We examine interactions taken from 32 international students who use lingua franca English on a LEGO task. Through analysis, we highlight features of collaborative interactions such as “positive face” maintenance and joint production of utterances, which indicate their engagement and involvement in the task. Implications for “symbolic competence” are provided.
We are concerned with interactions in which international students (with no native speakers of English) conduct a creative task in English. Specifically, our data are taken from circa 12 hours of video-recorded interactions among eight groups of international students (each group consisting of four students, and 32 students in total) who engage in a LEGO task. They are instructed to build LEGO bricks in a way that represents such concepts as “responsibility”, “justice” or “knowledge”. Our focus is on examining how these students with differential proficiency in English strategically manage the task, which has no “right answers”. By synthesizing theories and concepts in discourse analysis, we analyze the interactions, in which we highlight the parts that contain more distributed turns among the participants, rather than a single participant dominating the floor. In addition to showing the positive effects of “praise” and “agreement” that function as maintaining a “positive face” (Brown & Levinson, 1987), we reveal the functions of “other-initiated repair” (Sacks et al., 1974). Through analysis, we demonstrate that other-initiated repairs are used not only to resolve misunderstandings (Bjørndahl et al., 2015) but also to expand an emergent idea expressed in a single word into a phrase and even a complete sentence in the discourse of collaborative co-construction. These participants also stated their sense of “empowerment” derived from the group work in the interviews after the task. Pedagogical implications are discussed in which we suggest that this task-based pedagogy can be innovative by radically challenging the traditional assumptions of teacher-student roles in classrooms. Through this task, students can learn to interact collaboratively and creatively in emergent varieties of lingua franca English, in which “symbolic competence” plays a major role (Kramsch, 2014). With symbolic competence, they can strategically interact with linguistically and culturally diverse peers without any help from the teacher.
