Expressing disagreement in English as a lingua franca: Whose pragmatic rules?

What is it about?

This paper focuses on the study of the act of disagreement performed in an online educational forum by non-native students, to find out whether they followed their own L1 patterns when expressing disagreement or others (e.g. those of a native variety). Results show that their high linguistic competence goes hand in hand with a high pragmatic competence and students seem to resort to the British pragmatics of disagreement as lingua franca pragmatics.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Non-native disagreement has usually been studied by means of artificial data-gathering methods (such as discourse completion tests) but this paper uses naturally produced data. It also includes the fact that they are computer-mediated rather than face-to-face, which adds another interesting variable.