Page 554 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

532 Jonathan Newton

The interaction
Sara … which leads me onto one other item which I haven’t got on the um
agenda ah is it alright if I …?
Ripeka yep, sure
Sara and that’s the um issue of writing [deep breath]. Um when, um when-
ever you – er – we’re drafting, well, I’ve noticed a couple of mistakes
creeping into our work. That’s stuff that, that even that I’ve looked at. I
notice it because the letters go through – all the letters that go out of the
ministry go through what’s called the day file. They also go through, er,
each manager as well as our own staff. Sometimes suddenly as I’m re-
reading I spot a spelling mistake which I didn’t see the first time or a
grammatical mistake
Simon/Ella/Ripeka mm, yeah
Sara I really ask for all of you to make sure that you take it to one other per-
son at least to, um, to look at before you, before you post it. Even when
you send it to me to look at it must also be checked by others. Of course
when you’re doing a big chunk of work then that’s normal for us t- – we
always do that checking. Even with just simple letters make sure that
they’re looked at. It’s so easy to overlook just a simple mistake and the
less mistakes we send out the better
Ella I’m doing that eh [laughs]
Simon yeah, kia ora
Ripeka I’d like to take that a bit further too cos if we’re going to use other lan-
guages in the letters, make sure they are also checked as well okay
Sara Kia ora

Notes

1. I am a member of the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project (LWP). All ref-
erences to ‘we’ and ‘us’ refer to fellow team members. I would like to thank in par-
ticular, Janet Holmes and Meredith Marra for assistance with preparing this paper for
publication. Nicky Riddiford assisted with valuable comments and insights on the
teaching programme which forms the basis for the analysis in this paper. LWP tran-
scribers made the material available for analysis. Finally, I thank those who allowed
their workplace interactions to be recorded. This research was supported by a Victoria
University Research Fund Grant.
2. For more details, see the Language in the Workplace website, http://www.vuw.ac.nz/
lals/lwp [Accessed 31 January 2007]
3. A fourth critical issue is, of course, monitoring and assessment of the effectiveness of
instruction. This however, lies beyond the scope of this chapter.