The study presented in this paper examines the discourse behaviour of participants in academic office hours conducted in English as a lingua franca. Participants in the study are professors, their assistants and international students at a German university. Findings of the analyses of a small corpus of such institutional interactions show that these users of English as a lingua franca manage the discourse surprisingly well by strategically employing code-switching, re-presenting (parts of) their interlocutors’ message and re-interpreting several high-frequency discourse markers. In this way they seem to better achieve their own and their interactants’ communicative purpose in discourse.