Expressing disagreement in English as a

lingua franca: Whose pragmatic rules? Abstract: Multicultural classrooms provide the intercultural pragmatist with a breeding ground to get firsthand information on intercultural communication. In such a context, if English is used as a lingua franca, these classrooms also be-come an ideal setting to observe the pragmatics of this relatively unknown vari-ety. The present article aims to analyze qualitatively a sample of data produced by a multicultural group of masters students in which English is used as the lingua franca. More specifically, I intend to answer the following research question: In a multicultural class where English is the medium of instruction and students ’ peer to peer communication, whose pragmatic “rules ” are followed? In other words, do these speakers stick to their own cultural pragmatic rules or follow nativelike ones? More specifically, I focus on the speech act of disagreement given its face-threatening nature and its disruptive potential if carried out in what interloc-utors might perceive as the “wrong ” way. Disagreement was also chosen given the relative paucity of studies on this speech act – as opposed, for example, others like requests or compliments. For this purpose, the 10 students – from very differ-ent cultural backgrounds – were asked to carry out a group assignment. Their negotiation and discussion process, however, was computer-mediated via the use of forums rather than face-to-face. This allowed the researcher to collect naturally occurring, spontaneous data in a relatively easy way (without the need for tran-scription). It also gave the students the opportunity to interact in a more demo-cratic way. In fact, by being an asynchronous discussion online, they did not have to fight for the conversational turn, but all of them had the chance to contribute to the discussion at their own pace. The sample so collected consists of 15,598 words. The limitation of the sample calls for a qualitative rather than a quantita-tive approach but is valuable insofar as it represents naturally occurring data. Disagreement expressions were classified according to two main categories