Communication Strategies Supporting Receptive Multilingualism

Receptive multilingualism is a communicative mode to cope with multilingual communication in which speakers make use of different languages. Speakers make use of their receptive competencies to understand their interlocutors. It is important, though, that speakers develop communication skills that ease understanding, such as tailoring language use to non-­native speakers and employing frequent checks for understanding, more than one would do in most monolingual conversations (Ten Thije & Zeevaert 2007). Bahtina (forth) distinguishes different meta-communicative devices of receptive multilingualism. In this workshop participants will exercise receptive multilingualism and analyse the occurring strategies.