Language Unit research Beyza Björkman Research | Publications | Conference presentations | Contacts SPOKEN LINGUA FRANCA ENGLISH IN TERTIARY EDUCATION AT A SWEDISH TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY: AN INVESTIGATION OF FORM AND COMMUNICATIVE/ PEDAGOGICAL EFFECTIVENESS English has become the overwhelmingly dominant language in academia. There is a consequent development towards an increase in English-medium teaching in Europe in general. This is very much the case for Scandinavian countries. It is still true that English is used more at postgraduate levels compared to undergraduate levels, but the number of undergraduate courses offered in English has increased significantly in Sweden, in the third and fourth years together with the number of international master's programs offered. This study aims to investigate teachers' and students' spoken English communication in the engineering domain in tertiary education in Sweden. It is highly likely that different kinds of issues arise in monologic and dialogic speech events; therefore, speech events of both contexts are included in the investigation. Group-work sessions, presentations and lectures are included in the speech event categories. The material comprises 93 hours of digital recordings, of naturally occurring, authentic high-stakes spoken exchange, i.e. from non-language-teaching contexts. For the investigation of the material, all the occurrences of morphosyntactic (grammar and lexis-related) non-native-like usage were identified, noted down and transcribed. Cases of non-native-like usage were grouped as 'disturbing', i.e. causing overt comprehension problems and 'non-disturbing', i.e. causing no comprehension problems. The 'disturbing' category was further divided into 'irritating' and 'non-irritating', to examine attitudes and listener friendliness using the data that was obtained through interviews and questionnaires. The results show that the success of ELF communication depends on two factors. The first one is the situation. In cases where the speech event type provides the speakers with a great deal of contextual information, there is automatically a lower risk of disturbance. The second factor has to do with the nature of lingua franca features. The nature of non-standard usage here reveals more than merely divergent forms. The non-standard usage in this study can be grouped into three categories: 1. non-standard usage that led to disturbance in communication, e.g. non-standard question formulation, 2. successful reductions of redundancy, e.g. not marking the plural on the noun and 3. devices that increased comprehensibility, e.g. left dislocation and unraised negative. Apart from the first group where there is breakdown in communication, the other two seem to be strategies speakers in lingua franca settings employ to get the message across. From this respect, transparency seems to be the guiding principle of English in settings where it is used as a lingua franca.