Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

472 Part 6: Language and Interaction
Critics have also contended that in order to account for miscommunication
in intercultural talk, interactional sociolinguistics places too
much of the explanatory burden on contextualization cues while neglecting
attention to ‘pre-text’ (Hinnenkamp, 1987), the discourse-external
macrostructures, power asymmetries, ideologies and prejudicial attitudes
preceding the current interaction (Meeuwis, 1994; Sarangi, 1994; Shea,
1994). As several writers argue, following Giddens (1976), social contexts
differ in the extent to which they are ‘brought about’ – emergent and constructed
through the ongoing interaction – and ‘brought along’ as locally
instantiated versions of pre-existing communicative genres and associated
frames (Auer, 1992). Lastly, interactional sociolinguistics has been
taken to task for assuming an essentialist view of native and nonnative
identities and a static, monolithic concept of culture that in turn serves
analysts as a resource to explain miscommunication as the result of cultural
mismatches and thereby contributes to stereotypical views of intercultural
communication (Sarangi, 1994; Shea, 1994).
Many of these problems have been addressed effectively in more recent
interactional sociolinguistic research on intercultural discourse. Analytical
practices such as bracketing the common-sense notion that cultural diversity
is omnirelevant and adopting an emic perspective consistently enable
researchers to investigate rather than take as an unexamined given whether
cultural diversity is indeed a relevant concern for the participants in an
activity. A growing body of literature has examined ordinary conversations
and interactions in medical, educational, and legal settings, public
and private services, at work places and in other institutional contexts; in
a large variety of geographical and socio-historical environments; with
participants differing in such ‘transportable identities’ (Zimmerman, 1998)
as social class, race, ethnicity, culture, gender and age; and conducted by
means of equally diverse linguistic repertoires. This work converges on
the outcome that the most powerful organizing force in social interaction
is the activity that participants are engaged in, irrespective of their memberships
in transportable social categories. Cultural membership is interrelated
in complex ways with the situated identities associated with the
current activity and may alternately be backgrounded, foregrounded or
neutralized throughout the activity (Bührig & Thije, 2006; Di Luzio et al.,
2001; Higgins, 2007). One important methodological implication is that
researchers have to tease out whether (successful or problematic) actions
in institutional settings are informed by institutional or culture-specifi c
relevancies. In the effort to develop a nonessentialist view on interactions
among culturally diverse participants, researchers have argued that intersubjectivity
is achieved through aligned perspectives rather than shared
ethnicity. Reconsidered from this angle, diffi culties in intercultural interaction
can more productively be seen as resulting from misaligned perspectives
than from presumptive cultural mismatches (Shea, 1994; Thije,