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6 The communicative strategies of ASEAN ELF users1 The data upon which the findings in this chapter are primarily based come from the audio-recordings of six group discussions in which all ten ASEAN nations are represented. These are the same groups which were described in Chapter 4, but are repeated here for ease of reference and, because the individual speakers are referred to in slightly different ways, it is easier to refer to the speakers using these labels in the discussion of their communicative strategies. Naturally, some of the examples will be remembered from Chapters 4 and 5, but are here illustrating communicative strategies rather than linguistic features. Where lengthy, these are cross-referenced. For example, Extract 5 in this chapter is crossreferenced to [4: 47], meaning that Extract 5 below also occurred as Extract 47 in Chapter 4. Each group comprised three or four people (see Table 6.1). The subjects were all English language teachers who had been selected to attend professional development courses in English language teaching conducted by staff at the Regional Language Centre (RELC) in Singapore. They were recorded in the RELC recording studio. Three groups were recorded in January 2004 and three in January 2005. The groups were asked to start their discussions by talking about the English language teaching situation in their country and were told they would be recorded for about half an hour. No group appeared to experience any hesitation or awkwardness, even though they had only known each other for two or three days. The letter and number in the brackets provided after each participant represents their reference in the data. Thus B1 refers to the Bruneian female in Group 1, while B4 refers to the Bruneian female in Group 4. Where relevant, the speaker’s ethnicity and first language are also reported. Thus the Bruneian female in Group 1 (B1) is an ethnic Chinese who has a dialect of Chinese (Fuzhou in her case) as a mother tongue. Please also note that Burma is represented as ‘Mn’ and Malaysia as ‘My’. The notation conventions are in Appendix 1. 124 English as a Lingua Franca in ASEAN As detailed in the preceding two chapters of Part II, while speakers of ASEAN ELF share a range of non-standard forms, they also speak different varieties of English and, on occasion, their individual levels of proficiency in English may be lower than that of their peers. Given the different cultural, educational and linguistic backgrounds of these speakers, we would anticipate occasions where communication might become problematic, or even break down, and on such occasions for the speakers to adopt specific communicative strategies to try and repair the situation. This chapter describes the communicative strategies adopted by these speakers and illustrates these from the data. These strategies are all deduced from the ASEAN ELF data. A major reason for this is that the SEAMEO meeting was more formal and it was conducted very much along the lines as described by Rusdi in his analysis of the Indonesian seminars (Rusdi 1999; see also Chapter 5). In the context of academic seminars in Indonesia Rusdi remarks, Each seminar session is opened by a moderator. In his/her opening remarks, the moderator greets the participants … introduces the topic of the seminar, introduces members of the presentation team, sets the house rules for the activity and invites the presenter to give a presentation. After the presentation, the moderator summarises the main points of the presentation and calls for additional information from other presentation team members. The moderator then summarises the additional information and calls for questions from the audience. (Rusdi 1999: 71) This represents an accurate description of the SEAMEO meeting. That is to say, turn-taking was directed by the chair and every person was told explicitly when it was their turn to speak. Turns were seldom interrupted. The chair of the meeting would also often summarize the main points of presentations. The overall layout of the room and seating arrangements Table 6.1 Composition of groups Group Composition Group 1 Bruneian Female (Chinese) (B1); Filipina (F1); Thai Male (T1); Vietnamese Female (V1) Group 2 Singaporean Female (Punjabi) (S2); Burmese Female (Mn2); Laotian Female (L2) Group 3 Cambodian Male (C3); Indonesian Male (I3); Singaporean Female (Malay) (S3) Group 4 Bruneian Female (B4); Malaysian Female (My4); Thai Female (T4); Vietnamese Female (V4) Group 5 Indonesian Female (I5); Burmese Female (Mn5); Cambodian Male (C5) Group 6 Malaysian Male (Chinese) (My6); Laotian Male (L6); Filipina (F6) [18.219...

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