Resumen de Translingual practices of foreign friendship talks in ELF: a discourse-analytic approach
James H. Yang, Leimin Shi, Lynne Li, Xun Yan
Recent studies have described the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) as a type of translingual practices to negotiate meanings, resist neoliberal ideologies, and reconfigure speech norms, reflecting the normality of multilingual speakers’ language use. However, little is known about the ways ELF speakers resolve misinterpretation involving loanwords, culturally-specific locutions, creative wordplay, and individual idiolects. Accordingly, this paper aims to examine how ELF speakers avoid the misinterpretation of alien and idiosyncratic utterances in intercultural communication. A total of 30 international professionals were interviewed via a semi-structured post-pragmatic interview method conducted in 2021-2023. According to the data analysis, the concept of supra-understanding is proposed to explicate how ELF speakers develop a critical sociolinguistic awareness of ethnocentric language usages and worldviews to disambiguate intercultural misinterpretation. Finally, a revised approach to Deardorff’s [Deardorff, D. K. (2006). Identification and assessment of intercultural competence as a student outcome of internationalization. Journal of Studies in International Education , 10(3), 241–266. https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315306287002] process model is proposed to integrate supra-understanding into the development of intercultural communicative competence in the use of ELF.
