Chapter 1 Introduction

This book investigates how conflict talk is interactionally managed in casual ELF (English as a lingua franca) conversations among friends by using a conversation analytic approach, multimodal conversation analysis (CA) in particular (Mondada 2018; Mortensen 2012). This approach is also combined with perspectives from pragmatic theories of communication (Arundale 2010; Brown and Levinson 1987; Grainger 2011; Grice 1975; Haugh 2007). On the basis of a qualitative analysis of casual ELF conversations of international students at British universities, the book will show how interactants using ELF (1) competitively take the floor by overlapping, (2) disagree with a co-interactant, and (3) complain about an absent complainee/target by means of various multimodal resources at their disposal. In doing so, it aims to scrutinize an underexplored aspect of ELF interactions, namely interactionally conflict moments, from a multimodal perspective, which is also scarce in pragmatic research into ELF (see also Matsumoto 2019).

Globalization has changed the face of the world dramatically, accelerated by the development of transportation and communication technology. Society increasingly becomes interconnected and heterogeneous (Dewey 2007; Seidlhofer 2011) as more and more people from various parts of the world readily cross the boundaries of nations and regions physically and virtually for social, academic, professional, and/or business purposes. Accordingly, increased lingua-cultural diversity is highly visible in a wide range of contexts if we look at, for instance, the ratio of foreign nationals although this tendency has been slightly decelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Take a higher education context in the UK, which is of particular interest in this book, as an example. When the present data were collected in British universities in the academic year of 2012–2013, the majority of international students (70.5%) came from non-European countries such as China, India, and Nigeria, to name a few, and 29.5% came from European countries such as Germany, Ireland, France, and so forth (HESA 2014). As far as full-time postgraduate programs are concerned, the ratio of international students and that of British students was almost equal, the former (57.2%) being slightly larger than the latter (42.8%) (HESA 2014). Basically, the same tendency is also observed in more recent years. For example, in the academic year of 2020–2021, China and India were the top two countries where international students came from although the number of entrants from China decreased for the first time since 2007 (HESA 2022). Likewise, the ratio of full-time postgraduate students from overseas accounted for more than a half, including students from non-European Union (49%) and those from European Union (7%) (HESA 2022). This suggests that although a decade has passed since the present data were collected, “non-native” speakers of English still outnumber its “native” speakers (Crystal 2003; Graddol 1997, 2006). In such multilingual settings, English, along with other languages, plays an important role in communication. Students from multilingual backgrounds use it as a lingua franca (i.e., ELF) for both academic (e.g., lectures, seminars, discussion, presentations, etc.) and social purposes (e.g., parties, lunch breaks, short trips, etc.), thereby achieving mutual understanding and developing interpersonal relationships.

My initial interest in ELF emerged from my study abroad experience as a master’s student in a lingua-culturally diverse British university, where most of my classmates and flat-mates came from overseas, in addition to several local British students as well as both local and international faculty staff. One striking point of ELF communication that I noted from my experience is that it was not infrequent that international friends, Asians in particular, somehow understood what an Asian peer said even when “native English” friends could not understand. In fact, such an experience is not unique to me. For instance, a Japanese participant in the informal group discussion in the pilot study conducted prior to the present research said that she felt more comfortable talking to Asians than Britons, and Asians could understand each other easily because they were all “non-native” English speakers (see also Iino and Murata 2013; Nogami 2019; Tsuchiya 2013). A Korean participant then explained how she usually managed to communicate with “native English” friends, in contrast to communication with her Korean friends. Her explanation was not necessarily “straightforward”. However, a Chinese participant expressed her understanding and said, “We can still understand” when the Korean peer stammered and said “Where we are [sic]?” at the end of her explanation. The Korean participant then said “Yeah, like this!”, indicating that Asian friends could understand what she said easily, and they all laughed together. A story like this is not rare, and I frequently experienced similar situations when I studied in the UK. This observation gradually motivated me to investigate how ELF users, those with “non-native” backgrounds particularly, communicate with one another despite their different lingua-cultural backgrounds and different proficiency levels in English.

The field of ELF research, which emerged in the late 1990s, has now developed into a productive field in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics. A few seminal works include Jenkins’ (2000, 2002) investigation of mutual intelligibility of English pronunciation in international settings and Seidlhofer’s (2004) report on certain regularities in ELF lexico-grammatical features based on the analysis of ELF conversational data in the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE 2013). Since Seidlhofer (2001) called for more linguistic descriptions of ELF, an increasing number of ELF corpora have been compiled officially and individually by (audio-)recording actual instances of ELF interactions in various contexts. The official corpora, in addition to the VOICE, include the Corpus of English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings (ELFA 2008) and the Asian Corpus of English (ACE 2013). Descriptive research into ELF, accordingly, has been flourishing in the field, which is conducted at various linguistic levels such as phonology, lexico-grammar, and discourse-pragmatics. The earlier phase of research, referred to as ELF1 by Jenkins (2015b), focused more on the identification of linguistic forms, namely product. A research focus in the later phase, however, has shifted to the investigation of functions through the analysis of dynamic processes of meaning-making in interactions, and this phase of research is referred to as ELF2 by Jenkins (2015b). To borrow Seidlhofer’s (2009: 241) words, many ELF studies in this phase “take a much more processual, communicative view of ELF, of which linguistic features constitute but a part and are investigated not for their own sake but as indications of the various functions ELF fulfills in the interactions observed” (emphasis added). Pragmatic research, which the present research falls into, has been particularly flourishing since then, and variation, or in other words, variability and hybridity, has been reported to be one of the decisive characteristics of ELF (Canagarajah 2007: 926; Firth 2009: 162; Jenkins, Cogo, and Dewey 2011: 297, 303; Mauranen 2007: 244; Seidlhofer 2011: 95; Widdowson 2014).

More recently, this variability in ELF has been explicitly re-positioned within theories of multilingualism such as translanguaging (García and Li 2014), translingual practice (Canagarajah 2012), and metrolingualism (Pennycook and Otsuji 2015). All of these theories underscore the super-diversity, fluidity, and emergent nature of language use in communication in global contexts, which transgresses, transcends, and transforms the boundaries of named languages. These theories are also in accord with the multilingual turn (May 2014) in second language acquisition (SLA) and applied linguistic research in general, while they also have an influence from Complexity Theory, which sees language as complex adaptive systems (Larsen-Freeman 2018). In line with these theories, Jenkins (2015b) reconceptualizes ELF as English as a Multilingua Franca (its definition will be provided later in Section 1.2), identifying this phase of research as ELF3. She argues that the “multilingualism of most ELF users” (Jenkins 2015b: 75) needs to be emphasized rather than “multilingualism as an aspect of ELF” (Jenkins 2015b: 73), underscoring the complex and emergent nature of ELF use in interactions.

Pragmatic research into ELF has investigated how people use ELF to achieve transactional and interactional purposes of the talk in situ in various ELF contexts (Seidlhofer 2011) by using approaches such as discourse analysis and conversation analysis. While a detailed review of existing pragmatic research into ELF will be offered in Chapter 3, to my knowledge, two aspects seem to be underexplored in the field. One is conflict talk in ELF interactions, and the other is the interplay of verbal and non-verbal semiotic resources in ELF interactions, namely multimodality. A substantial amount of research has revealed that...