Achieving Mutual Understanding Using Interactional Strategies in English as a Lingua Franca Context

This study aims to examine the interactional procedures used to achieve mutual understanding between non-native speakers in English as a lingua franca (ELF) context. Within the conversational analytic framework, this paper investigates how the participants in interactions accommodate to each other and construct shared understanding and how they employ several strategies like repetition, paraphrase, confirmation and clarification requests to achieve the goal. Eighteen hours of transcribed audio recordings of naturally occurring spoken interactions in ELF between speakers of a range of different first languages and cultural backgrounds were examined. The results demonstrates that regardless of the speakers’ use of different varieties of English at varying levels of competency, they achieve mutual understanding without communication breakdown as the speakers strategically use interactional strategies.