Accommodation in ELF communication among East Asian speakers of English

Abstract

The global spread of English and its wide-ranging use worldwide have exerted a great influence on the socio-cultural and sociolinguistic situation and led to a substantial change in language use, pedagogy and policy. This changing situation of English use has brought about the new emerging mode of communication, which is English as a lingua franca (henceforth ELF). The hybridity and heterogeneity is an inevitable result of frequent and widespread language contact in ELF situations, and this variability and diversity is characterised as the primary nature of ELF communication. This fluid and hybrid nature of ELF communication has resulted from the need for more accommodative and adaptive behaviour in the interaction. Therefore, accommodation has been considered as one of the most influential and effective pragmatic strategies in ELF. The research reported in this thesis aimed to investigate how flexibly and effectively ELF speakers deal with the variability and diversity by employing various accommodative strategies, and the study is particularly focused on pragmatic accommodation among East Asian ELF speakers.

The findings of the study show that East Asian speakers of ELF strategically and dynamically engage in pragmatic processes of co-construction of meaning and accommodation and adopt convergent pragmatic strategies such as repetition, paraphrase, and utterance completion. The high frequency of accommodation strategies for solidarity seems to indicate that East Asian speakers of ELF draw on their own cultural values and communicative behaviours, which emphasise positive politeness and rapport-oriented relationships in conversation, and the result suggests the need for reconsideration of communicative competence in order to foreground the significance of pragmatic and strategic competence in intercultural communication settings. The study provides pedagogical implications of the need for awareness on sociolinguistic issues in teachers education and suggests a more ELF-oriented and diversity-driven teaching approach.

More information

Identifiers

Catalogue record

Export record