English as a Lingua Franca and Intercultural Communication

Abstract

This chapter presents an Experiential Place-Marketing project in Responsible Tourism grounded on a cognitive-pragmatic model of Experiential-Linguistics applied to a multimodal Ethnopoetic analysis of texts drawn from two corpora of, respectively, (a) non-Western migrants’ sea-voyage narratives, reported in their variations of English as a ‘lingua franca’ (ELF), and (b) epic narratives of journeys across the Mediterranean sea towards ‘Utopian places’, which are part of the Western cultural heritage, trans- lated from Ancient Greek and Latin ‘lingua francas’ of the past into contemporary ELF variations. The principal aim of this project is to ‘emotionally promote’ (premote) the seaside resorts of Salento, an area of Southern Italy affected by migrant arrivals, by directly engaging tourists and migrants, who happen to be in the same holiday locations, in intercultural activities of ethnopoetic analysis, video making and ELF subtitling as if they were ‘philologists’ and ‘ethnographers’. In this way, under the guidance of researchers acting as ‘intercultural mediators’, both groups of international tourists and migrants, as subjects and tar- gets of this project, are made aware of their common experiential roots and socio-cultural values. The aim of the present research project in Responsible Tourism is indeed to encourage both tourists and migrants to experience the holiday place they live in as a ‘shared Utopia’ where they can rediscover common cultural/experiential schemata and narrative structures through a hybrid use of ELF developed with the purpose of promoting the appraisal, on the tourists’ side, of the migrants’ traumatic ELF narrations of sea-voyages and, on the migrants’ side, of the epic narratives of Mediterranean ‘odysseys’ towards ‘Utopian places’ belonging to the Western cultural heritage, translated from ancient Greek and Latin into ELF variations. The ELF variations used in such contexts of intercultural communication between groups of non-native speakers of English are assumed to foster in both tourists and migrants in contact an awareness of shared linguacultural narrative features. The research project was carried out in collaboration with the local administrations of a number of seaside resorts in Salento, Southern Italy. Phase 1 of this pilot stage of the research project focuses on tourists familiarizing themselves with the migrants’ sea-voyage experiences through their oral narratives. To this purpose, an initial introduction to sea-voyage tales of the Western literary heritage was proposed to trigger tourists’ emotional memory of tragic journey experiences. Then, they were guided to an ethnopoetic analysis on some extracts of journey reports collected in reception centres for migrants to make tourists aware of similarities in the emotional structures of both literary and real sea-voyage narratives. Then, Phase 2 focuses on migrants who, in their turn, are made acquainted with the ancient sea-voyage narratives of the Western tradition through an ethnopoetic analysis and a translation into the ELF variations of modern oral narratives carried out on some extracts from Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. In Phase 3, such ancient and contemporary sea-voyage narratives with their experiential ethnopoetic rhythms were turned into multimodal representations through the production of a video with subtitles in ELF aimed at achieving promotional/emotional (premotional) effects on both tourists and migrants, so as to make their experience of the seaside resorts they live in memorable as belonging to their process of personal and cultural growth.

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