Managing group rapport : an investigation of disagreement in academic ELF group discussion

Abstract

University students often confront face-threats in academic settings, such as when expressing opposite ideas or asking questions, because they are required to demonstrate effective critical thinking skills (Frager & Thompson, 1985; Kaur, 2018; Tannen, 2002). Given the global spread of English in the past few decades (Mauranen, 2012), students from different linguacultural backgrounds may encounter difficulties in conforming to this academic expectation, particularly in tertiary education settings. This situation is likely due to the mismatch between their first language (L1) and cultural norms and academic English-use requirement in these face-threatening speech acts (Brown & Levinson, 1987). Against this background, this study sought to investigate how second language (L2) English speakers of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds perform disagreement in assessed group discussion in an English-medium university in Hong Kong. It is one of the first to illuminate the complexity of disagreement in academic English as a lingua franca (ELF) context through various multimodal resources. More specifically, the investigation examined the participants’ use of mitigation strategies and non-verbal actions in an academic discussion task and their perceptions of disagreement in academic settings. This is an interpretive, qualitative study, which adopted an insider perspective of the ELF university students. The study used the principles and theoretical underpinnings of conversation analysis (CA) to the fully transcribed discourse data. A total of 148 students from different linguacultural backgrounds participated in an oral assessment task, which was a mandatory component of an English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP) course for all year 1 students. Twelve of them participated in follow-up interviews to share their perceptions of their task performance. The group discussions were video-recorded, yielding approximately twelve hours of recordings. The video recordings were also used to observe nonverbal actions and turn-management during disagreement incidents. Rapport Management Theory was used as the analytical framework to evaluate how group rapport was managed during disagreement acts. The findings showed dominance of mitigated disagreement and the use of multiple mitigation strategies for a single disagreement act. A variety of attributes, such as identities and personality traits, were identified as factors that affected how disagreement was approached and enacted. While the discourse data provided analysis of the observable characteristics, such as the verbal, non-verbal and turn-management features, the interview data served to unveil the unobservable participants’ view, providing a more holistic understanding of disagreement enactment in academic group discussion. Findings from this research are likely to advance our current knowledge of how disagreement is enacted in ELF academic discussions and its underlying factors. This study will also provide important insights into the choice of effective pedagogy, which helps better prepare students for their needs at the tertiary level.