Prot. 2015REZ4EZ
Description of the project
The starting point of this Project is an objection to the established Anglocentric discourse practices reinforcing the conventional belief that the ‘Standard-English’ grammar code and the pragmatic behaviours ascribed to English-as-a-native-language (ENL) usage provide shared norms in intercultural transactions globally adopted across cultures, specialized-discourse domains and communities of practice (Todd/Hancock 1986). This view would exclude in principle any acknowledgement of the fact that people from different linguacultural backgrounds appropriate English by adapting its meaning potential not only to the different pragmatic modes through which they express their own communicative needs, but also to the different social-semiotic functions (Halliday 1978) and experiential schemata (Carrell 1983) grammaticalized in the forms of their native languages. A failure to acknowledge this adaptive appropriation by ELF speakers may have quite problematic consequences, particularly in the socio-political domains that this Project intends to investigate where unequal conditions of interactions are more liable to occur – which are: (a) institutional migration domains, where miscommunication may be due to the different ELF variations in contact, as well as to the biased schemata of interacting migrants and officials in charge of the interactions; (b) digital-media virtual environments, where the ‘supposed’ multicultural identities of ELF users interacting at distance are challenged as they are called to negotiate the meanings of culture-specific concepts in the controversial discourse domains of health and economics; (c) increasingly multicultural school environments in Italy where English classes are often places where the rigid adherence to a model based on an idealized native speaker is still perpetuated, whereas a principled education to ELF accommodation strategies needs to be developed to protect the linguacultural expression of the identities of those who are marginalized.