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Article published In: Discourse linguistics: Theory and practice
Edited by Karin Aijmer and Anita Fetzer
[Functions of Language 21:1] 2014
► pp. 50–66

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Managing academic institutional discourse in English as a lingua franca

Published online: 7 April 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.21.1.04hou
The study presented in this paper examines the discourse behaviour of participants in academic office hours conducted in English as a lingua franca. Participants in the study are professors, their assistants and international students at a German university. Findings of the analyses of a small corpus of such institutional interactions show that these users of English as a lingua franca manage the discourse surprisingly well by strategically employing code-switching, re-presenting (parts of) their interlocutors’ message and re-interpreting several high-frequency discourse markers. In this way they seem to better achieve their own and their interactants’ communicative purpose in discourse.
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