Introduction With the birth of the civil aviation in the 50s, the English language was adopted by the aviation
community and gradually became its official language.
Since then, as a consequence of the internationalization of air navigation, English has gained
a vital role in air-ground communications and has also become the lingua franca in most working
fields, such as science, medicine, technology and economy, which were increasingly developing
worldwide.
In order to guarantee air safety and to help operators from different countries to understand
each other quickly and correctly, it has been necessary to establish a common standardized
communication code, the air traffic control (ATC) phraseology, for routine situations and also to
closely attend to the plain language to be used in all cases not covered by phraseology.
The organization in charge of overseeing this elaborate and delicate issue is the International
Civil Aviation Organizazion (ICAO) by means of a dedicated team of operational and linguistic
experts, the Proficiency Requirements in Common English Study Group (PRICESG), formed in
2000.
The Study Group has been founded with the aim to analyze aviation language, highlighting
possible weaknesses that could cause troubles in communication, and to make a list of
recommended practices to be included in the Manual on the Implementation of ICAO Proficiency
Requirements (Doc 9835 AN/453) published in 2004.
The introduction of the Manual constitutes a fundamental step toward the achievement of a
fully harmonised and safe sky, since it provides reliable specifications as concerns air navigation.
If such regulations were in force in the 70s, maybe the Tenerife accident in 1977 would not
have happened, avoiding the tragic loss of 578 lives.
However, ATC phraseology is only one of the aspects of language playing a role in
miscommunication. A high percentage of incidents and accidents in previous years were, indeed,
dependent on the difficulty encountered by pilots and air traffic controllers to elaborate messages in
plain English (or English for General Purposes, or EGP), e.g. to explain that some unexpected
event, neither included in phraseology nor concerning any technical aspects, and hence not
belonging to Aviation English, hinders a manoeuvre.
It is, therefore, necessary for air traffic operators to achieve full competence not only in ATC
phraseology and English for Specific Purposes (ESP), but also in General English (or EGP).
Several have been the training programs and testing systems developed in the last decades,
and many aviation schools have seen the light as an answer to the evergrowing aviation industry.
Nevertheless, only recently national authorities have emphasized the relevance of regulated
and validated testing services, which in turn implies the need for testers to demonstrate testing
competence and for operators to receive dedicated training in all three areas of language
(phraseology, ESP and EGP) with special regard to speaking and listening skills, given the nature of
ATC messages. Furthermore, being air navigation an international industry, involving both native
and non-native speakers, and, most importantly, considered the extremely high technicality of the
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language, both groups of speakers must be addresses the same language training.
This in particular refers to ICAO mandate that operators comply with ICAO Language
Proficiency Rating Scale, which provides a detailed account of plain language competencies to be
demonstrated in order to be allowed to operate.
Since most ATC communications are exchanged between non-native speakers or between
native and non-native speakers, though, it can be very useful also to highlight possible causes of
incomprehension due to the influence of the different mother tongues (L1), to human factors (such
as stress, workload, speech rate), or even to different reference standards, since, to illustrate, the
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), US, and the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), UK, also
provide phraseologies which partly diverge from ICAO phraseology, but which, they maintain, do
not constitute possible source of error.
Being the language under consideration so technical, training plays a major role in the way
pilots and air traffic controllers will perform their job: effective teaching methodologies and
intensive and suitable training are more probable to lead to efficient and accurate operations.
Building a learner speech corpus of Aviation English, thus, could help to clarify to what
extent training affects learners' performance. Specifically, analysis of speech data produced by
learners can provide a deep insight into what learners actually internalize of what they are taught, so
as to identify, for instance, possible language problems which need to be solved by means of
appropriate and adjusted teaching methodologies and materials. Corpus data can also provide useful
information on what should be included in syllabuses and on the topics to take into account when
planning testing services.
In order to develop this project successfully, it is important to consider a wide range of
variables, which could be grouped under three main parts: I. Aviation Language characteristics,
standards and documentation; II. Corpus data analysis; III. Learner corpus proposal.
The present paper follows the above described subdivision. Specifically, Part I includes a
brief overview of Aviation Language features with reference to General English, restricted varieties
and controlled languages, and also offers a comparison between Aviation English in general and air-
ground communications, with special regard to ICAO Language Proficiency Requirements (Chapter
One).
Chapter Two, instead, focuses on the interactive nature of the language and illustrates some
internal factors influencing operators' performance.
As for Part II, Chapter Three is dedicated to the quantitative and qualitative analysis of data
from two corpora, namely the Air Traffic Control Corpus (Linguistic Data Consortium –
Pennsylvania, US) and Air Traffic Control Simulation Speech Corpus (Graz University of
Technology and Eurocontrol Experimental Centre – Austria, EU). The aim is to compare several
lexico-grammatical and pragmatic features (i.e. modals, polite speech act formulae) which
characterize daily communications and which, surprisingly, also characterize air-ground messages,
though being neither recommended nor allowed by ICAO reference standards.
Lastly, Chapter Four in Part III deals with the prospective learner speech corpus. Hence, a
review of learner corpus design criteria are presented, and a discussion on the usefulness of corpora
in language studies and an overview of learning and learners' needs, with special reference to ESP
courses, introduce the would-be corpus. A detailed description of the corpus-to-be is, therefore,
provided by taking Granger's International Corpus of Leraner English (ICLE) as a reference, though
not forgetting the different field of application.
In the final conclusions, ideas for further research and studies are also outlined.
All analysed communications can be found in the 36901-02-zip folder.
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PART I
Aviation Language characteristics, standards and
documentation
Chapter One Aviation English: descriptive overview and reference standards 1. Introduction Several disparate variables influence ATC operators' performance. Language, unfortunately, is
among the major causes of incomprehension, not rarely leading to incidents, or even to serious
accidents. As such, in the years language has drawn the attention of several international
organizations, especially that of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), which have
tried to regulate this delicate issue in order to contribute towards its resolution.
Since the official language of the aviation community is English, and as it presents unique
linguistic features, in this chapter specifications about its distinctive characteristics are presented,
along with ICAO language requirements.
2. From general English to restricted varieties and controlled languages After the Second World War, English gradually became the official language of civil aviation. This
was mainly due to two reasons: first, the English-speaking countries, and especially the United
States with its Air Force, played a major role in the conflict. The U.S.A., in particular, were able to
convert their military airplanes into civilian vehicles, which greatly contributed to the spread of the
English language. Second, the growth of civil aviation implied the introduction of standards
concerning technical procedures as well as communication. In order to foster standardization in
communication, ICAO recommended to communicate in the language used by the station on the
ground, nevetheless it also requested, as a temporary measure, that English be available at all
control facilities supporting international routes. The “development and adoption of a more suitable
form speech for universal use in aeronautical radiotelephony communications” (ICAO 1995:
5.2.1.1.1-5.2.1.1.2), in fact, was never carried out, while English increasingly stabilized as lingua
franca of the international air navigation.
The picture below effectively illustrates the composite structure of Aviation English
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(Mathews 2004):
General language Language for
Specific Purposes Restricted
Variety Controlled
language Figure 1. The structure of Aviation Language The outer circle is constituted by general language, i.e. the language of daily-life situations,
which is characterized by high levels of creativity and flexibility, and by a very wide lexicon. It is
highly ambiguous and greatly relies on Grice's Conversational Maxims and on Brown and
Levinson's Politeness Strategies. General language is spoken in most communicative situations,
nevertheless, its vocabulary is not suitable for very specialized, technical contexts.
The next circle concerns Aviation language, that is a specialized subdomain of general
language. Like any other specialized subareas (e.g. economy, medicine, science, art), it consists of a
domain-related but still wide lexicon, selected sintactic structures, specific use of modal verbs, and
preferred speech acts.
The more the circles come closer to the core, the more the language identified is
standardized, and the more situation awareness, i.e. the ability to manage the wide range of
variables influencing operation, increases. Especially in aviation, maintaining a high level of
situation awareness is decisive, given the delicate nature and the very high stakes of the
environment, which in turn entail high levels of stress and fatigue for all operators, and in particular
for those concerned with air traffic control, who mainly communicate by means of technological
equipment, and hence cannot rely on visual clues. In such conditions, communication errors are
more likely to occur, being human language intrinsically ambiguous.
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All this considered, a specialized language is still too “general”, in the sense that its lexicon
and syntax are not sufficiently regulated, and, hence, can still concur to misunderstandings. What is
needed, thus, is a so-called Restricted Variety. With this label, Firth (1955 [1968]) identified those
languages which permit only minimal or no variation as concerns creativity, being based on a very
limited set of rules and constituted by a narrowed vocabulary.
Reducing flexibility along with relying on a restricted set of rules and lexicon greatly
minimizes ambiguity events, as operators receiving a message can predict the message content more
easily and because they can recall their long-term memory with minor effort.
A type of restricted variety, specifically created for miscommunications resolution, are
Controlled (Natural and Artificial) Languages. Controlled Languages are standardized and highly
restricted languages based on a set of constraints concerning all areas of language (such as the ‘one
word – one meaning’ principle as regards lexicon). Halliday and Hasan also describe such
languages, which they define as ‘closed registers,’ and compare them to registers in general [italics
added]:
The category of register will vary, from something that is closed and limited, to something that
is relatively free and open-ended. That is to say, there are certain registers in which the total
number of possible meanings is fixed and finite and may be quite small [...]. One example […]
was that which was familiar to those who were in the armed services during the Second World.
The set of messages that one was allowed to send home from active service by cable was
strictly controlled, and the number was very limited […]. It is a characteristic of a closed
register , one in which the total number of possible messages is fixed and finite [...]. That kind
of register is, of course, an extreme case; we could refer to it as a RESTRICTED
LANGUAGE. It is a kind of register in which there is no scope for individuality, or for
creativity. The range of possible meanings is fixed. (Halliday and Hasan, 1989: 39)
According to the authors, hence, registers differ from ‘closed registers,’ or restricted languages, in
the potential creativity and in the range of possible meanings.
Whatever the label, these communication codes are adopted by those job areas where the
slightest incomprehension can even lead to a disaster, as also exemplified by Halliday and Hasan in
the citation above.
Aviation constitutes a such delicate domain. In 1986 the European Association of Aerospace
Manufacturers (AECMA) released the Specification ASD Simplified Technical English, or ASD-
STE100, and in 1990s this pseudo-language was specifically developed as an answer to the US
Government's Plain English initiative, which did not comply with aviation's strict regulations about
language. However, ASD-STE10 cannot be considered as a real language, since it only consists of
“a set of Writing Rules […] and a Dictionary of controlled vocabulary” formed by “sufficient word
to express any technical sentence” (STEMG). A so restricted communication code, in fact, cannot
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overcome potential non-routine situations and, thus, may be compared to ATC radiotelephony, i.e.
ATC phraseology, plus a very limited set of correlated technical messages. The same could be
argued with regard to Firthian restricted varieties and Halliday and Hasan's closed registers. Such
pseudo-languages, hence, do not solve the issue of language ambiguity conclusively.
Non-routine events are probable to occur during work hours. This implies that in case
neither the restricted variety nor the specialized language are effective to resolve the situation, the
operator shall be able to compensate for the deficiencies by using the creative, flexible, and highly
ambiguous general language.
3. Aviation English and air-ground communications: a brief description As shown in Figure 1., Aviation language constitutes the second outer circle, which means that it is
more specialized than general language, but far less regulated than ATC phraseology.
Being English the official language of aviation, the expression Aviation English will
henceforth be used in place of Aviation language.
ICAO provides interesting definitions for Aviation English and for its subcategories, i.e.
radiotelephony and phraseology. As ICAO is the organization which provides reference standards
internationally, it is worth considering the classification provided in paragraph 4.4.3 of the Manual
on the Implementation of Language Proficiency Requirements (Doc. 9835 AN/453, 2004,
henceforth cited as LPRs Manual):
• Aviation English . We can define aviation English as a comprehensive but specialized subset of
English related broadly to aviation, including the “plain” language used for radiotelephony
communications when phraseologies do not suffice. Not restricted to controller and pilot
communications, aviation English can also include the use of English relating to any other aspect
of aviation: for example, the language needed by pilots for briefings, announcements, and flight
deck communication; or the language used by maintenance technicians, flight attendants,
dispatchers, or managers and officials within the aviation industry.
• Radiotelephony English (RTFE) . A sub-category of aviation English, radiotelephony English is
the language used in radiotelephony communications. It includes but must not be limited to
ICAO phraseology and can require the use of “general” English at times. […] “Plain language”
refers most often to what we are calling here radiotelephony English but also may require
“general” English.
• ICAO phraseology . The standardized words and phrases approved for radiotelephony
communications by ICAO have been developed over years and represent a very narrow,
specialized and rigid subset of language.
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