Global or Local Errors? Cross-language Influence in Aeronautical Communication

This paper aims to discuss and explore - through authentic examples that depict the interlanguage hypothesis and cross-language influence in second language acquisition - some effects of being bilingual when teaching, learning and assessing Aeronautical English (AE). Foreign speakers’ mother tongue (L1) tends to affect the way certain structural misuses of English are detected and identified, such as word order inversion (e.g. Happened an accident), which also affects training and assessment practices either negatively or positively. In other words, depending on the context, global errors, i.e. structural mistakes that affect meaning, might be interpreted as merely local errors which do not usually interfere with meaning, when they actually do. On the other hand, bilingual instructors can anticipate some mistakes Brazilian students commonly make and try to prevent them from happening. Considering that there are also some instances of mistakes that are more of an accidental slip than an actual error, how can one tell the difference between errors and occasional slips of the tongue? How important is recognizing these differences when training and assessing students’ Aeronautical English proficiency? The examples and discussions presented here can help us address some of these questions and language issues.