Do speakers in a multicultural classroom of masters students in which English is used as lingua franca between peers and as medium of instruction, adhere to their own cultural pragmatic rules or do they obey nativelike ones, focusing on the possibly disruptive (face-threatening) nature of the disagreement speech act ? Students generally seem inclined to evade strong disagreement whilst fostering mitigated disagreement of various kinds, whereby students of high linguistic proficiency exhibit a boader range of strategies, complying with a more nativelike pattern.