ABSTRACT
Learners’ participation in transnational plurilingual encounters with peers provides them with opportunities to use English-as-a-lingua-franca (ELF) and to deploy their Interactional Competence (IC). This chapter focuses on how learners organise their participation in different sequences of interaction recorded during the implementation of a group task (as part of an international exchange project) between Greek and Catalan secondary school students. The study presents a single-case analysis stemming from an ethnographic perspective and grounded on the theoretical and methodological premises of the Conversation Analysis (CA). Our data suggest that, when interacting with peers for genuine purposes, foreign language learners, even if faced with communication obstacles, strive to orient themselves towards the use of the target language. Data also reveals that learners are compelled to deploy plurilingual and multimodal resources, along with other interactive procedures, to favour both mutual understanding with the other participants and progressivity of the task at hand. This lets us conclude that transnational plurilingual peer encounters enhance learners’ engagement to use English, which eventually has an impact on the development of their IC.
