use. A lot of those expressions commonly found with native speakers' speech do not occur at all, and lingua franca English speakers mainly restrict themselves to stereotype phrases such as "How are you?", "Good Morning.", "Hello." and "Bye.".

The back-channeling behaviour of participants in the conversations is very similar to what has been observed with British English native speakers. Participants use the same amount of supportive back-channels (e.g. mhm, right, yeah), though verbal back-channels are frequently replaced by supportive laughter. At the same time, speakers employ a comparatively high amount of sentence completions and restatements. Non-back-channeling gambits were realized in a way that significantly differs from native BrE speakers (cf. Meierkord 1996). Of special interest is the very high amount of cajolers (verbal appeals for the listener's sympathy, e.g. you know, I mean, you see) that occurred in the corpus, and which expresses the speakers' desire to cooperate and involve her interlocutors.

If we are to interpret these characteristics, the first attempt may be to regard them as being interferences from the speakers' mother tongues. However, although "cultural transfer is evident in the types of communicative events that learners expect to occur in a given situation, the manner of their participation in them, the specific types of acts they perform and the ways they realize them, the ways topics are nominated and developed, and the way discourse is regulated" (Ellis, 1994), Ellis emphasises the importance of not overstating the role of the non-native speakers' mother tongue and culture. In the present corpus, most of the features that have been stated to characterise lingua franca English conversations could be shown not to be reflections of the participants' mother tongues' communicative norms (cf. Meierkord, 1996).

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