English as a Lingua Franca

: Accommodation and Affiliation of Monolingual to Multilingual Speakers of English during Profession Meetings

Abstract

This study investigates the accommodation strategies employed by monolingual English speakers in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) settings, during professional meetings with multilingual counterparts. Existing literature claims that monolinguals lack accommodation skills (Scollon & Scollon, 1995; Jenkins 2006; Cook, 2007; Drury and Ma, 2009; Seidlhofer, 2009; Louhiala-Salminen and Kankaanranta, 2011; Ollinger, 2012; Scollon, 2016; Cogo & House, 2017; Toomaneejinda, & Saengboon, 2022). Participants were video recorded during ELF interactions but analysis through traditional methods proved challenging. Consequently, a new framework was developed to evaluate if monolingual English speakers do employ accommodation strategies. The findings suggest that whilst monolinguals do employ some accommodation skills at threshold level, their effectiveness remains marginal aligning with existing research. However, the findings also revealed that contrary to pre-existing literature multilingual counterparts, in this study, did not effectively employ accommodation strategies either. Thus, suggesting that, in relation to accommodation skills, some of the existing literature may contain a bias in favour of multilingual adaptability when operating in ELF settings. This calls for a re-evaluation of the monolingual versus multilingual accommodation narrative. Perhaps more importantly this study contributes to the complex understanding of linguistic accommodation highlighting the need for more robust and relevant methodologies to assess communication dynamics in ELF settings.

Date of Award	22 Oct 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Portsmouth
Supervisor	Mario Saraceni (Supervisor), Marie McCullagh (Supervisor) & Sarah Berthaud (Supervisor)