Lili Cavalheiro

Developing Intercultural
Communicative Competence in ELF
Communication
By
Hugo Taborda, Jaime Chacón &
Juan Felipe Sánchez
 Objectives
 Recognizing the importance of exploring bottom-up learning
processes in language teaching pedagogy

 Developing intercultural communicative competence (ICC) and

more communicative-based methods

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 About the author

Main research areas: English as a Lingua Franca, English Language Teaching;

Teacher education; Materials development; Intercultural communication

Research Group: Linguistics: Language, Culture and Society (RG 5)

Professional Title: Lecturer

Academic Degrees: (2015) PhD in English Linguistics; (2009) MA in English Studies

(Applied Linguistics); (2006) Degree in Modern Languages and Literatures (English
Studies)

Institutional Address: CEAUL - Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa,

Alameda da Universidade, 1600-214 Lisboa

E-mail: lilicavalheiro@campus.ul.pt

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Scholars’ concepts

Graddol 2006, 11 “It is no longer English as we have known it and

have taught in the past as a foreign language” but “a new
phenomenon” known as English as Lingua Franca (ELF).
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 Scholars’ concepts
Margie Berns
 Appropriateness

World Englishes studies 2006

 Acceptability

 Intelligibility

Dell Hymes
Hymes portraits the social implicatures framing the conditions for ideal
communication:
 Grammaticality
 Acceptability

 Appropriateness

 Occurrence.
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 Theoretical support.
These circles represent “the type of spread, the patterns of
acquisition and the functional domains in which English is used
across cultures and languages”. Kachru

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 Implications

EFL

It is a part of the modern foreign

languages paradigm

ELF

It is integrated in the global Englishes

paradigm

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 Implications

ELF EFL
Jenkins Interference and
Language contact and
evolution (2011) fossilization

pragmatic gaps in
strategies Code-mixing knowledge

Code-switching

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9
 Context

Verbal Context Non-verbal Context

Context of situation Context of Culture

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 Communicative
competence

Halliday and Mathiessen

Hymes (1980, vi)
(2004, 23) note,
states,
“a language is a resource
“social life shapes
for making meaning, and
communicative
meaning resides in systemic
competence.”
patterns of choice.”

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 Communicative
competence

• Multiglossic
Nunn (2007, 41)
• Strategic
Essential aspects for
communicative • pragmatic/discourse
competence at an
international level • intercultural

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 Bottom-up learning processes
Bottom-up processing happens when someone tries to understand
language by looking at individual meanings or grammatical characteristics
of the most basic units of the text, (e.g. sounds for a listening or words for
a reading), and moves from these to trying to understand the whole text.

 Backchannelling
 Repetition

 Bargaining or negotiation of meaning I’m Marius. I’m

from Romania. I
I’m Anna. I’m like English
Polish. I love
 Rephrasing and self-repair English

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 Bottom-up learning processes in practice
A Study from the VOICE Corpus
VOICE, the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (2005–2013), is
a structured collection of language data capturing spoken ELF interactions,
containing transcriptions of spontaneous, non-scripted face-to-face
communication in international scenarios.

I’m Marius. I’m

I’m Anna. I’m from Romania. I
Polish. I love like English
English

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 Pedagogical strategies
 Backchannelling
Indicating that a piece of talk by the speaker has been registered by the
recipient of that talk
I don’t Imagine I bet so
He don’t know how I score

Clear

What’s the aim of this strategy?

Helping the current speaker along while manifesting the listener’s attention

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 Pedagogical strategies
 Repetition
Indicating convergence of both the intended and received message

How tall is the the tower o:r (.) The the tower?

yeah the the the church tower

and er how old 18 was the guy
who died here

What’s the aim of this strategy?

Specifying the particular topic the speaker is referring to in order to avoid
any further breakdown in communication
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 Pedagogical strategies
 Rephrasing and self repair
It allows interlocutors to rethink and restructure their message in order to
make it clearer and more intelligible for the other speaker
Who’s your I know __. His name is
…your name is Mr Jones.
teacher? Paul Jones.

Yes, His name is Paul. He’s I think the same. I have

a nice teacher. classes with he at 9:00.

Oh … I have classes
with him at 7

What’s the aim of this strategy?

Changing speakers’ wording so as to adjust the message and make it more
understandable (lexically or synthax).
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 Pedagogical strategies
 Negotiation of meaning or bargaining
Clarifying the topic is intended to be dealt

I do exercises. I
What do you do for a living? love healthy food.

Oh, yeah. I am cook

A job? at McDonald

What’s the aim of this strategy?

Focusing in the topics undertaken in the conversation

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 Conclusions
 EFL teachers should not obliterate bottom-up approaches
aimed at developing communicative language competence.

 ELF encourages peer correction and strengthens cultural

awareness in such a way EFL is supposed to do.
 It’s important to reflect the role of the teacher not in terms of
a language inspector but as a language facilitator and
entrepreneur.

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THANKS

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