222 Chapter Ten
work operational settings, radiotelephony discourse analysis should take
into account the bilingual nature of air-to-ground communication.
Radiotelephony language miscommunications
It is obvious that radiotelephony communication is a case of mandatory
use of phraseology/artificial language and plain English/natural language
in compliance with phraseology norms, and at the same time the same
interactants use native language or general spoken English to communicate
with other workmates beyond radiotelephony communication. This English
language use situation can be identified as complex, bilingual and multi-
vectored.
Researchers have aimed studies mainly at analyzing potential threats to
oral communication during radiotelephony exchanges between interactants
with English as a second language for communication. Therefore, the
results are to identify possible factors contributing to flight safety in order
to recommend the ways of improving language training of pilots and air
traffic controllers. In this chapter, the results of some recent research
projects that investigated the linguistic aspect of radiotelephony
communication are presented.
It has been reported that radiotelephony communication can be
affected by incompliance of the real world ‘air-to-ground’ exchanges with
ICAO requirements; by miscommunications due to syntactic, semantic and
pragmatic errors; by cultural and discursive-interactional difficulties
arising for non-native speakers in international working environments; by
psychophysiological personal qualities and technical distortions of
radiotelephony contacts.
For instance, École Nationale de l’Aviation Civile conducted a
comparative study between two aviation English corpora at a lexical level.
The research sample materials included one representing the prescribed
norm and made up of examples of English from two phraseology manuals;
the other consisting of the orthographic transcription of recordings of real
air-ground communications. The research focused on the discrepancies
observed in the distribution of the corpora lexicon, and the results
demonstrated different uses of English phraseology and plain language
within radiotelephony communication.
The results reported quite extensive use of interjections and courtesy
expressions in real communication, which were explained by “the
speakers’ prevailing need to customize and “humanise” air-ground
communications and their perpetual repetitive tasks” (Lopez et al. 2013:
14).