Volume 8, Issue 1 -

ELF research has demonstrated that English users employ various communication strategies (CSs) to achieve mutual understanding and deal with uncertainty in ELF conversations. Thus, implementing various CSs is said to be important for learners in ELF interactions. Although a list of CSs might indicate which strategies English learners may ultimately need, it is not necessarily helpful for low-proficiency English learners as they may not be able to use many CSs due to a lack of English language resources. This study attempts to identify CSs that 20 Japanese low-proficiency English users employ in talk-in-interaction with English language instructors. CSs investigated in this study were not restricted to those examined from second language acquisition perspectives but included pragmatic and collaborative strategies identified in various ELF studies. Investigating CSs from the perspective of ELF helps to form a more sensitive analysis of how low-proficiency English users work to achieve successful L2 communication with interlocutors. Results revealed that the students, who were not given prior instruction in strategies, collaboratively employed various CSs to cope with communication breakdown, promote message conveyance, and co-construct a meaningful interaction with their interlocutors. These findings provide insights into how low-proficiency users might manage to achieve successful communication in various ELF settings. Analysis of the data helps to inform teachers which CSs low-proficiency learners may utilize more easily and those for which they may require more intensive practice.

This study investigates the degree of intelligibility of Croatian and Croatian speakers’ English for native Slovene listeners. For the purposes of the present experiment, 18 native speakers of Croatian were recorded narrating two short films in their mother tongue as well as in English. Each of the 135 participants, whose L1 is Slovene, listened to a recorded Croatian speaker retelling one story in their native language and another in English. The intelligibility of the two communicative modes was measured using multiple-choice questions. Overall, the level of comprehension was found to be higher for English than for Croatian. Two extralinguistic factors (border proximity and language preference) were also considered so as to gain a deeper insight into the nature of the intelligibility of English as a lingua franca (ELF) and receptive multilingualism as two potential mediums of communication between Croatian and Slovene speakers.

This paper examines attitudes of Japanese business people towards English by interviewing Japanese construction company employees working on international projects in Asian countries, where English is used as a lingua franca (ELF). The engineers took part in an intensive English course provided by their company before being transferred to overseas offices. Conducting individual/focus-group interviews multiple times during and after the English course, the study sheds light on the participants’ ambivalent and shifting perception of the language, which has both communicative and identifying function in different contexts of use. While these BELF (English as a business lingua franca) users were more content-focused and critical about a teacher’s form-focused approach during the intensive English language training, they are likely to identify more with native-speakers’ English rather than with their own English communication in BELF environments. The paper discusses that there are two reasons for their adherence to “standard” English, referring to the impact of “standard” English ideology (Cogo 2015, 2016b; Seidlhofer 2011, 2018) and social power (French and Raven 1959) that their interlocutors possess. First, the participants are constrained by their past learning experience as EFL (English as a foreign language) learners (Iino and Murata 2016) with little exposure to varieties of English other than the Inner Circle English models (Kachru 1992). Second, they believe in the advantage of using “correct” or “proper” English in producing a good image of their company or themselves. More specifically, while the participants regard English predominantly as a tool to fulfil their communicative goals when working with interlocutors who have relatively less power (e.g. subordinates, subcontractors), they feel that they need to speak “proper” English when communicating with people with more power and authority (e.g. superiors, clients), because they believe it is more relevant and accepted by the wider public. In other words, the result shows how the “standard” English ideology is deep-seated in the workplace communication discourse.

The aim of this paper is to examine how nurses in family clinics use language, and clients’ perceived English proficiency in particular, when categorizing their non-Finnish-speaking clients in their talk. Through membership categorization analysis (Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2007. A tutorial on membership categorization. Journal of Pragmatics 39(3). 462–482), this study shows that perceived proficiency in English, along with migration status and reliance on the native English speaker norm, seemed to be the most decisive elements in how the nurses categorized their migrant clients. The findings demonstrate the power of categorization as an instrument in institutional decision-making and highlight the role language plays in these categorizations. In particular, the study shows how influential perceived English language proficiency and the native speaker norm are in how nurses categorize their migrant clients. The findings suggest that being able to interact with clients in English is becoming a more and more important skill in working life in Finland, also in the health care sector. It would be important to understand how influential perceived language proficiency is in the way nurses conceptualize their clients, and to what extent this relates to the standard language ideology (Milroy, James. 2001. Language ideologies and the consequences of standardization . Journal of Sociolinguistics 5. 530–555).

As the use of English as a lingua franca increases in a range of contexts, one question that has received recent media attention is that of whether native or non-native speakers are more effective communicators in these contexts. The native/non-native question resists a straightforward answer, but taking account of the views of people in the business world is a necessary step towards understanding the underlying issues. This article investigates the nature and origin of these views by analysing online newspaper comments written in response to a column in the Financial Times . It first identifies several topics related to the native/non-native question, including perceived differences between and within the two categories. It then discusses these topics from a language-ideological perspective, aiming to identify the patterns of beliefs and assumptions that inform the comments. Although this perspective involves a critical evaluation of the binary “native/non-native” opposition, the article identifies several important effects of the native speaker concept, ranging from outright discrimination to feelings of frustration and inhibition. It portrays the comments as both reflecting and questioning the ideological premises of the native speaker concept, and it considers the implications of the approach for ELF research and for the wider study of international communication.