Pragmatic strategies to solve and preempt understanding problems in Chinese professionals’ emails when using English as lingua franca communication

ABSTRACT

Although there has been a steady rise of empirical studies investigating pragmatic strategies in oral communication using English as a lingua franca (ELF), there have been relatively few published studies about pragmatic strategies in written ELF communication. Email, despite its current popularity, has scarcely been examined in ELF communication. To extend the existing research on ELF into email discourse, this study investigates Chinese-English bilingual professionals’ real-life emails in ELF communication. Email data were collected from 15 Chinese-English bilingual professionals in Mainland China. The paper analyzes and discusses the pragmatic strategies employed by these Chinese bilingual professionals both to solve and to avoid problems of understanding when writing their emails in ELF communication. The results reveal no evidence of non-understanding and only a few misunderstandings. The Chinese bilingual professionals employed various pragmatic strategies to prevent and resolve problems of understanding in ELF communication and to facilitate understanding and ensure communicative effectiveness.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese-English bilingual
• English as a lingua franca (ELF)
• pragmatic strategies
• email discourse
• non-understanding
• misunderstanding

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for the helpful comments they have made. Any remaining errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Wei Ren is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the National Key Research Center for Linguistics & Applied Linguistics at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, China. His research interests include L2 Pragmatics, Cross-Cultural Pragmatics, and Pragmatics in online communication and in English as a Lingua Franca Communication. His recent publications include a monograph L2 Pragmatic Development in Study Abroad Contexts and articles in Applied Linguistics, Discourse, Context & Media, ELT Journal, Journal of Pragmatics, Pragmatics, and System.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China [grant number 13CYY030].