ELF Encounters in Migrants’ Forums: Communication Management Across Cultures

The present study investigates the strategies that migrants can adopt to ask for help and express their views in English as a Lingua Franca. On the basis of the exchanges between migrants of various nationalities and in different locations, a framework is proposed with the twofold aim of outlining the structure and discursive moves of migrants’ postings and analyzing the interactional dynamics which may turn a mixed group of nationals into a goal-oriented community of practice (House, 2003). The migrants participating in discussion forums rely on the experience of other users to obtain additional information and solve their problems. This prominent goal is manifest in the survey of the discussion threads, from nationalization documents to job hunt, including lawful residence, citizenship tests, application forms and many others. The transactional metafunction is, however, entwined with the interactional one (Brown and Yule, 1983) as feelings of anger, frustration, relief, joy, gratitude are in turn expressed by the forum users. In light of the ‘entailment’ paradigm advanced by Firth (2009), that is «the inherent interactional and linguistic variability that lingua franca interactions entail», the analysis focuses on the affective connotations of lexical choices and interactional markers, as well as the dialectics between potentially disruptive language behaviour and consensus-seeking pragmatic strategies. The migrants’ forum Trackitt <www.trackitt.com> (last access 31.05.2013) is contrasted with a British expatriates’ forum <www.britsabroad.com> (last access 31.05.2013) in order to ascertain to what extent the pragmatic features of the former can be realistically associated with an ELF use rather than with the genre (i.e. forum discussion) and the subject (i.e. migrants’ queries) under examination.