Co-constructing meaning in international meetings: an approach to plurilingual interactions

Communication in international meetings represents a challenge for the participants, who need to make choices about the language(s) they use to co-construct meaning and guarantee the success of their work. In this context, plurilingual interactions may offer an invaluable opportunity for power balanced relations and intercultural flexibility. In this paper, we present an analysis of a plurilingual corpus based on the intercomprehension (IC) approach. We will analyse the IC strategies at work by characterising the specific features that appear in this context and stressing the essential role of interproduction skills for the success of communication processes. This will allow us to determine the impact of IC in the accomplishment of successful intercultural and interlinguistic encounters as well as its contribution to pluricultural (lifelong) education.