Based on the work of House (1999), and examining the context-specific realizations of pragmatic competence, this paper attempts to demonstrate how English as a lingua franca users efficiently integrate the communicative norms of their mother tongue into their English-as-a-second language conversation. It focuses on the particular case of first languge Arabic speakers, employing multifunctional discourse markers and strategies to attain a culturally appropriate interactional musayara ethos.