English as a lingua franca, conversation analysis, repair organization, boundary cases

The presentation discusses the results of research which studies the use of English as a lingua franca in spoken academic discourse interactions in countries where English is neither the local language nor that of most of the participants, offering a deeper insight into the interactional practices utilized in the process of achieving the communicative purpose(s) of international university seminars. Drawing on audio-recorded data collected from English-taught seminars at the University of Ostrava and the ELFA corpus and using conversation analysis procedures, the research, focusing on the sociopragmatic aspects of interaction, identifies and analyses boundary cases of other-initiated repair where the initiations are used to perform potentially face-threatening acts, i.e. express doubt, criticism or disagreement.