Epistemic stance in spoken academic ELF

Beskrivelse

Increasingly, English is being used as a lingua franca at universities in Denmark. However, so
far, very little is known about what characterizes this particular use of ELF. In my ongoing
PhD research, I address this issue by investigating how English is used as a lingua franca in
undergraduate student‐student interaction at a Danish university.

The investigation focuses on students with Danish as a first language who participate in
problem‐oriented project work in groups where English is being used as a lingua franca. The
analysis centres specifically on the students’ use of modal verbs and epistemic and evidential
adverbs during group meetings. In order to be able to identify the specific characteristics of
the ELF interactions, comparisons are made to data from group meetings where either Danish
or English is being used as the participants’ first language.

In this talk, I will discuss how stance is expressed by means of modal verbs and epistemic
and evidential adverbs in the ELF interactions, comparing this to how the expression of stance
is managed by similar means in the Danish data.