Page 45 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

Discourse, cultural diversity and communication 23

method resembles the conversational analyst’s procedures of reconstructing the
strategies members employ in formulating specific actions, but it differs from
conversational analysis in that the concern is with the situated interpretation of
communicative intent, not with strategies as such, and in that analysis is not con-
fined to overtly lexicalized information. Instead of taking interpretive processes
for granted, it suggests a) what the most likely interpretations are and b) what the
assumptions are and the inferential processes by which they are achieved.
Empirical studies employ the following procedures to deal with the problem
of interpretive ambiguity. First, there is an initial period of ethnographic research
designed to: a) provide insight into local communicative conventions; b) dis-
cover the recurrent types of encounters most likely to yield communicative data
relevant to the research problem at hand; c) find out through observation, inter-
viewing key participants and checking one’s own interpretations with them of
how local actors handle the problems they encounter and what their expectations
and presuppositions are. In the second stage, the ethnographic findings provide
the basis for selecting events reflecting representative sets of interactions for re-
cording. Analysis begins with the scanning of the recorded materials at two le-
vels of organization: a) content and b) pronunciation and prosodic organization.
The aim is to isolate sequentially bounded units, marked off from others in the
recorded data by some degree of thematic coherence and by beginnings and ends
detectable through co-occurring shifts in content, prosody, or stylistic and other
formal markers. Extending the ethnography of communication practice some-
what, the term event is used to refer to such temporally organized units. The aim
is to discover segments of naturally organized interaction containing empirical
evidence to confirm or disconfirm the analyst’s interpretations, evidence against
which to test assumptions about what is intended elsewhere in the sequence.
Once isolated, event recordings are transcribed, and interactional texts (that
is transcripts that account for all the communicatively significant, verbal and
non-verbal signs perceived) are prepared by setting down on paper all those per-
ceptual cues: verbal and nonverbal, segmental and non-segmental, prosodic,
paralinguistic and other cues that, as past and on-going research shows, speakers
and listeners demonstrably rely on as part of the inferential process. This pro-
cedure enables us not only to gain insights into situated understandings, but also
to isolate recurrent form–context relationships and show how they contribute
to interpretation. Relationships can then be studied comparatively across events
to yield more general hypotheses about members’ contextualization practices.
Contextualization can take many linguistic forms. Among the most import-
ant are the choice among permissible linguistic options at the level of pronun-
ciation, morphology, syntax or lexicon – as in code or style switching, the use of
intonation or tone of voice, speech rhythm or pausing, and the use of formulaic
phrases or idiomatic expressions that have particular interactional import. It fol-
lows that shared knowledge of contextualization conventions is a precondition