Many multilingual groups and professional teams tend to be too fleeting or unstable to be considered Communities of Practice. This presentation puts the spotlight on interactions in which professionals from diverse L1 backgrounds meet for the first time (T0). It focuses on methodological implications of studying such Transient International Groups.
The domain of professional and business communication has been an integral part of the study of English as a lingua franca (ELF) from early on (e.g. Louhiala-Salminen et al. 2005; Planken 2005) and it is an area that continues to attract scholarly interest (see e.g. Bjørge 2012; Kankaanranta et al. 2015; Cogo 2016a; Pitzl 2016; Franceschi 2017; Räisänen 2019). Although the concept of Communities of Practice (CoPs) has been influential for and is certainly useful to the study of many BELF contexts (e.g. Ehrenreich 2009; Cogo 2016b), some multilingual groups and professional teams tend to be too small, too fleeting or too unstable to fully fit the CoP criteria; hence some contexts do not easily lend themselves to a CoP approach (Pitzl 2019; see also Ehrenreich 2018). This multimodal presentation builds on and expands recent work on Transient International Groups (Pitzl 2018) and Transient Multilingual Communities (Mortensen 2017). It puts the spotlight on interactions in which professionals from diverse L1 backgrounds meet for the first time (i.e. T0) and on groups that are inherently unstable or short-lived. Making use of spoken data collected in a number of BELF settings, the presentation highlights some methodological challenges and implications that the study of such Transient International Groups (TIGs) entails for data collection and data analysis.
