WHAT CHANGES WHEN YOU USE ENGLISH AT WORK? A STUDY OF ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA IN MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS IN CHINA

Abstract

This study investigated when Chinese business professionals use English as a lingua franca to communicate in the workplace, what changes, and why and how the changes happen. 14 respondents who had Chinese as L1 and English as at least one of their working languages participated in the open-ended questions survey. Qualitative approach was employed to analyse the data. The results showed that compared to use L1 to communicate at work, using English brought changes in terms of language proficiency (including vocabulary level, syntax level and other), language politeness, interculturality and linguistic relativity.