On 17 February 2024, Dr. Tone Holt Nielsen (Oslo Metropolitan University, School of Business) highlighted in her talk “The language is just the beginning”: Researching BELF use in meetings and application to teaching and assessment. Her talk was based on her article “Developing shared communication practices: A study of BELF in multinational team meetings” (2020):
The title of Tone’s talk, “The language is just the beginning”, is a direct quote from one of her interviewees and highlights that the language itself often plays only a small role in meeting interactions. For instance, Norwegians tend to demonstrate a local or “very direct Norwegian” communication style and some of them might not be that good at reading expressive international speakers or at making use of hedging.
Tone decided to focus on meetings as they had turned out to be particularly “daunting and difficult” for BELF users in other studies. Based on a sociolinguistic qualitative study in a large Norwegian multi-national with a presence in more than 100 countries, she joined one team with members from all over the world to find out how communication strategies are locally developed. As BELF use varies a lot across contexts, Tone also applied Wenger’s theory of Communities of Practice (1998). This theory focuses on a group of people, who meet on a regular basis, have shared/joint goals, and create a repertoire of shared practices, in this case, BELF communication practices.
Generally speaking, the team had been very successful in developing trust, common ground and shared BELF practices. (“We have consciously tried to create a ‘we-feeling’). Moreover, their team leader showed a high level of leadership skills by acting like a coach and taking care that everyone participated in the meetings. In addition to this, all the team members were highly aware of linguistic and cultural differences and how to accommodate in specific situations (“You cannot use the same way of communicating and the same English with everyone”). Whenever disagreement or criticism had to be expressed, they did that in an extremely careful way, making use of accommodation strategies. The overall idea of supporting each other was expressed by this quote: “We play to each other’s strengths, you know, and we help each other get into markets, right?”
The students’ BELF meeting skills were tested in a case-based oral exam that involved carrying out a formal business meeting in a group. The assessment criteria mirrored BELF research findings and only focused on linguistic proficiency to a limited degree. Tone has also carried out interviews with experienced assessors working with this exam who appreaciated that the exam format gave the students an opportunity to actively make choices regarding for instance how to accommodate and direct interaction.
Cogo, A. (2016). “They all take the risk and make the effort”: Intercultural accommodation and multilingualism in a BELF community of practice. In Lopriore, L., & Grazzi, E. (Eds.), Intercultural communication: New perspectives from ELF, (pp. 365-383). Roma TrE-Press
Ehrenreich, S. (2010). English as a business lingua franca in a German multinational corporation: Meeting the challenge. Journal of Business Communication, 47, 408-431.
Kankaanranta, A., & Louhiala-Salminen, L. (2018). ELF in the domain of business – BELF: what does the B stand for? In Jenkins, J., Baker, W., & Dewey M. (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of English as a lingua franca, (pp. 309-320). Routledge.
Komori-Glatz, M. (2018). Conceptualising English as a business lingua franca. European Journal of International Management, 12(1-2), 46-61.
Nielsen, T. H. (2020). Developing shared communication practices: A study of BELF in multilingual team settings. Journal of English as a Lingua Franca 9(1), 131-153.
Wenger, É. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge University Press.
