“They all take the risk and make the effort”: Intercultural accommodation and multilingualism in a BELF community of practice

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Cogo, Alessia. 2016. “They all take the risk and make the effort”: Intercultural accommodation and multilingualism in a BELF community of practice. In: L. Lopriore and E. Grazzi, eds. Intercultural Communication: New Perspectives from ELF. Roma: Roma TrE-Press, pp. 365-383. ISBN 9788897524632 [Book Section]

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Abstract or Description

ELF research has showed that processes of accommodation are more important than linguistic correctness according to a NS model. Recently more studies have explored accommodation, pragmatic and multilingual strategies in different ELF corpora of naturally-occurring exchanges. However, what research still needs to address is how the participants themselves orient to these phenomena, how they view the idea of prioritizing effective communication instead of accuracy, as well as issues of ownership and nativeness versus the multilingual speaker. This paper addresses the views of business professionals through ethnographic interviews in a BELF community of practice. Findings show that professionals tend to prioritize intercultural accommodation and show open attitudes towards multilingual resources and non-nativeness in ELF. They also report challenges to their communication, which they overcome by relying on a shared repertoire and multilingual resources. Other reported challenges concern the company’s language policy and the access to languages other then English. Finally, it is argued that more research needs to address the link between sociolinguistic investigations of naturally-occurring corpus data with ethnographic explorations of practices and ideologies at the local level, both in ELF groups generally and ELF communities of practice specifically.

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