Best of both worlds? The influence of idiomatic expressions in an ELF setting.
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2020-06-08
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en
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The use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is becoming more and more important considering the growth of multinational organisations and expanding cultural diversity in Universities. The English language is seen as the global lingua franca and is the most used language for scientific articles, international trade, education and books (Parupalli, 2019). In addition, idiomatic expressions exist in every language and are a central aspect of language. The purpose of this study was to discover whether idiomatic expressions and the native language of a speaker influence how texts and speakers are judged in an ELF setting. The main research question was therefore: “to what extent do idiomatic expressions influence the judgments of texts and speakers in an ELF setting?” ELF is very important to study, since English is the global language of academia and it is spoken more by non-native than by native speakers (Mauranen, Hynninen, & Ranta, 2010). Furthermore, idioms are also interesting to investigate, because they are a central aspect of language and its understanding (Seidlhofer, 2009). In this experiment, 85 native Dutch speakers had to evaluate four English emails each regarding the comprehensibility and competence of the writers and the emails. The results indicated that idiomatic expressions did not influence the judgments of texts and speakers in an ELF setting. Furthermore, there was no difference in evaluation of the text and speaker when the writer was assumed to be a non-native speaker and when the writer was assumed to be a native speaker. The results illustrate that more research is needed on the written and oral evaluation of speakers and writers who use idiomatic expressions in an ELF setting.
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