Accommodating Toward Your Audience: Do Native Speakers of English Know How to Accommodate Their Communication Strategies Toward Nonnative Speakers of English?

Abstract

The study seeks to add to the current debate on English as a lingua franca by analyzing the role of the native speakers of English in intercultural business negotiations and to what extent they effectively accommodate lingua franca speakers. The data, gathered from a sample of 14 native English speakers and 13 nonnative English speakers, consist of interactions collected through a discourse completion task and a short questionnaire. The results showed that the native speakers in this sample used a wider range of linguistic devices than the nonnative speakers. The majority of the native speakers attempted to accommodate nonnative speakers, but there was significant variation in the way that individual participants chose their strategies and approached accommodation. The most striking finding was the imbalance between the native speakers' understanding of the issues of intercultural communication and their inability to effectively accommodate nonnative speakers. The implications are discussed.

Review of developments in research into English as a lingua franca

“…Charles & Marschan-Piekkari (2002), for instance, demonstrate that English NSs are particularly problematic in international business communication because they are more difficult to understand than speakers of other varieties of English. The potentially problematic role of the NS is also the main focus of Sweeney & Zhu's (2010) study. This is a comparison of the use of accommodation strategies by NS business operatives and NNS students of business English courses.…”

Managing discourse in intercultural business email interactions: a case study of a British and Italian business transaction

“…1 This paper analyses data from a 10-month email exchange between the two companies in which English was used as the lingua franca. Although much research has been done on English lingua franca interactions between NNS (Louhiala-Salminen, Charles, and Kankaanranta 2005;Kankaanranta 2006) less has been done on the interaction between English NS and NNS (Firth 1996;Sweeney and Hua 2010), and still less on Italian NNS of Business English as the Lingua Franca (BELF). Thus, this work, while following previous studies in the field, hopes to contribute to the current debate on English as a lingua franca by analysing to what extent interactants effectively accommodate in the interaction.…”

New contexts, new processes, new strategies: the co-construction of meaning in plurilingual interactions

“…Literature on monolingual interactions in pluricultural contexts is very wide and deals with native speakers -non-native speakers (NS-NNS) interaction (PICA, 1994;SHEHADEH, 1999;WIBERG, 2003;SEIDLHOFER, 2001;GONZALEZ-LLORET, 2005;ROGERSON-REVEL, 2006;SWEENEY;ZHU, 2010;DOBAO, 2012) and non-native speakers -non-native speakers (NNS-NNS) interaction (SCHWARTZ, 1980;VARONIS;GASS, 1985;YULE, 1990, PICA;LINCOLN-PORTER;PANINOS;LINNEL, 1996;GARCÍA MAYO;PICA, 2000;MEIERKORD, 1996MEIERKORD, , 1998MEIERKORD, , 2000MACKEY;OLIVER;LEEMAN, 2003, AL-GHATANI;ROEVER, 2012;COGO;DEWEY, 2012), indicating that not only the context of face-to-face interaction but also the setting, the scene and the relationship between interlocutors influence the structure of the negotiation. However, if one of the speakers is using a foreign language, the language deficit determinates what can be said and how it is said, and the unbalanced linguistic proficiency between them (either in NS-NNS interactions and NNs-NNs)…”