Sessions /
Teaching English for Lingua Franca Communication: Korean Speakers and Beyond #1115

For most learners and speakers today, English is a language learned predominantly for interaction with other non-native users. We shall discuss how these users adapt and variably alter English ad hoc to suit their communicative purpose, thus preserving their identity without striving to mimic native speakers’ conventions. We will present the results of the first comprehensive analysis of the complete conversation subcomponent of the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English, focusing on (a) the possible causes of communication breakdowns in ELF communication, and (b) strategies employed by speakers in order to both prevent and overcome such failures. We categorize and show the distribution of the sources of breakdowns as well as the compensatory strategies. These considerations will steer us towards a discussion of the implications for language pedagogy, taking as an example learners who are L1 speakers of Korean, and conclude with recommendations for the translation and interpreting professions.