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CICLO DE LICENCIATURA EN INGLÉS 
TALLER DE COMPETENCIAS ACADÉMICAS 
 
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UNL – Licenciatura en Inglés 
TCA 
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PRACTICE 
 
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Pragmatic strategies in English as an academic lingua franca: Ways of 
achieving communicative effectiveness?§ 
Beyza Bjo¨rkman * 
Unit for Language and Communication, Department of Speech, Music and Hearing, Royal Institute of Technology 
(KTH), 
Lindstedtsva¨gen 24, SE 100 44, Stockholm, Sweden 
 
A B S T R A C T 
This paper will report the findings of a study that has investigated spoken English as a lingua franca (ELF) 
usage in Swedish higher education. The material comprises digital recordings of lectures and student 
group-work sessions, all being naturally occurring, authentic high-stakes spoken exchange, i.e. from non-
language-teaching contexts. The aim of the present paper, which constitutes a part of a larger study, has 
been to investigate the role pragmatic strategies play in the communicative effectiveness of English as a 
lingua franca. The paper will document types of pragmatic strategies as well as point to important 
differences between the two speech event types and the implications of these differences for English-
medium education. The findings show that lecturers in ELF settings make less frequent use of pragmatic 
strategies than students who deploy these strategies frequently in group-work sessions. Earlier stages of 
the present study (Bjo¨rkman, 2008a, 2008b, 2009) showed that despite frequent non-standardness in the 
morphosyntax level, there is little overt disturbance in student group-work, and it is highly likely that a 
variety of pragmatic strategies that students deploy prevents some disturbance. It is reasonable to 
assume that, in the absence of appropriate pragmatic strategies used often in lectures, there is an 
increased risk for covert disturbance. 
_ 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved 
 
 
2 
The acquisition order of coherence relations: 
On cognitive complexity in discourse 
Wilbert Spooren a,*, Ted Sanders b 
a Department of Language and Communication, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, 
NL-1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands 
b Utrecht institute of Linguistics – UiL OTS, Trans 10, NL-3512 JK Utrecht, The Netherlands 
Received 14 July 2006; received in revised form 14 February 2008; accepted 23 April 2008 
 
Abstract 
This article presents an analysis of the acquisition order of coherence relations between discourse 
segments. The basis is a cognitive theory of coherence relations (Sanders et al., 1992) that makes 
predictions about the order in which the relations and their linguistic expressions are acquired, because 
they show an increasing cognitive complexity. The child language literature lends support to two 
distinctions in the theory, Basic Operation (causal versus additive) and Polarity (positive versus negative). 
In two studies, additional data were collected to test the validity of two other distinctions, Source of 
Coherence and Order of the Coherence Relation. 
In the first study, children described a picture or conversed freely with the investigator. Both distinctions 
turn out to be necessary to account for the acquisition patterns. In the second study, the children’s 
proficiency in dealing with negative causal relations was investigated. The two studies use different 
research designs. 
The first is a study of relatively naturalistic, only partially structured elicitation of extended stretches of 
speech produced by children, the other is an experiment on the understanding and production of 
coherence relations in short sequences of statements relying on nonsense words that lack a conventional 
semantic content. The two procedures tap very different kinds of communicative skills and linguistic as 
well as conceptual knowledge. The combination of these two studies allows us to draw valid conclusions 
about the acquisition of the various coherence relations. The data support the claim that cognitively 
complex coherence relations show up later than cognitively simple relations. 
# 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 
Keywords: Child language; Discourse coherence; Cognition; Dutch