This study discusses the communicative strategies (CSs) used by speakers in polyadic lingua franca English (ELF) to assure communication efficiency in consequential situations in an academic setting (here in student group-work talk in content courses at a technical university) and proposes a framework that shows the various communicative functions of a range of CSs. It is shown that besides explicitness strategies, comprehension checks, confirmation checks and clarification requests were often used CSs in the data. And in general the speakers in these ELF interactions employed other-initiated strategies as often as self-initiated communicative strategies.