Spatial repertoires and virtual communicative effectiveness: bilingual international students’ use of polysemiotic explicitness strategies to preempt and resolve English as a lingua franca miscommunication

ABSTRACT

This study reports bilingual international students’ communicative strategies to preempt and resolve English as a lingua franca (ELF) miscommunication in an English-medium virtual learning program offered by an international university in times of the global pandemic. Drawing upon 18 hours of Zoom recordings and supplementary ethnographic data, this study follows a spatial orientation [Canagarajah, S. 2018a. “The Unit and Focus of Analysis in Lingua Franca English Interactions: In Search of a Method.” International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 21 (7): 805–824. doi:10.1080/13670050.2018.1474850] to analyze international students’ polysemiotic meaning-making practices for virtual communicative effectiveness. Key findings highlight the students’ explicitness-raising strategic moves such as indexing and reflexive pointing, repetitive highlighting, visual contrasting mediated by the mouse cursor and screen-based resources while navigating moments of (potential) miscommunication. To remedy and preempt understanding problems, they coordinate and align polysemiotic spatial repertoires across expansive spatiotemporal scales to enhance the clarity of potentially ambiguous referents, communicative topics, and key information. This study advances current understanding of bi/multilinguals’ polysemiotic translingual pragmatic ability for communicative success in lingua franca scenarios, and provides implications that help prepare international higher education for effective virtual communication, teaching, and learning in the post-pandemic digital era.

KEYWORDS:

• International higher education
• English as a lingua franca
• synchronous virtual interactions
• spatial repertoire
• translingual practice
• communicative strategies

Acknowledgements

I would like to sincerely express my gratitude to Dr. Suresh Canagarajah and Dr. Celeste Kinginger for their invaluable comments on earlier versions of this paper. I am deeply grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their thorough and inspiring feedback, which greatly contributed to the improvement of this work. I also extend my heartfelt thanks to the international students and their online course instructors, whose participation and support made this research possible. Any remaining errors in this paper are solely my responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics approval

This research has obtained formal approval from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) office of the Human Research Protection Program (HRPP) at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. All participants have provided informed consent for this study following appropriate IRB protocols and procedures. The IRB approval number of this study is STUDY00012216.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shuyuan Liu

Shuyuan (Joy) Liu holds a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the Pennsylvania State University, where she worked as an instructor of record for graduate and undergraduate courses in English academic communication and Global Englishes for over four years. Currently, she is Assistant Director of English Language Support at the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning at Brown University, where she designs and manages programs and resources to support multilingual international students’ navigation and participation in intercultural global higher educational contexts as effective English as a lingua franca communicators. Her research interests include English as a lingua franca, intercultural pragmatics in technologically mediated interaction, concept-based language instruction, and study abroad. Her recent work appears in venues including the Journal of Pragmatics and Foreign Language Annals.