The Negotiation of Meaning in Aviation English as a Lingua Franca: A Corpus‐Informed Discursive Approach

Abstract

AbstractThis study explores the pragmatics of aviation English (AE) as a lingua franca in radiotelephony (R/T) communications primarily between aviators and air traffic controllers worldwide. AE is a crosslinguistic register used by aviation professionals who do not necessarily share their first languages and cultures. Accordingly, mutual intelligibility is the ultimate goal, as in English as a lingua franca (ELF) featuring message‐oriented accommodation. Simultaneously, AE is a highly restricted and relatively stable register, as its use is mandated to maximize accuracy, conciseness, and clarity of communication—factors all contributing to air safety. While instruction and testing in AE have been investigated in applied linguistics, its pragmatics‐focused aspects are underexplored. In this qualitative corpus‐informed study, we first relied on a small corpus of R/T communications in nonroutine situations to identify 3 cases of communication difficulty and then, investigate in depth the discursive construction of meaning, especially in terms of the pragmatic strategies the interactants used on the radio. Drawing exclusively on ELF‐speaker exchanges from the corpus, we illustrate the process of the negotiation of meaning within the constraints of the given aviation contexts. The findings of this study reveal similarities and differences between AE in R/T communications and general ELF discourses described in the literature. We conclude by offering pedagogical implications for enhanced aeronautical training addressing pragmatic and interactional competence.