Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Language and Culture 471
categories of contextualization are cross-culturally shared, the specifi c
forms and their associations with dimensions of context are often not.
Early interactional sociolinguistic research found that different contextualization
practices were a frequent and typically unrecognized source of
misunderstanding between members of different speech communities
(Gumperz, 1982a, 1982b). Studies of interethnic communication 8 showed
that miscommunication and mutual negative attributions become particularly
acute when miscues accumulate over the course of an encounter and
instantiate diverging frames and activity-level inferences, with potentially
serious consequences for participants in high-stake (‘gatekeeping’) events
such as employment interviews (Gumperz et al., 1979), courtroom testimony
(Gumperz, 1982a) and a range of activities in educational settings,
including undergraduate counseling (Erickson & Shultz, 1982; Fiksdal,
1990), course consultation (Gumperz, 1992, 1996), college-level grade
negotiation (Tyler, 1995; Tyler & Davies, 1990) and oral language assessment
interviews (Ross, 1998). By showing how miscommunication is
interactionally co-produced by the participants through the systematic
details of their interaction and displayed confl icting understandings,
interactional sociolinguistics furnished a rigorous empirical basis for
research on intercultural communication in socially consequential real-life
encounters.
Despite this lasting achievement, the early work did not remain without
critics. One line of objections concerned the narrow focus on interethnic
miscommunication and its implicit suggestion that intercultural
communication is inherently fraught with problems, whereas interaction
between members of the same speech community is construed as largely
trouble-free. Contrary to this presumption, Coupland et al. (1991: 3)
describe all language use as ‘pervasively and even intrinsically fl awed,
partial and problematic’. The most compelling support for their contention
is the repair apparatus, a small set of generic interactional procedures
that interlocutors routinely draw on to address problems in
speaking, hearing and understanding (Schegloff et al., 1977). In the main,
problems are occasioned through interaction-internal contingencies
regardless of interaction-external factors, such as membership in different
ethnic groups (Schegloff, 1987). Furthermore, to the extent that interactional
diffi culties appear to result from confl icting frames 9 (Goffman,
1974), such diffi culties may arise out of asymmetries in institutional
knowledge and interactionally mediated power relations regardless of
participants’ ethnicities and cultural backgrounds. Finally, the focus on
miscommunication obstructs the view on successful intercultural interaction.
The interactional competencies and practices that enable participants
in intercultural activities to achieve understanding require equal
analytical scrutiny as communication diffi culties and breakdowns
(Bremer et al., 1996; Bührig & Thije, 2006).