Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Language and Culture 469
indispensable resources for teaching and testing the pragmatics of a target
language (Alcón & Martínez-Flor, 2008). But despite this useful contribution,
the approach has a number of shortcomings. One set of problems
centers around the inferences drawn from the described pragmatic patterns.
The rationale for cross-cultural comparison is to identify contrasts
in the speech act usage between speakers of different languages who are
assumed to be members of a culture associated with the language. No
published study is based on systematic sampling, yet the participants
recruited through convenience-and-volunteer sampling are routinely
treated as representative of large and empirically diverse social populations.
The populations, in turn, are considered homogenous ‘cultures’,
whose putatively defi ning characteristics (‘individualist’ versus ‘collectivist’,
‘negative politeness’ versus ‘positive politeness’, e.g. Fukushima,
2000) are understood to determine, or be indexed through, the pragmatic
patterns identifi ed in the study. Although it has become a common disclaimer
to reject essentializing and homogenizing categorizations, precisely
such categorizations are encouraged by the research paradigm itself.
A recent development that begins to bring cross-cultural speech act studies
on a more sociolinguistically defensible footing is variational pragmatics
(Félix-Brasdefer, 2008b; Schneider & Barron, 2008), an effort to examine
dialectal pragmatic variation within larger language communities.
A second set of problems derives from the speaker-centered production
model. The concern with speaker intention precludes the view of speech
acts as actions-in-interaction, jointly produced by at least two participants
as sequences within the turn-taking system and larger activities. While
different approaches to discourse have demonstrated the important role
of linguistic conventions in performing language-mediated action (e.g.
Curl & Drew, 2008, for request formats; Heritage & Roth, 1995, for question
formats in political interviews), the convention view of meaning gives
insuffi cient recognition to the fundamentally indexical character of language
use, and it ignores the temporal, sequential and nonverbal resources
and organizations by which participants accomplish action in interaction.
Third, the pre-occupation with cultural difference tends to obscure that
the structures of social actions and interaction are fundamentally shared
across human communities, drawing on the same interactional organizations
and categories of semiotic resources. A more balanced emphasis on
the universal and the local in cross-cultural pragmatics (Kasper & Rose,
2002; Ochs, 1996) has important implications for language pedagogy, as it
encourages teachers to acknowledge and build on shared cultural resources
in diverse student groups. Cultural sensitivity needs to extend to sameness
as well as otherness. Finally, inferences from cross-cultural comparison
to intercultural interaction require particular circumspection
because the method of comparing and contrasting speech act performance
across linguistic and cultural groups cannot address such fundamental