Section 1. Guidelines for reading texts on the use of international English in European business

The insights gained from ELF research during recent years have made a considerable impact on the conceptualization of English as an international language and have told a lot about interactional practices and pragmatic strategies successful ELF speakers use. These insights into successful ELF usage are gained from the observation and analysis of spoken data, and there are very good reasons for doing so. The fact that much of what we know about ELF today comes from researching spoken interactions, at one of the central principles governing such spoken interactions – the principle of turn-taking is arguably a central issue to be investigated in ELF. But despite the huge body of work on turn-taking, in general, and the immense growth of research on ELF over the last few years, turn-taking management in English as a lingua franca remains still very much unknown territory.

Christiane Meierkord’s study analyses informal non-native speaker (NNS} – non-native speaker conversation to see what types of NNS errors lead to what types of NNS response constituting negative input available to the NNS. This study further examines the differential effect of the NNS response on subsequent NNS speech in a given conversation.