Research Papers

 

Politics and Pragmatics in the cross-cultural management of rapport. Two exchanges between English language assistants and mentors in French schools.

Robert Crawshaw, Julia Harrison

Presented at IALIC Conference, 11-14 November 2004, Dublin City University

To be submitted to: Journal for Language and Intercultural Communication

 

This paper examines the socio-pragmatic character of intercultural communication between English Language Assistants (ELAs) and their mentors in French primary and secondary schools. With reference to Levinson's notion of 'activity type', it argues that judgements by mentors as to what constitutes 'acceptable contributions' on the part of ELAs are determined by the extent to which mentors themselves have internalised French State regulations. The degree of internalisation can thus serve as a means of distinguishing between 'the political' and 'the cultural'. Awareness of this distinction and an insight into its social significance exemplifies what Spencer-Oatey describes more generally as a 'strategic interactional principle' or SIP. According to Spencer-Oatey, 'SIPs' are key elements in the successful management of 'rapport' in intercultural situations. By applying a methodology derived from Sinclair and Coulthard's (1975) model of spoken discourse to recordings of ELA-mentor interactions, we identify specific sequences of moves which illustrate the relationship between political and cultural factors, SIPs and socio-pragmatic misunderstandings in Anglo-French intercultural communication.

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Facteurs politiques et culturels dans la gestion réussie des 'rapports' en situation interculturelle

Robert Crawshaw

Presented at: British Council conference on Assistants' Programme, 7 December 2005, Paris

To be submitted to:

 

Cet article examine le caractère socio-pragmatique de la communication entre des Assistants d'Anglais (FLAs) et leurs 'Responsables' dans des établissements primaires et secondaires en France. En se référant à la notion de Levinson d'' Activity Type ', les auteurs constatent que le jugement de la part des 'responsables' de ce qui constitue une ' acceptable contribution ' de la part d'un FLA, dépend en large mesure de leur propre volonté en tant que fonctionnaires d'assumer les mesures politiques régissant les conditions d'enseignement dans leurs établissements. Le niveau auquel les responsables auraient internalisé ces mesures sert d'indice qui permet de différencier entre 'politique' et 'culture' dans un sens plus large. Aussi, la conscience de la qualité de cette distinction de la part du FLA, représente-t-elle un exemple de ce que Spencer-Oatey qualifie de ' Strategic Interactional Principle ' (SIP) dans son analyse des éléments gouvernant la gestion réussie des 'rapports' en situation interculturelle. En recourant à l'approche de Sinclair et Coulthard dans leur analyse du discours oral, nous avons pu mettre en relief des séquences d'énoncés au sein de deux entretiens enregistrés qui font ressortir le rapport entre facteurs politiques et culturels, SIPs et malentendus socio-pragmatiques dans des communications interculturelles anglo-françaises.

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'Activity types' as a bridge for micro and macro research: The case of 'advice' in interactions between language assistants and their supervisors in schools in France and England

Jonathan Culpeper, Robert Crawshaw , Julia Harrison

Presented at 31st International LAUD Symposium,27-30 March, Landau, Germany

To be submitted to:

 

In this paper we focus on interactions involving the seeking, giving and receiving of 'advice', something which all language assistants engage in at some point, usually early in their period of placement. This is a sensitive area which is susceptible to misunderstandings and where interpersonal linguistic communication is likely to be governed by culturally determined norms. We will argue that the notion of 'activity type', as defined by Levinson ([1979]1992), is a crucial mechanism in analysing and understanding how 'advice' is enacted. Activity types involve a workable degree of consistency and abstraction such that they are useful as regulatory mechanisms - for speakers and for analysts. Yet at the same time, they are sufficiently nuanced and dynamic. Moreover, they encompass both the dynamics of language use and the participants' conceptions of language use. The notion of activity type helps solve a key problem in cross-cultural pragmatics, as well as politeness theory, namely, the mapping of micro linguistic behaviour onto macro notions of culture.

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Formality in Cross-Cultural Discourse

Julia Harrison

Presented at 3rd IVACS Group Conference, 23-24 June 2006, University of Nottingham

To be submitted to: Mutilingua

This paper aims to examine more closely the notion of 'formality' in discourse, particularly how formality is constructed linguistically, and how different expectations about formality might contribute to cross-cultural interactional difficulty. Some analysts apply ideas of (in)formality to linguistic, usually lexical items, for example slang or swearing is generally recognised as informal. Others consider it a pragmatic concept tied to aspects of politeness, while Labov (1982) sees formality as a cline from 'casual speech' to 'careful speech' which is affected by issues which include the context, and the speaker's emotional state. In cross-cultural discourse, differences in perceptions of formality (what constitutes formal language and behaviour and in what circumstances it is appropriate) is a factor which interactants themselves evaluate as critical to the success or failure of cross cultural relations. However, although this term is quite widely used, the conceptual character of formality is rarely clearly defined. This paper attempts to address this issue. It will draw on the PIC project corpus, using both reflective data (diaries, témoignages and retrospectives) and recorded interactions. The reflective data can be used to pinpoint occurrences of both formality and informality in the interactants' relations so that, using computational analysis, we can begin to identify which aspects of an interaction cause it to be perceived as 'formal', and also begin to speculate how these perceptions might differ cross-culturally.

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'Form, function and intercultural pragmatics: goal-directed speech behaviour in French and English'

Robert Crawshaw, Jonathan Culpeper, Julia Harrison

Presented at: LLAS/CILT Conference, 6-7 July, University of Cardiff

To be submitted to:

 

This paper derives from a current AHRC-funded project 'Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication' conducted by Lancaster and Cambridge Universities in collaboration with The British Council and the French Ministry of Education. The aim of the project has been to analyse communication between language teaching assistants and their mentors in schools in France and England. It has sought to make explicit the sources of misunderstandings between the two sets of interlocutors; this in turn has meant identifying patterns of speech behaviour which interlocutors have either misinterpreted or reacted against for personal, linguistic or cultural reasons.

Comprehensive data has been collected from 65 students from eight universities in the two countries and from more than 50 mentors. The data has included personality tests, cultural essays, live recordings of discussions with mentors and retrospective reflections on these, both tape-recorded and written up in logbooks covering the first three months of the assistant ship. The data has been codified and analysed using Atlas TI (5). This methodology has allowed the team clearly to identify and subsequently to search examples of goal-directed talk labelled as 'requesting', 'informing', 'complaining', 'advising', 'supportive' and 'conflictual' and so on. With particular reference to the work of House, Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Pavlidou, Béal and Spencer-Oatey, the paper will empirically review the formulae employed by the mentors in fulfilment of particular goals, make comparisons between French and English and consider the extent to which the assistants' responses demonstrate that the intention of the native speaker interlocutor has been correctly understood. Evidence from the supporting (metalingual) data will enable us to identify what the causes of any misunderstandings have been and to make generalisations about the relationship between language and culture in the two languages.

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Aspects of rapport management: some differences in politeness behaviour between French and English native speakers in educational contexts

Julia Harrison, Robert Crawshaw

Presented at: Sociolinguistics Symposium 16, 6-8 July, University of Limerick

To be submitted to: Journal of Politeness Research

 

This paper will investigate particular instances of the politeness behaviour of the British mentors. It arises from comments made in the reflective data of several French foreign language assistants (FLAs) about l'enthousiasme Brittanique as one FLA called it; a tendancy for the British to be very encouraging, positive and effusive in their praise of the FLA and her/his ideas. However, the FLAs in their retrospectives or later diary entries mentioned feeling disappointed by the way this early enthusiasm failed to materialise into something more concrete, even using the word hypocrite to describe the behaviour of the English. I suggest that this is in fact a misinterpretation of a type of positive politeness behaviour which is perhaps peculiarly English; that the praise and enthusiasm was simply a way of making the assistant feel welcome and attending to their face wants, not something to necessarily be taken literally. That this is a cultural difference of some importance is also reflected in some of the commentary from both sides about the nature of each education system in terms of the differing attitudes to negative feedback. There is commentary from both sides of the channel that the British tend to praise and encourage students more:

T1 The British education tells them all the way through that they're doing well.

S1 Mm <laughs>.

T1 Right? it avoids telling them that they're doing badly and that's quite a difficult thing to get used to.

(Adeline Torrat and Patricia Zale - Conv 1)

This paper will aim to describe this cultural difference, and then exemplify how this shows up in the discourse through the 'excessive' use of praise and other positive politeness behaviour from the British.

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‘Complainte' or ‘Complaisance': a cross-cultural study of complaint among foreign language teaching assistants in France and England

Robert Crawshaw

Presented at BAAL/IRAAL Conference, 7-9 September, University College, Cork

To be submitted to: Discourse and Society

 

This paper is one of a series of research outputs from the ESRC - funded Project ‘Pragmatics and Intercltural Communication' – PIC (2003-2006). The project focuses on the pragmatic factors affecting the outcome of communication between foreign language teaching assistants and the members of staff responsible for their professional duties in schools in France and England. Its findings, based on the study of 57 students of both nationalities, derive from a wide-ranging corpus data set, including the results of questionnaires and personality tests, transcriptions of conversations, written journals and workshops. One of the more prominent ‘goal-driven activities' to which the data bears witness is that of ‘complaint'. This type of discourse finds powerful expression in the student journals and in the retrospective commentaries on the development of the students' relationships with their ‘mentor' or ‘ responsable '. Close analysis of all the textual extracts which focus on ‘complaint' ( sic. ) - perhaps more accurately referred to as ‘ complaintes ', since we concentrate in this paper with reports transmitted to a third party and not with live events - allow interesting comparisons to be made between French and English subjects, notably in the volume, intensity and style of the language used. The study of this type of data also calls for some revision of the scales hitherto used to assess the quality and extent of complaint in live situations (cf House and Kasper [1981], Olshtain and Weinbach [1993], Trosborg [1995]). It may even be possible on the basis of this evidence to make generalisations concerning the cultural outlook and attitude towards authority of the two national groups.

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Pragmatic misunderstanding and repair in Cross-cultural (French-English) communication 

Julia Harrison

To be submitted to: Intercultural Pragmatics

 

Following Thomas' (1983) conceptualisation of certain types of misunderstanding as 'pragmalinguistic' and 'sociopragmatic' failure, this paper seeks to identify and categorise the different factors affecting both types of pragmatic failure. Continuing research which began in the early stages of the PIC project (cf. Crawshaw and Harrison, forthcoming) this paper will use a methodology based on Sinclair and Coulthard's (1975) model of discourse (and subsequent revisions to that model) to locate examples of both 'misunderstanding' and repair in the discourse. Expanding on research by Bremer et al (1996), we will use corpus informed techniques to carry out a systematic examination of miscommunication across our data.

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Definitions of Culture in the metalingual discourse of French and English Foreign Language Assistants

Robert Crawshaw

To be submitted to:

 

This paper will use ATLAS to locate all instances in our data where 'culture' is overtly referred to or discussed, and use the FLAs' metalingual commentary to construct a definition of what 'culture' means to our participants, and more specifically, what 'British culture' and 'French culture' mean. It will also draw on evidence gathered prior to the FLAs' actual experience of the culture, which took the form of NESSays.

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Performance

Robert Crawshaw and Alison Phipps

To be submitted to:

 

Abstract to follow.