Page 468 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

446 Saskia Corder and Miriam Meyerhoff

The community of practice’s emphasis on the gradual learning of norms
provides a framework that readily accommodates individuals shifting from pe-
ripheral membership in a community of practice to core membership. Fiona
Moul (2004) worked with a tutorial in a first year university course over a sem-
ester. A clear, dominant culture was established for patterns of interaction in
the tutorial from the start (this was partly defined by the tutor’s teaching style
and partly by the previous experience that some second year students who
were taking the course brought into the tutorial from Week 1). Moul showed
how the participation patterns of one young woman, Maria, moved from being
peripheral (in Weeks 1–3), to patterning like a core member of the tutorial (in
Weeks 9–10). This was measured in terms of how often Maria contributed to
tutorial discussions and the range of speech acts she used in making her con-
tributions.
Moul’s study focused not only on what individuals do in the tutorials (the
extent to which members share a repertoire), but also on the extent to which they
become involved in defining the goals of the tutorial and the success or appro-
priateness of each other’s contributions, e.g. how being funny or supportive in-
terrelate with being a leader or core member of a tutorial. She showed how a
community of practice approach to studying variation can illuminate not just
how core membership is enacted but also what it means to the group and indi-
viduals within the social space of that particular tutorial.
Taking a more longitudinal perspective on the distinction between core and
peripheral membership in communities of practice leads us to another aspect of
the framework, which perhaps resonates particularly with researchers in inter-
cultural communication. This is the extent to which members of a community of
practice can be said to have a shared history.

2.4. ‘Locally shared histories’ and ‘biographies’
Wenger points out that within a community of practice “learning and the negoti-
ation of meaning are ongoing within the various localities of engagement, and
this process continually creates locally shared histories [emphasis ours]” (1998:
125). As we noted above, Moul found that previous experience of tutorials and
previous experience in the subject area affected the level of an individual’s par-
ticipation and the kind of role they adopted as members of the emergent tutorial
community of practice (2004: 35). In other words, we see evidence in her study
for the relevance of shared histories that are highly local (i.e. form part of the
culture of the tutorial) and those which may belong to the larger culture (i.e.
here, the university).
Holmes and Stubbe (2003: 168) discuss how workplaces constitute commu-
nities of practice, acquiring their own locally shared history and patterns of
communication. They also examine how humour plays a role in the construction