ELF users’ attitudes and orientations in tourism interaction.

Tourism English is an interesting domain of ELF research because it can provide sociocultural, discursive and sociolinguistic insights into a kind of professional genre that has not been researched so far in the ELF paradigm. The proposed investigation involves 27 participants to a pilot study conducted in Italy among some Tourist Industry stakeholders interacting for leisure, cultural, entertaining, sportive, culinary, etc. reasons. From a poststructuralist approach and by the use of ethnographic interviews, this study explores evidence of participants’ consciousness of intercultural accommodation and attitudes towards multilingual resources in ELF encounters (Cogo 2016). Moreover, it investigates their awareness of the strategic use of pragmatic resources to achieve effectiveness in communication and overcome cultural characterisations (Beker 2011, 2012b, 2015). This poster presentation can contribute to clarifying tourism employees’ and visitors’ perspective towards multicultural use of English as a Lingua Franca for tourism in Italy.