Miscommunication and accommodation issues in ELF-mediated intercultural migration contexts

Abstract

This paper focuses on interactions between West-African immigrants and Italian intercultural mediators in authority in centres for legal advice and medical assistance. In such contexts, it was observed that misunderstanding is often triggered by distinct ELF variations in contact. These variations are often, in Kachru’s (1986) terms, from the outer circle (endonormative variations spoken by immigrants from former British colonies) and the expanding circle (exonormative variations making reference to native inner-circle norms spoken by non-native experts, who regard migrants’ variations as ‘defective variants’ of the native-speaker language). Central in this enquiry is the notion of transfer of non-native speakers’ respective L1 semantic, syntactic and pragmatic structures into ELF, caused by different cognitive-experiential backgrounds – or schemata (Carrell 1983) – underlying their native typologically different languages (Guido 2008, 2012, 2019) and their cultures (Jenkins 2007). Being aware of such L1-transfer processes underlying ELF uses is crucial for experts responsible for successful communication. Yet, as case studies will show, this is not evident in migration contexts where experts impose upon immigrants their own ELF-mediated specialized uses which may be cognitively inaccessible and conceptually unavailable (Widdowson 1991) to immigrants, thus representing the very cause of intercultural miscommunication in need of accommodation.