English for Cross-Cultural Communication: The Question of Intelligibility

When people talk about the use of English as a language for crosscultural communication, the one question which is asked most frequently is How can we insure mutual intelligibility among speakers from different cultures? This paper is a report of an empirical study on this question involving 1,386 people from eleven countries. There is no claim that the question has been fully answered, but hopefully the report does provide insights into the question and information towards the answer.