English as a lingua franca in Transient International Groups

English is used as a means for intercultural communication on a daily basis by millions of people world-wide. In many situations, international groups of speakers form for a particular (private or professional) purpose and use English as their lingua franca (ELF), often alongside or mixed with other languages. Although some groups are long-lived enough to become so-called Communities of Practice, many international groups remain transient and fleeting and dissolve after a relatively short amount of time. The aim of this project is to provide a conceptual, methodological and descriptive framework for such Transient International Groups (TIGs) in order to investigate how ELF communication evolves in different contexts and in different short-lived groups across time. Questions that will be explored include: Under which circumstances do multilingual ELF users in different TIGs engage in which linguistic practices to what extent? Which linguistic practices and communicative phenomena are particularly noticeable in different phases of group formation, interaction and negotiation in different ELF contexts? The project will rely on naturally-occurring spoken ELF interactions that were video- and audio-recorded in different TIGs. It will combine different methods for analyzing interaction and language use (such as conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics) in order to describe the chronological development of various aspects of ELF communication in different groups. The methodology used for these detailed analyses will be supported by qualitative data analysis software, which will make it possible to systematically trace and also visually represent linguistic and communicative patterns that emerge in group interaction in these diverse international constellations. In addition, a comprehensive framework for TIGs and a model for systematizing ELF contexts will be devised in the project. These will allow a more integrated view on existing ELF findings and will serve as conceptual tools for a meta-analysis of published descriptive ELF studies. The meta-analysis will relate existing research results and make it possible to put forward first hypotheses about the salience of different linguistic practices and communicative processes in different phases of group development or in different kinds of TIGs.