Communication strategies in task-based interaction: An ELF-aware perspective

This study examines how English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) interlocutors employ communication strategies during task-based interaction and how these strategies relate to ELF-aware communicative orientations of intelligibility, adaptability, and multilingual–multicultural awareness. Ten university students learning English as an additional language completed a closed information-gap task. Interactional data were video-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed through a combination of distributional analysis and interactional analysis, and complemented by stimulated recall to examine learners’ strategic awareness. The findings show that, beyond commonly reported strategies, participants frequently engaged in co-creating messages, deconstructing complex information, and adaptive self-repair. These strategies enabled learners to collaboratively clarify meaning, adjust their linguistic production in response to interactional demands, and draw on shared multilingual resources. The analysis illustrates how these strategies support three ELF-aware communicative orientations: intelligibility through collaborative clarification and reformulation, adaptability through self-initiated monitoring and adjustment, and multilingual awareness through the use of shared linguistic resources. The findings highlight strategic competence as an interactionally enacted resource that supports collaborative and adaptive meaning-making during task-based interaction, and underscore the pedagogical value of tasks that promote these interactional processes.