مذاکره درمورد معانی

Research has shown that using English as a lingua franca requires high degrees of adaptability from speakers in order to successfully negotiate meaning. It is therefore characterised by high levels of explicitness to enhance clarity, with content prioritised over accuracy.

The interactional ‘work’ done by speakers to achieve mutual understanding is often referred to as ‘accommodation strategies’, because these strategies help speakers to mutually accommodate to each other’s variety of English.

Accommodation strategies include, for example:

Simplifying, e.g. using less complex grammar or vocabulary.
Repetition, e.g. “Let me summarise for you …”.
Paraphrasing / rephrasing, e.g. “In other words, that is …”.
Adjusting the pace/making pauses.
Explaining, or avoiding, jargon/technical terms.
Signposting, e.g. “I would now like to explain the main benefits of our product”.
Code-switching, e.g. using vocabulary from another shared language
Asking for clarification, e.g. “What do you mean by that?”
Comprehension checks, e.g. “Could I just check whether I’ve understood you here …?”)
Giving signals of misunderstanding, e.g. silence, absence of reception markers such as aha, sure.
Acting as a mediator (when there are more than one conversation partners), e.g. “What James meant to say here is …”
Just a little anecdote to illustrate how important these strategies are:

When my husband first met my friends in Germany, he frequently mentioned his career in the ‘RAF’. Even though my friends all speak good English, and many of them teach English in secondary school, they all looked puzzled until I explained – as a kind of mediator – that in Britain ‘RAF’ stands for ‘Royal Air Force’.

© University of Surrey