Direct questions as strategies for the management of interpersonal relations in ELF lectures

The use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in university courses poses new communicative challenges to lecturers, as successful teaching in a foreign language and in a highly intercultural setting entails continuous monitoring not only of subject contents and language of instruction, but also of interpersonal relations. A set of strategies adopted in the management of interpersonal stance in ELF courses has been recently described, showing how institutional roles and personal identities are continuously negotiated in class (Formentelli 2013). Little attention, however, has been devoted to the micro level of discourse, to ascertain how specific linguistic structures contribute to rapport management. Moving from a small corpus of ELF lectures recorded at an Italian university, the paper focuses on the use of direct questions, which have been found to be strategic rhetorical devices in lessons aimed at an international audience (Morell 2004; Crawford Camiciottoli 2008). The results show a much higher frequency of questions in Italian ELF lectures than in comparable lectures by English native speakers, interpreted as a response of ELF speakers to the additional communicative needs of intercultural interactions. The findings also confirm the prominence of direct questions in foregrounding the complex dynamics of power and social distance, and uncover linguistic patterns that diverge from native speakers’ norms of usage and can be accounted for in terms of incipient functional innovation and creativity.