Page 478 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

456 Saskia Corder and Miriam Meyerhoff

tural communication necessarily involves contact between individuals who
have accumulated different sets of practices and beliefs which are important
for how they define themselves. The detailed, and generally longitudinal, na-
ture of the analysis required for a study of a community of practice is very simi-
lar to the work of an anthropologist. With this kind of descriptive detail, com-
parisons between communities of practice can be quite specific. As Corder
showed in her work with Studmuffins and Female Firsts, the salient details are
often found not at the level of what general activities the members of different
communities of practice engage in, but at the level of how the members of dif-
ferent communities of practice actualize those activities (cf. Marra and Holmes
in this volume).
This presents both opportunities and challenges to researchers who might be
interested in using sociolinguistics as the basis for engaging with and planning
interventions in institutions such as schools, in order to combat bullying, or in
order to break cycles of chronic under-performance by working class students
and widen their participation in the social and economic marketplace. Commu-
nity of practice studies such as those done by Peck (2000) and Holmes (2000),
and Heydon’s conversation analytic approach, show that through micro-level
analysis of language within a community, linguists can expose interactional pat-
terns that create institutional power asymmetries, and hence are able to make
tangible suggestions for macro-level or societal improvement.
Furthermore, community of practice studies have allowed for important
suggestions to be made in the promotion of gender equality, particularly in the
area of the workplace. As Stubbe et al. (2000: 250–251) discuss, by focusing on
a social constructionist or performative model of language, and by analysing in-
dividual interactions, we can break down unhelpful gender stereotypes which
impose oppositional categorizations such as ‘Men are from Mars and Women
are from Venus’. 7
Nevertheless, we see reason to be cautious in our enthusiasm. While there is
always something refreshing and emancipatory about a new approach to stu-
dying and analysing old questions and problems, we see the community of prac-
tice as being an addition to sociolinguists’ tool kit, rather than a substitution for
all the old tools. Just as there are inherent areas of potential, there are inherent
limitations to the kinds of situations and questions which can be addressed using
the community of practice approach. It is due to these limitations that we felt it
necessary to discuss in Section 2.3.1 the importance of Wenger’s criterial fea-
tures being fulfilled in order to speak of a community of practice.