Abstract
Mediation in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) interaction is defined as “a form of speaking for another, where a coparticipant starts rephrasing another participant’s turn that was addressed to a third party” (Hynninen in J Pragmat 43:966, 2011). This chapter examines the practice of mediation in a Business ELF (BELF) casual meeting at a branch of a Japanese company in Southeast Asia, applying a corpus analysis and a conversation analytic approach. Nine workers with six different nationalities were involved, which is considered as a transient international group (Pitzl in J Engl Ling Fr 7:25-58, 2018). The findings include: (1) mediators share the multilingual repertoire with the addressers and the addressees, and (2) mediation was conducted with repetitions of addressers’ utterances or rephrasing with a preceding other-repair, and in some cases with translanguaging (García & Li Wei in Translanguaging. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2014). Through the practice, mediators posit themselves in multiple linguacultural communities, doing interculturality by aligning self-oriented and other-ascribed identities (Zhu in J Engl Ling Fr 4: 63–90, 2015).
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- 1.
In the transcription in Hynninen (2011), the symbol [indicates overlapping speech begins and] overlapping speech ends (text) means uncertain transcription and wo—word left unfinished (ibid., p. 976).
- 2.
The amount of the time the Researcher spoken in the conversation was relatively large partly because it includes the time she explained the research project and answered to some participants’ question about Japanese English Education. However, this would not affect the analysis of the current study since she took part in the meeting as a guest of the participants and an ELF user herself.
- 3.
Fuqing is a dialect of Fujian province on the southeast coast of China. It was also called Hokkien.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported in part by the JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, Foundation B, No. 26284083 (PI: Prof Kumiko Murata). I am grateful to Professor Nakagawa and Prof D’Angelo for their kind permission to use the data I presented in a short research note in Chukyo English Linguistics in Japanese. I would also like to express my gratitude to Zhu Hua for her and the publisher’s permission to reproduce a figure in her book: Figure 4.1 alignment and misalignment between self-orientated and ascribed identities in Zhu (2014c, p. 217). I thank the participants for their contribution to this research.
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Tsuchiya, K. (2020). Mediation and Translanguaging in a BELF Casual Meeting. In: Konakahara, M., Tsuchiya, K. (eds) English as a Lingua Franca in Japan. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33288-4_12
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