ABSTRACT
To carry forward the argument from the last chapter that English as a contact language works through the strategies people adopt to negotiate their differences, we need to know more about the strategies in such encounters. Though these strategies are not the same for everyone and for all situations, they are adopted by everyone for communicative success. Both NES and multilingual speakers have competence in these strategies, and treat them as resources for successful communication. These strategies constitute a “grammar of practices,” so to speak. This grammar will give insights into the competence people bring to contact zone communication—one I label performative competence in Chapter 9. Unfortunately, this area of consideration hasn’t developed adequately as scholars have been looking at grammatical competence as more primary in communication, under the influence of the monolingual paradigm. In this chapter, we focus on the range of strategies that translinguals use in lingua franca conversations to co-construct meaning. The few studies on pragmatics in contact English are reviewed and classified under an overarching model that provides a better explanatory framework. Finally, I analyze a conversation among multilingual students to illustrate the way such practices and strategies work to shape communication in interactions where there is no uniformly shared or “advanced” proficiency in grammatical norms.
