ELF Users’ Attitudes and Orientations in Tourism Interaction

Abstract

Tourism English is an interesting domain of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) research because it can provide sociocultural, discursive, and sociolinguistic insights into a kind of professional genre that has not been extensively researched within or under the ELF branch of Applied Linguistics so far. The proposed investigation involves some tourist industry service providers and tourists interacting for a variety of reasons (e.g. leisure, culture, entertainment, sport, cuisine etc.) in order to probe their orientations and attitudes towards the use of English as a Multilingua Franca (Jenkins 2015). Adopting a poststructuralist approach and drawing upon the ethnographic interviews taken from among 27 participants in a study conducted in Italy, I explore evidence of participants’ consciousness of intercultural accommodation and attitudes towards multilingual resources in ELF encounters (Cogo 2016). Moreover, I scrutinise their cognizance of the strategic potential of pragmatic resources to enable them to achieve effectiveness in communication and overcome cultural characterizations (Baker 2011; 2012; 2015).This article has the additional capacity to provide more information concerning the perspectives of employees within Italy’s tourist industry, along with tourists themselves, toward the multicultural use of English as a Lingua Franca.

Keywords

• multilingual resources in elf
• intercultural accommodation
• speakers’ attitudes
• tourism english
• interactional sociolinguistics