Communication Strategies in English as Lingua Franca Interactions: A Study of University Students

Over the last two decades, the number of international students coming to English-speaking countries has been increasing, resulting in English being a default means of communication. This study examines the communication strategies used by university students in their on-campus interpersonal communication at Monash University. The data for the study were comprised of audio-recordings of 63 participants from 22 different lingua-cultural backgrounds. Both descriptive and qualitative analyses have been conducted, resulting in a taxonomy of communication strategies used in ELF interactions. This includes five newly-identified ELF communication strategies that were not found in data for previous studies.