Page 188 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

166 Meredith Marra and Janet Holmes

Jupp 1992). Such workers are often skilled at their jobs, but do not always know
how to manage the social and interpersonal aspects of workplace interaction. In-
terpersonal interaction provides a range of challenges for anyone joining a new
place of work. Learning to cope with and contribute appropriately to the distinc-
tive style and type of humour of one’s new community of practice is an import-
ant aspect of this process of integration into the workplace team.
Our research on communication in different workplaces emphasizes the im-
portance of identifying the social, contextual, discursive and cultural norms for
interaction in each community of practice. New workers need to be sensitized to
the potential for miscommunication. Old patterns will not necessarily transfer to
new workplaces. Each community of practice develops its own distinctive pat-
terns and ways of doing things, including preferred styles of humour, as we have
briefly illustrated in this paper.
Interestingly, humour is often overlooked in cross-cultural training perhaps
precisely because it is so context dependant. However, we have suggested a
number of ways in which those involved in assisting new workers can con-
tribute to raising their levels of socio-pragmatic awareness, including their abil-
ity to manage the social aspects of workplaces interaction (Newton 2004;
Holmes 2004, 2005). Newton (2004) for example, outlines three types of peda-
gogical task for this purpose: Awareness-Raising Tasks, Interpretation Tasks
and Communication Practice Tasks. He provides examples of awareness tasks
which pay attention to explicit knowledge, and interpretation tasks oriented to
noticing (Ellis 1999), which encourage learners to attend to and interpret socio-
pragmatic meaning in authentic language episodes. Role-play illustrates a com-
munication practice task which provides practice in attending to socio-prag-
matic dimensions of language in production contexts (see also Newton in this
volume).
As Newton notes “the three task types offer a varied but integrated approach
to using authentic talk in language instruction for the workplace” (2004: 59).
Using local television programmes can also provide material for raising aware-
ness and learning to interpret humour correctly (Grant 1996; Grant and Devlin
1996; Grant and Starks 2001). Materials from our project are also available for
exposing learners to authentic data and for practising interpretive skills and sug-
gesting potential role plays (Stubbe and Brown 2002). Such tasks assist learners
to interpret and produce socio-pragmatically appropriate talk in authentic con-
texts and they are then well placed to adapt this knowledge for their own com-
municative ends.