Lingua Franca Negotiations of Cultural Understandings to Build Friendships: Interrelating Intercultural Awareness and Pragmatic Strategies

In this pandemic and historic season marked by international tensions, we are reminded of the growing relevance of further understanding intercultural communication mediated through English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). The negotiation of understandings through ELF intercultural communication has been studied substantially since the focus of ELF research turned from the investigation of features to the underlying processes involved in meaning-making (Jenkins, 2015). In the present study, I critically engaged with previous theoretical constructs of pragmatic strategies (Mauranen, 2003a, 2006; Cogo, 2009; Kaur, 2009; Mauranen, 2012; Cogo and Dewey, 2012; Cogo and House, 2018) and a model of intercultural awareness (ICA) (Baker, 2011, 2015, 2018) to take a step forward and investigate how the interplay of those two aspects impacts the unfolding of Negotiations of cultural understandings in ELF talk (Zhu, 2015). Using Conversation Analysis complemented by ethnographic tools, I analysed the conversations of two Londoner multilingual faith-based communities of practice (Wenger, 1998). Those communities were part of the same broader church community and had building friendships as their main ‘enterprise’. The participants’ super-diverse (Vertovec, 2007, 2019) linguistic and linguacultural repertoires (Risager, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2012) led them into the Negotiation of situated meanings, constituted by their understandings of those topics. I examined the unfolding (beginning, middle and ending) of the Negotiations and, among other things, adapted the ICA model to describe a wider range of communicative practices. The findings revealed relevant patterns in the displays of ICA that affected how complexly the topics were treated. It also indicated that some pragmatic strategies had specific functions in the displays and responses to particular ICA levels. This investigation of naturally occurring conversations offered further insights into the processes of pre-empting, fine-tuning, and resolving culture-based mis-/non-understandings, with the potential to inspire future research that will inform ELF-aware pedagogies