Okay in intercultural lingua franca interactions between Chinese and British postgraduate students

Abstract

The forms and functions of okay have been investigated extensively in contexts where interlocutors speak the same language (e.g., German, Hungarian, and Swedish). Conversely, comparatively few studies have been conducted on how okay is used among people who do not share the same first language, such as lingua franca encounters. This article narrows this gap by investigating the use of okay in face-to-face tandem language learning between Chinese Expanding Circle users of English and British Inner Circle users of English. Using applied conversation analysis on a large corpus of 36 h of video recordings, the findings demonstrate that okay is used by both groups of speakers to manage comprehension in two ways: (1) okay is used to display sufficient understanding and (2) okay is used to display insufficient understanding. Although both groups of speakers use okay to claim sufficient and insufficient understanding, there are small, nuanced ways that the British Inner Circle users of English and Chinese Expanding Circle users of English differ in the use of discourse markers. These findings suggest that much more work is needed to fully understand how discourse markers are used in lingua franca interactions and world Englishes contexts.