Communication in the Oil and Gas Industry

Abstract

This article aims to describe some features of communication in the oil and gas industry considering contributions from applied linguistics and Aviation English. Fostered by the need to have a picture of communication dynamics taking place in the proposed scenario, studies were conducted within the HF2 Project and were organized in three stages. Stage 1 revised accident reports to find out communication factors that could be associated with safety and help build a tentative version of a taxonomy based on the Taxonomy of Communication and Language factors in Aviation used for language analysis in aviation. Stage 2 comprehended interviews with workers from two different offshore operations so to assess metalinguistic information regarding a possible standardized language training and use during the performance of activities. Stage 3 encompassed in-loco data collection and analysis of linguistic information. Corpus Linguistics, Conversational Analysis, The Cooperative Principle, and the Taxonomy of Communication and Language factors in Aviation were some of the theoretical references that guided the analysis. The results presented are preliminary, yet significant, and show that procedural factors are outstanding when contemplating the possibility of miscommunication and, because of that, could be considered the core of a taxonomy. Additionally, metalinguistic data from the interviews show that there seems to be a standardized communicative behavior in the operations given the strict technical training to which the workers are submitted to. However, the misuse or non-use of certain lexical-morphological structures and strategies, and procedures could impact safety. In this line, the article also addresses some suggestions for optimized communication practices.