The aim of my dissertation is to describe the complexities of English as a lingua franca (ELF) as it is used by a group of Erasmus exchange students engaged in social practice. My research was begun while I was working with the LINEE project, which made me realize that for a better understanding of the Erasmus exchange students' linguistic situation, the analytic focus had to be on language use in its social context. To that end, I adopted the community of practice model, which relies quite specifically on ethnographic techniques for collecting data, qualitative methods for analyzing social practices, and discourse analytic methods for analyzing linguistic practices. The participants were 142 Erasmus exchange students who studied temporarily at the University of Szeged, Hungary. The data collection spanned a whole academic year. The data sources included audio-taped and transcribed interviews, audio-taped and transcribed naturally occurring interactions, field notes, prompted e-mails, online posts by the students and circular e-mails by the students.By focusing on shared practices and resources that the participants imbued with meaning, the analysis indicates that the Szeged Erasmus students indeed built a community of practice during their relatively short stay in Hungary. The shared practices emerged to achieve the goal of building a friendship and "family" based local social network with a focus on fun and self-confidence. The shared practices involved "spontaneous" as well as "ritualized" code-switching, yet, most of the practices were in English. In the Szeged Erasmus community English was a key shared practice: it helped the participants to build shared negotiable resources (1) for accomplishing everyday ritual tasks; (2) for making humor in the language and also about the language; and (3) for repairing the problematic moments of word search and non-understanding. Given that for the vast majority of the participants English was an additionally learnt language, the analyzed linguistic practices are necessarily interpreted as ELF practices.The analysis indicates that for the Szeged Erasmus students English was a facilitator. In case of lacking other shared languages, it was the most important means of connecting both with the other Erasmus students and with the local peers. Further results of this study show that through developing their shared resources, the participants created through practice their own "version" of ELF. That is, they made the fleeting, changeable nature of ELF "fixed" to the extent that it helped them define themselves as a group. Furthermore, the participants of the present study were users of English, in the first place, and learners of English in the second place. That is, they exploited their non-nativeness and demonstrated their "language learner" roles by choice, as and when appropriate, as a way of exploiting their shared resources. Finally, the Szeged Erasmus students creatively exploited their plurilingual repertoires. However, their code-switching was more for the crea...

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With the present empirical chapter, the attention shifts to the linguistic resources with which the Szeged Erasmus students created the shared enterprise of building a temporary Erasmus Family with a focus on fun and self-confidence. In this chapter, in particular, my focus will be on that part of the shared linguistic resources which served the purpose of building a friendship and family based social network. To that end, I will look into the linguistic practices which the participants used to accomplish ritual activities at particular times, namely, at evening parties and at weekends trips. The linguistic rituals for which the participants typically drew from a shared resource include swearing, teasing, greeting, leave taking, addressing, congratulating, apologizing, thanking, "party conversations", and so called "real conversations" outside the parties. Thus, in the present chapter I will show what particular form (or meaning) connection the students had for the purpose of small, single-word type routines as well as for large, conversation-type routines.For a particular form to become part of the shared negotiable resource, it was necessary that the participants repeat them. However, the kind of repetition evidenced in the building of a shared negotiable resource is different from the kind of repetition English as a lingua franca (ELF) researchers have examined thus far. Here repetition concerns the repetition of "old" utterances stored in the long-term memory, whereas in current ELF research, repetition concerns the repetition of the prior turn, which activates the short-term memory. A further difference between the present analysis and that of current ELF research is that repetition is not only seen as a strategy promoting mutual understanding and expressing solidarity, approval and rapport, but also, and more importantly, it is viewed as a practice in the service of building a friendship and family based social system. Thus, while the Szeged Erasmus students did practice rapport, their "work" was not just a general human attempt to be cooperative, as Grice's (1975) cooperation principle would imply, but something more profound accomplished through mutual engagement in shared practices.A large part of the ritual practices drawn from a shared resource involved an act of code-switching, or more aptly called translanguaging (e.g., Blackledge and Creese 2010; Canagarajah 2011; see also Section 2.5.5). That is, when the participants were, for instance, to greet each other or address each other, they often broke down the boundaries between the languages in their repertoires, and put the different features creatively in use. Code-switching which served the purpose of building a friendship and family based social network was not spontaneous Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 6/25/15 2:11 PM creating something new on the spot, but rather "repetitive" or "ritualized", recycling "old" code-switched utterances. Besides this, in line with current ELF res...