35.1659, Review: Conflict Talk in English as a Lingua Franca: Konakahara (2023)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-35-1659. Thu Jun 06 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.1659, Review: Conflict Talk in English as a Lingua Franca: Konakahara (2023)

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Date: 06-Jun-2024
From: Hiba Ibrahim [hibaib87 at yorku.ca]
Subject: Sociolinguistics: Konakahara (2023)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/34.1503

AUTHOR: Mayu Konakahara
TITLE: Conflict Talk in English as a Lingua Franca
SUBTITLE: Analyzing Multimodal Resources in Casual ELF Conversations
SERIES TITLE: Developments in English as a Lingua Franca
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2023

REVIEWER: Hiba Ibrahim

SUMMARY

The use of multimodal conversation approaches has received growing
attention in exploring casual talk and everyday conversations among
speakers and learners of English (see e.g. Keisanen & Kärkkäinen,
2014, Satar, 2013, Yu, 2013). By exploring the interplay of verbal and
non-verbal semiotic resources in social interactions, multimodal
conversation analysis (MCA) brings multilingual practices of speakers
of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)  and their communicative ability
to the fore. The book titled “Conflict Talk in English as a Lingua
Franca: Analyzing Multimodal Resources in Casual ELF Conversations”,
by Mayu Konakahara, aims at providing rich descriptions of ELF
interactions by using multimodal conversational analysis (MCA),
combined with aspects of pragmatics theory, to explore how
international students in universities across the UK manage types of
conflict talk in their ELF casual interactions. The book is a single
study in which Konakahara explores competitive overlapping,
disagreement, and complaints as conflict moments for exploration in
this study. It comprises 8 chapters; the first is an introduction to
the book and an explanation of its organization, followed by two
chapters which establish the theoretical frameworks for Konakahara’s
research and address the research gaps this qualitative inquiry is
addressing. Chapter 4 explains the research methodology, each of
Chapters 5-7 report the research findings followed by the author’s
discussion, and Chapter 8 concludes with a summary of the research
findings, implications for research and practice, suggestions for
further research, and limitations of the study.

The introduction chapter contextualizes the need for the research
presented by briefly discussing the similarities and differences
between World Englishes (WE) and ELF from a sociolinguistic
perspective. It emphasizes that while WE are the linguistic study of
the variety of English used in a certain community, ELF is interested
in studying the variation of communication practices used by English
speakers from different cultural and regional backgrounds in an
intercultural setting. Both fields emerged to claim the plurality of
English and the legitimacy of all its ‘non-native’ speakers around the
world. Although existing definitions of ELF highlight the multilingual
nature of language use (i.e., the adaptive and flexible use and mixing
of one’s linguistic repertoire as communicative resources in a
particular setting), Konakahara argues that integrating multimodal
perspectives in ELF research provides a more nuanced understanding of
speakers’ behavior and interactions. Thus, ELF should be perceived and
researched as “multilingual and multimodal repertoires in flux” (p.
9). Similarly, Konakahara calls for reconsidering concepts such as
‘speech community’ and ‘communicative competence’ to be more relevant
to the lingua cultural diversity in ELF interactions. As explained,
notions such as transient international groups (TIG) (Pitzl as cited
in Konakahara, 2023) and multilingual transient communities (TMC)
(Mortensen as cited in Konakahara, 2023) seem to reflect the
heterogeneity, the specificity of the carried-out activity, and the
shared goal of the group more appropriately than speech community in
ELF contexts. However, approaching ELF interactants’ processes and
performance in a TIG/TMC as the critical notion in judging their
communicative capability and current epistemologies of communicative
competence, Konakahara argues, lacks a multimodal perspective. Just
like verbal resources, ELF interactions research should examine
non-verbal semiotics because these are a source of creating and
comprehending meaning in any interaction, in addition in some cases to
conveying thoughts or emotions.

Chapter 2 is a literature review of conversation analysis (CA) and
relevant approaches. It is divided into four sections. Section 1
highlights the nature of interaction and the need to explore ELF
participants’ negotiation of meaning-making and negotiation of
identity and face. It provides an overview of CA and the features that
make it an ideal approach for analyzing ELF interactions from an emic
perspective. In this section, the author explains that context in CA
research is defined as the aspects relevant to the immediate context
of interaction. In other words, participants’ ongoing contributions in
ELF conversations can be analyzed in relevance to the actions and
reactions of their own and others in a specific situation
(context-shaped). These same contributions continue to form the
immediate context for the preceding actions based on how they are
perceived and acted upon by other participants (context-renewing). By
analyzing ELF contributions from the perspectives of participants
(i.e., an emic perspective), CA attains the intersubjectivity of the
meaning-making process in an ELF context. This makes the turn-taking
system, the participants’ operation of interaction on a turn-by-turn
basis, a core aspect of CA. The section ends with a brief discussion
on how the size of groups can impact the organization and rules of
turn-taking. Based on how turn-taking rules are applied by
participants, the author briefly describes the occurrence of some
other features of ordinary conversation: silence, overlaps, repairs,
and performance structure.

Section 2 explains gestures and postural shifts, the functions they
serve from a CA perspective, and how multimodal CA can be used to
analyze gazes, postural shifts, and speech-accompanying gestures.
Given the multilingual context of these ELF interactions and the
cross-cultural variation in the use of semiotics, Section 3 argues
that an intercultural or transnational approach to deconstructing ELF
interactions is more appropriate than a cross-cultural one. As
Konakahara illustrates, the intercultural/transcultural approach
acknowledges the heterogeneous, multilingual, and dynamic construct of
culture. Therefore, it perceives national culture as one of the many
other scales (gender, social class, religion, and so on) that share
communication discourse and impact meaning-making practices in
interaction. Building on this notion with concrete examples, the
author concludes this section by explaining how to use the
intercultural approach to better understand the cultural variations of
embodied actions (gaze, hand gestures, and head movements). Section 4
concludes the chapter with a review of the pragmatic theories of
relevance to this research and a comparison between the discursive and
interactional approaches to analyzing politeness. The discussion
concentrates on politeness theory, which focuses on face-saving, the
possible threats which speech acts might cause to interlocutors, and
how the interlocutors are perceived by each other. To establish a
rationale for the analytical approach to ELF interactions in this
study, Konakahara compares the discursive and interactional approaches
when analyzing politeness, explaining that the discursive approach is
analyst judgment-based, while the interactional approach is
participant-perspective-oriented (because it is interested in how
participants themselves construct politeness or impoliteness in their
multimodal conduct). Since the study aims to investigate the dynamic
process of participants’ negotiation of face in ELF interactions, the
author adopts the latter approach in conducting sequential analysis of
these interactions.

Chapter 3 provides a literature review of pragmatic ELF research and
the need for a multimodal perspective when investigating conflict
talk. In Section 1, the review reveals two recurring findings among
old and recent research: The fact that most ELF interactions are
successful, except in the occurrence of non-understanding (i.e., an
interactant cannot make sense of an utterance) or misunderstanding
(i.e., when an interactant makes sense of an utterance but in a
different meaning than the speaker intended). The other is the
collaborative and supporting nature of interactants’ behavior that are
showcased in eight linguistic resources (or accommodating strategies)
including paraphrasing, repetitions, clarification and confirmation
practices, let-it-pass strategy, code switching, and others when
non-understanding or misunderstanding occurs. Section 1 ends with a
brief review of the functions of these resources and how they support
progress of ELF interactions.

In Sections 2 and 3 of the chapter, Konakahara draws attention to gaps
in ELF research — a lack of a multimodal perspective in examining ELF
interactions and the limited research on conflict talk. In attempts to
encourage more integration of non-verbal semiotics in the analysis of
ELF interactions, the author shares study findings that reveal the key
role non-verbal semiotics sometimes play in interpreting interactants’
strategies in interaction. Furthermore, the author includes findings
from previous studies that highlight the crucial role of multimodal
semiotics in understanding conflict talk and how it is managed in ELF
interactions.
The concluding section reviews some types of explored conflict moments
in current research categorized in subsections. Although there have
been a few attempts to examine facework in ELF interactions, those
investigations are limited to work-related contexts and to the use of
facework to achieve interactional and transactional needs in
communication; other research uses discursive analysis to explore
responses to face threatening in more informal interactions.
Therefore, the author identifies a research gap in exploring conflict
talk in informal or casual ELF interactions that goes beyond analyzing
utterances to the process of face negotiation between interactants in
conflict talk.

Chapter 4 describes the research methodology design, including issues
of its validity and reliability. Using a single-method design,
Konakahara used qualitative analysis of transcripts using MCA to
examine how interactants manage conflict talk through face negotiation
in casual audio and video-recorded ELF conversations. Thirty
international students from four British universities in England and
Scotland took part in this study, with a majority of graduate students
originally from Asian countries and specializing in linguistics. The
participants studied in the UK between 6 months and 6 years and their
English proficiency ranged between intermediate and advanced.
Participants were asked to recruit their interactants and to record a
30–60-minute informal conversation with a friend, mate, or supervisor,
or a group conversation on any emerging topic to maintain the casual
format of the communication. The author was present at each arranged
gathering to record conversations using one video camera and two audio
recorders in order to ensure recording quality, take pressure off
participants, and take contextual information. With the support of CA
transcription services, the author transcribed ten sets of audio
recordings of casual ELF conversations, preparing them for analysis.
Since MCA was followed for analyzing data, the author used a
combination of Rossano (as cited in Konakahara, 2023) and slightly
modified conventions of Mondada (as cited in Konakahara, 2023) to
transcribe and analyze gaze orientation, gestures, posture, facial
expressions, and head movements, in addition to the use of screenshots
to highlight critical moments as needed.

In Chapters 5-7, Konakahara presents data analysis and findings. In
Chapter 5, the author focuses on the interactional management of
competitive overlaps in ELF interactions. The chapter starts with
various definitions from the existing literature on ‘overlaps’,
examples of when they occur, and how speakers use them in
conversation. The author closely observed cooperative overlaps
(overlapping backchannels such as yeah or mm, assessments, and
utterance completion) in addition to competitive overlaps (mainly
taking floor from the current speaker without changing the topic).
Floor-taking overlaps (FTO) take the format of a question (which the
author calls FTQ) and they usually follow the structure of
question-answer and lead to informative talk. They can also be a
statement that extends the topic (FTE), and they control the floor by
eliciting evaluative talk connected to the preceding discussion. It
was found that the former was more frequent than the latter in this
study. However, not all these overlaps resulted in controlling the
floor by providing answers to the questions or evaluative commentary.
By providing an analyzed instance of a FTQ and a FTE that successfully
controlled the floor without changing the topic, the author found that
FTQ were treated by interactants as cooperative interruptions to show
agreement, attention, and solidarity with the speaker. Furthermore,
floor-taking expansions were found to serve the purpose of either
developing the topic ‘proactively’ (by giving a commentary or
evaluative comment on the overlapped talk to show interest in the
topic) or retroactively (by denoting a turn extension of the user’s
prior talk seeking clarity and mutual understanding). The author
provides multiple excerpt examples of the flow of floor-taking,
explaining where each of the overlap types occurred in the
interactions.

Since not all attempts to claim speakership are successful, Konakahara
then highlights findings of floor-attempting overlap types (i.e.
questions and expansions). A floor-attempt overlap generally occurs
when the overlapped speaker projects transition by continuing to speak
(usually in a louder voice and/or with accompanied hand gestures) to
maintain speakership. It is noteworthy that such an attempted
transition of speakership does not necessarily aim to change the
topic. Moreover, the findings show that individuals who fail to take
the floor are not discouraged from contributing to the topic at a
later stage of the conversation as they wait for another chance to
take the floor and retrieve what they wanted to share in earlier
turns. The author also provides expert examples on how they were
exploited in the interaction environment.

In Chapter 6, the author theorizes conflict and disagreement from a
politeness theory perspective before describing the findings on
interactional management of disagreement among interactants and
providing excerpt examples from the data. Self-deprecation, as
Konakahara explains, is an important element that comes with agreement
and disagreement in ELF interactions. In disagreement with
self-deprecation, the speaker produces linguistic elements such as
changing the topic, partial repeats of prior talk, statements about
the improperness of self-deprecation, and others. It can also be
produced by the recipient in the conversation by remaining silent,
expressing weak confirmations, or using continuers (e.g. uh huh, mm
hmm). Using examples from previous research, Konakahara explains that
this action is usually more preferred than agreement with
self-deprecation, which comes in the format of weak agreement.

The other thing the author highlights about disagreement is that it is
not necessarily a negative act and understanding its purpose, as
research shows, depends on how it is organized and mediated by
interactants in the social situation in which it occurred. In
arguments, for instance, disagreements can be a sign of engagement and
in social or casual conversations among friends they can deepen
relationships.

The findings show two types of disagreement interactants used:
mitigated and unmitigated disagreement. Analysis identified multiple
devices and functions used in each type when agreement or disagreement
is preferred. In disagreement, when agreement is preferred (i.e.
mitigated disagreement), interactants either reject the suggestion
made by the prior speaker or provide an alternative view to it. In
disagreement, when agreement is preferred (i.e. unmitigated
disagreement), interactants were found to provide what they believe to
be correct information that is different from what the previous
speaker shared. On the other hand, in disagreement when agreement is
dis-preferred, interactants supplied positive assessment of the
previous speaker’s self-deprecating statement(s). The author then
provides different excerpt examples on these different types of
disagreement from the present data. Through discussing these examples,
the author concludes that, although interactants actively used
disagreement to share knowledge and develop their interpersonal
relationships, there was no consensus in using these types to fulfill
these two purposes. In other words, the interactants adjusted their
disagreement approaches to the context of their conversation by
negotiating their stances with one another.

Chapter 7 highlights the findings on how face is negotiated in ELF
interactions by focusing on how interactants manage complaints made by
third party speakers. Therefore, this chapter deals with extended
sequences of talk in the study. Following the structure of the
previous two chapters, Chapter 7 starts with reviewing types and
functions of complaints and a definition of third-party complaint
sequences. Third-party complaints, as the author describes, involve a
minimum of three individuals: the complainer, the complainee (if it is
a person) or a complaint target (if it is a thing), and the complaint
recipient. Usually, third-party complaints fulfill the purpose of
releasing the complainer’s negative affections about the target(s). In
other circumstances, complaints can serve as a bounding and solidarity
tool when they carry a shared value, if any, among interactants.

Given the broader context of social relationships, the author argues
that face negotiation is a complex process, in which face threatening
cannot be limited to speaker-hearer relationships. The author explains
this notion by showing different cases of how complaining can
potentially threaten the face of these three individuals (directly or
indirectly). Similarly, responding to third-party complaints can be
face threatening (depending on whether the complaint recipient agrees
or disagrees with the complainer). Furthermore, Konakahara shows
through examples from the literature that third-party sequences
usually develop in a stepwise and fluctuated manner. Complainers, for
instance, use storytelling, repetition, show of emotion, and other
elements to make the complaint valid or influential. To engage in the
complaining activity, recipients might choose to agree with the
complaint, disagree with it or criticize it, or shift the topic to
avoid further complications that might arise because of the complaint.

Konakahara observed third-party complaints and identified two types of
sequences in the data: ‘disattended complaint sequence’, in which a
complaint is disattended by the recipient and ‘negotiated complaint
sequence’, in which the complainer and recipient negotiate the
validity of the complaint. In the former type, the author found that
the recipient's disattendance of the complaint (by laughing or
referring to previous talk or producing acknowledgment tokens) is an
attempt to save the complaint recipient's and the absent complainee’s
positive face and softening the potential of face threatening towards
the complainer. In the negotiated sequences, on the other hand, the
complainer and recipient tend to agree with one another regarding the
complaint using non-verbal communication to show the seriousness of
the complaint. However, non-affiliated interactants question the
legitimacy of the complaint by requesting more information to validate
the seriousness of this complaint. In doing so, non-affiliated
interactants take a neutral stand towards the complaint by not taking
part in co-complaining, saving their positive face and the absent
complainee’s, in addition to softening potential face threatening with
the complainer and recipient as well. By sharing an example on each
type, the author illustrates the negotiation management skills of
participants and the complexity of this process.

In Chapter 8, the author concludes with a summary of the research
findings, followed by a summary of the book’s contribution to the
topic of conflict talk in ELF interactions. Konakahara suggests that
ELF speakers should be trusted as legitimate speakers and mediators of
ELF interactions for their capability to foster social relationships,
navigate disagreement and various communication styles, and exploit
multimodal resources to make and negotiate meaning in conversation.
The author then highlights the benefits and challenges of using MCA in
research. As shown in the analyses, MCA provides a rich description of
interactional data, in addition to revealing multiple layers of
meaning when exploring the interplay between verbal and non-verbal
semiotic resources used by interactants to fulfill different purposes.
One of the biggest challenges in using MCA is navigating
cross-cultural variations and avoiding making assumptions and
conclusions that connect participants’ behavior with their national
cultures. As the author illustrates in excerpt examples, this study
shows that verbal and non-verbal communication is not necessarily
‘culture-specific’ and that making such assumptions about ELF speakers
is problematic.

The chapter briefly discusses limitations of the study, which include
the organized rather than natural occurrence of the interactions, the
presence of audio-only data (which was less multimodal than other
data), presenting a limited number of excerpts used to illustrate each
of the conflict talk types, and the use of a single-method research
design, which could have limited further insights by exploring more
data.

In addition to the need for more studies that explore conflict talk
using MCA, future research, as Konakahara suggests, should investigate
more types of communicative behavior in ELF talk, including unexplored
elements in this study such as interruptive overlaps, direct
complaints, and more. Moreover, the author highlights the need for
exploring asymmetric interactions between teachers and students in
K-12 settings, managers and employees in workplace settings, and other
contexts. Another area for future research is exploring identity
negotiation from a CA perspective because the study’s findings show
that interactants negotiate their identities as part of negotiating
face and meaning as well.

EVALUATION

Konakahara’s Conflict Talk in English Language as a Lingua Franca
introduces a less common approach to understanding conflict and
misunderstanding in ELF interactions by breaking it down to the
manageable elements of floor-taking and overlapping, disagreement, and
complaints. Although conflict is examined in previous research in
applied linguistics, it has been mostly examined as problematic and,
in many cases, disturbing to interactants in applied linguistics
research (e.g. Al-Zubeiry, 2013, Fujio, 2004, He et al., 2017,
Özdemir-Çağatay & Küllü-Sülü, 2013). In this book, on the other hand,
the author introduces conflict as a manageable face negotiation
process conducted by interactants by giving examples of when conflict
is a preferred action in conversation. Thus, the book is a practical
example of how conflict should be carefully examined by understanding
its function and the social context in which it occurs.

The book also provides a comprehensive review of the theories and
methodology used in the study. Different chapters include explanation
and comparison of relevant theories to the phenomenon examined in this
study. By establishing such a comprehensive theoretical framing for
this research, Konakahara contextualizes the research gaps and
rationale for the research design used in the current study.This
organization helps readers who are not necessarily familiar with
conflict talk or multimodal conversational analysis to develop a solid
ground on the topic investigated. This book serves as a good example
of how to use this methodology. Graduate students or scholars learning
to use multimodal conversational analysis will benefit from the many
discussions of its benefits and challenges, in addition to examples of
how to conduct transcription and analysis using multimodal
conversational analysis.

It is worth noting, however, that readers who are not familiar with
conflict talk or conversational analysis will probably need to reread
a few sections and look for explanations of some jargon, especially in
Chapters 2 and 3, where the book reviews relevant literature. This
also includes looking for specific examples of fundamental concepts of
conversational analysis introduced in the book. For instance,
turn-constructional unit and turn-allocational techniques are
abstractly discussed in Chapter 2, in addition to the organization of
turn-taking (i.e. context-free and context-sensitive status) without
giving any examples. Similarly, no examples are provided when
explaining self-deprecation and how it looks in agreement/disagreement
in Chapter 6. Providing in-text examples of such elements of talk can
help readers better understand the examples from the data to be
introduced later in the findings.

The book provides helpful appendices that include further examples of
transcription and visualizing some data sets in the study. To help
readers navigate the many abbreviations used throughout the book, a
list of acronyms is provided. However, it only includes those acronyms
that reappear frequently in the discussions. Including more acronyms
could have helped, but sections with many acronyms are manageable if
the list is used by readers as a glossary guide to which missing
acronyms are added.

Since Konakahara makes an argument for multimodal conversational
analysis and the importance of examining both verbal and non-verbal
semiotics in ELF interactions, I would extend this argument by calling
for more multimodal approaches in presenting data in similar future
research. All example excerpts from the study data are illustrated as
black-and-white screenshot images of anonymized participants in
relevant interactions discussed in analyses. Although the discussion
offers detailed descriptions of the interaction including gestures,
facial expressions, and other non-verbals of interactants, it is still
challenging to engage with the data when its multimodality is limited
to text only. Although there are ethical concerns regarding
participants' identity and protection of research data that come with
this suggestion, it is still worth exploring how journals and
publishers can manage presenting audio or video data examples, which
are likely to lead to more engagement and understanding of the
analyzed data.

REFERENCES

Al-Zubeiry, H.ameed Yahya. A. 2013. Intercultural miscommunication in
the production of communicative patterns by Arab EFL learners.
International Journal of English Linguistics, 3(5). 69-77
Fujio, Misa. 2004. Silence during intercultural communication: a case
study. Corporate Communications, 9(4), 331–339.
He, Helen Ai. et al. (2017). Two sides to every story: Mitigating
intercultural conflict through automated feedback and shared
self-reflections in global virtual teams. Proceedings of the ACM on
Human-Computer Interaction, 1(CSCW), 1–21.
Keisanen, Tiina. & Kärkkäinen, Elise. 2014. A multimodal analysis of
compliment sequences in everyday English interactions. Pragmatics,
24(3). 649 – 672.
Satar, Müge. 2013. Multimodal language learner interactions via
desktop videoconferencing within a framework of social presence: Gaze.
ReCALL. 25(1). 122-142.
Özdemir-Çağatay, Sibel & Küllü-Sülü , Ayfer. 2013. An investigation of
intercultural miscommunication experiences. International Online
Journal of Education & Teaching, 1(1). 39-52.
Yu, Changrong. 2013. Two interactional functions of self-mockery in
everyday English conversations: A multimodal analysis. Journal of
Pragmatics 50(1). 1-22

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Hiba B. Ibrahim is a PhD Candidate in applied linguistics at York
University, Canada. Her doctoral research explores university English
language students’ experiences of intercultural competence in lingua
franca virtual exchange between Canada and Jordan. Hiba’s research
interests include telecollaboration and virtual exchange,
intercultural competence, language, culture, and identity.



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