Research on phonological intelligibility in ELF communication has largely focused on identifying the pronunciation features that tend to cause miscommunication among ELF users. I argue for a shift from this 'lingua'-focus to a 'franca'-focus which takes proper account of how phonological intelligibility is affected by the co(n)textual conditions of interaction.
Since ELF users come from a large variety of lingua-cultural backgrounds and speak English in a multitude of different accents, phonological intelligibility has been a concern for ELF researchers right from the start of the field (Jenkins 2000). The focus of investigations of phonological intelligibility in ELF communication has to date largely been on the identification of pronunciation features that cause miscommunication among ELF users (e.g. Jenkins 2000, Osimk 2009, Deterding 2013). This 'lingua'-focus might be due to the fact that early ELF research suggested that numerous non-native ELF users are particularly dependent on the quality of the phonetic-phonological code because they fail to exploit cues from linguistic co-text and extralinguistic context when processing speech (Jenkins 2000). By contrast, this paper argues for a 'franca'-focus in research on phonological intelligibility in ELF communication, that is, a focus on co-textual and contextual effects on international intelligibility, which acknowledges the interactive, communicative nature of the listening process. The need for this shift in focus is justified on the basis of research findings obtained from both qualitative observations of ELF users engaging in communicative tasks and a large-scale quantitative study, which show that
a) contrary to early research findings, non-native ELF users draw on sources of information beyond the phonological code when processing each other's accents
b) consequently, co(n)textual factors can become serious confounding factors when examining sources of unintelligibility in ELF interactions and therefore need to be properly taken account of in ELF intelligibility studies.
References:
Deterding, David. 2013. Misunderstandings in English as a lingua franca. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.
Jenkins, Jennifer. 2000. The phonology of English as an international language. Oxford: OUP.
Osimk, Ruth. 2009. "Decoding sounds: an experimental approach to intelligibility in ELF". VIEWS 18(1), 64–89.
