This book investigates how conflict talk is interactionally managed in casual ELF (English as a lingua franca) conversations among friends by using a conversation analytic approach, multimodal conversation analysis (CA) in particular (Mondada 2018;Mortensen 2012). This approach is also combined with perspectives from pragmatic theories of communication (Arundale 2010;Brown and Levinson 1987;Grainger 2011;Grice 1975;Haugh 2007). On the basis of a qualitative analysis of casual ELF conversations of international students at British universities, the book will show how interactants using ELF (1) competitively take the floor by overlapping, (2) disagree with a co-interactant, and (3) complain about an absent complainee/target by means of various multimodal resources at their disposal. In doing so, it aims to scrutinize an underexplored aspect of ELF interactions, namely interactionally conflict moments, from a multimodal perspective, which is also scarce in pragmatic research into ELF (see alsoMatsumoto 2019).
Globalization has changed the face of the world dramatically, accelerated by the development of transportation and communication technology. Society increasingly becomes interconnected and heterogeneous (Dewey 2007;Seidlhofer 2011) as more and more people from various parts of the world readily cross the boundaries of nations and regions physically and virtually for social, academic, professional, and/or business purposes. Accordingly, increased lingua-cultural diversity is highly visible in a wide range of contexts if we look at, for instance, the ratio of foreign nationals although this tendency has been slightly decelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Take a higher education context in the UK, which is of particular interest in this book, as an example. When the present data were collected in British universities in the academic year of 2012–2013, the majority of international students (70.5%) came from non-European countries such as China, India, and Nigeria, to name a few, and 29.5% came from European countries such as Germany, Ireland, France, and so forth (HESA 2014). As far as full-time postgraduate programs are concerned, the ratio of international students and that of British students was almost equal, the former (57.2%) being slightly larger than the latter (42.8%) (HESA 2014). Basically, the same tendency is also observed in more recent years. For example, in the academic year of 2020–2021, China and India were the top two countries where international students came from although the number of entrants from China decreased for the first time since 2007 (HESA 2022). Likewise, the ratio of full-time postgraduate students from overseas accounted for more than a half, including students from non-European Union (49%) and those from European Union (7%) (HESA 2022). This suggests that although a decade has passed since the present data were collected, “non-native” speakers of English still outnumber its “nati
