1 Introduction

From Australia to Zambia, from the Bahamas to Yemen, and from Tanzania to Germany, an increasing number of people all over the globe use English as a shared medium for communication. The number of English speakers is currently estimated at 1.5 billion in total (see Crystal 2012a: 6; Eberhard et al. 2022), with ‘non-native’ speakers, who account for more than two thirds of all speakers of English, out­numbering ‘native’ speakers by far (see Eberhard et al. 2022).1 Global mobility, both long-term migration and short-term sojourns, as well as the rapid spread of the internet continue to bring people from different linguacultural backgrounds together, who – in need of a lingua franca – often resort to English in both real and virtual worlds (see Jenkins 2018: 600). Employed by speakers from most various geographical and social backgrounds in a wide range of domains, English as a Lingua Franca has grown into “a communicative tool of immense political, ideological, and economic power” (Kachru 1996: 910) and has gained a global influence unparalleled (see Seidlhofer 2011: 3).

Following Seidlhofer (2011: 7), I understand English as a Lingua Franca (hence ELF) as “any use of English among speakers of different first languages for whom English is the communicative medium of choice, and often the only option [italics in original]”. While the use of ELF has become a globe-encompassing linguistic reality, “linguists, teacher educators, and teachers have been told, and have generally accepted, that ‘real English’ is ENL [i.e. English as a native language]” (Seidlhofer 2011: 23). Over the past two decades, however, a rapidly growing body of ELF research has contributed to making the sociolinguistic reality of ELF visible and accessible to academics and educators alike, exploring ELF from a variety of linguistic perspectives, with a recent emphasis on pragmatics and translanguaging (see e.g. Mauranen 2013; Cogo & House 2018).

Though universally employed, ELF has so far mainly been investigated in a restricted set of regions and domains: while previous studies have centred around business and academic ELF in European and Asian settings (see Seidlhofer 2004: 221–222; Firth 2009: 149; Cogo 2016a: 89; Jenkins 2018: 596; Kaur 2022: 37–38), future research needs to incorporate additional domains and integrate data from further continents (see e.g. Kaur 2016a: 164–166). The present study addresses this desideratum by exploring the interactional behaviour of ELF-speaking ado­lescents2 in an African-European context. Although ELF research is no longer in its infancy, young speakers’ use of ELF has received little attention so far (for notable exceptions, see D’Andrea 2012, Vettorel 2013). As Palacios Martínez (2018: 364) notes, however, “[t]eenagers constitute an important sector of society, one which deserves close attention and understanding in its own right”. He goes on to observe that “[b]y studying some of the mechanics of their communication, we will be provided with a valuable window onto them as a group.” Particularly in view of the ongoing debate about implications of ELF research for English language teaching (ELT), an investigation of the primary target group’s use of ELF appears promising.

Research into forms and functions of English in Africa on the other hand is all but new, but has primarily been approached from a variety-centred (see e.g. Mesthrie 2010) or a postcolonial (see e.g. Achebe 1975; Thiong’o 1986) rather than an ELF perspective so far (for notable exceptions, see van der Walt & Evans 2018; Rudwick 2021). Analysing the “new voice coming out of Africa, speaking of an African experience in a world-wide language” (Achebe 1975: 61) in an ELF framework will shift the perspective to African speakers’ participation in a global communicative network.

Addressing the urgent need for more “situated, exploratory studies” of a “qualitative, emically oriented” nature (Seidlhofer 2009: 50) while at the same time paying specific attention to the blind spots in ELF research as outlined above, the present study investigates adolescents’ ELF pragmatics in the framework of an African-European student exchange. Analyses will largely build on my fieldwork recordings of 26 hours of ELF face-to-face interactions between 30 Tanzanian and German secondary school students aged 15 to 19, compiled into a corpus of about 190,000 transcribed words, but will also draw on fieldnotes, sociolinguistic participant information sheets and retrospective interviews. The overall qualitative approach is complemented by quantitative methods where deemed appropriate for an interpretation of findings. The exploratory study is guided by the following overall research question: How do adolescents taking part in a German-Tanzanian student exchange employ linguistic and paralinguistic resources in English as a Lingua Franca to reach their communicative aims?

As is a common procedure in ethnographically influenced research (see e.g. Starfield 2013: 59; Section 4.4), this broad overall research question will be narrowed down in the process of analysis. As far as communicative aims are concerned, students are found to primarily pursue intersubjective understanding, a management of rapport and the negotiation of identities, which often go hand in hand. Major linguistic and paralinguistic resources at play will be worked out and further examined in the course of the study. Repetition and repair, the realization of the speech act of complimenting, and the use of laughter receive prominent attention. Particular emphasis is placed on translanguaging as a communicative tool in ELF. These major interactional means and goals will provide the structure for the present study.

The book starts off with an overview of theoretical and empirical foundations of ELF research (Chapter 2, Chapter 3), laying the ground for subsequent methodological considerations and analyses. Conceptualizations of ELF as emerging from previous research pave the way for reflections on the relationship between language and culture in ELF as a transcultural phenomenon. Research on ELF is examined in its interplay with related fields that offer analytical potential, such as interactional linguistics, pragmatics, and intercultural communication research. Theoretical considerations are followed by comprehensive descriptions of methods and data, with the research design being laid out against the background of research interests and objectives (Chapter 4). In a predominantly qualitative approach, conversation analysis (CA) is employed as a major methodological tool for the analysis of the interactional data at the core of the study.

Chapter 5 provides an overview of communicative aims students address in their conversations: the negotiation of meaning, rapport, and identity. The five subsequent chapters (6 to 10) give detailed insights into negotiation processes at work in the present data through a close formal-functional analysis of ELF conversations. Repeating, repairing, complimenting, laughing and translanguaging are investigated with regard to their interactional potential for contributing to the communicative aims as outlined above. The interactional means investigated in detail were chosen on the basis of the following considerations:

• Salience: Topics emerging from the researcher’s fieldnotes and observations were collated with participants’ perspectives retrieved from interviews and contents of previous research. In particular, repetition, repair, and the use of plurilingual resources were brought into prominence as salient communicative means in ELF by all parties.

• Innovative potential: Less researched areas in ELF such as laughter and complimenting promise to reveal new insights into general mechanisms at work in lingua franca communication. The innovative potential is also considered high for research on the multifaceted phenomenon of translanguaging in ELF, which has made it to the centre of attention and is now gaining ground in empirical ELF research (see Cogo 2016a: 86).

• Representativeness: The linguistic means looked at cover a wide range of do­­mains of language behaviour (see Spencer-Oatey 2008: 21; Section 3.2). While complimenting as a complex speech act, for example, represents the illocution­ary domain, translanguaging reaches into the domains of discourse and participation, whereas humour and laughter exemplify the stylistic as well as the non-verbal domain. At the same time, the communicative means chosen foreground different functional aspects. While repetition and repair primarily serve the negotiation of mutual understanding, complimenting and laughter play vital roles in the management of rapport, and translanguaging stands in a close relationship to aspects of identification, although no single means is naturally restricted to just one function.

A methodological reflection and a summary of major linguistic findings...