Exploring L2 learners’ use of communicative strategies in the Corpus of Hong Kong Spoken English: Implications for teaching English as a lingua franca

Abstract

Since the era of globalisation, the use of English in international communication has been the focus of the research paradigm in English as a lingua franca (ELF), which sees L2 speakers as the vast majority particularly in the professional and business discourse. ELF interactions place greater emphasis on communicative functions (than language forms) to ensure mutual understanding, and the use of communicative strategies (CSs) plays an important role in this process. This study seeks to investigate the use of CSs from a self-complied spoken corpus, which has recorded Hong Kong secondary and university students’ 8-minute semi-authentic (academic) group interactions (n=457), resembling the format of Hong Kong’s public speaking examination. This sample includes L2 learners of different English proficiency levels. In total, around 22 hours and 5 minutes’ interaction transcriptions were collected for the CS analysis following Björkman’s (2014) framework to investigate Hong Kong students’ use of CSs in academic discourse. Our findings suggest that the participants mainly used self-initiated strategies to enhance explicitness (e.g., repetition, paraphrasing) but they used relatively few other-initiated strategies (e.g., confirmation checks, clarification requests, co-creation of the message) that are crucial for mutual support in ELF communication. Furthermore, students with a lower English proficiency level tended to use a limited variety of CSs and rely on some pre-taught formulaic expressions during the discussion. These findings reveal the (mis)alignment in CS use between Hong Kong L2 learners and ELF speakers and their ways of learning CSs, thus giving advice on the teaching of CSs for international communication.