Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Language and Culture 477
When the host proposes that a guest might sometimes experience understanding
diffi culties, the guest shifts away from the categorial relevance of
nonnative speakerness by agreeing that the technical terminology used in
his company is often troublesome to him. In another episode, after the
host has drawn up asymmetrically distributed entitlements to knowledge
about Japanese nature, the guest evokes the function of mountains and
rivers as regional boundaries and in so doing orients to his professional
identity as a student of Japanese history. In both cases, the collection
‘membership in a language and cultural community’, with its standard
relational pairs ‘native–nonnative speaker’ and ‘Japanese person–
foreigner’, gets replaced by the collection ‘professional status’ and the
contrast pairs ‘specialist–layperson’. One important implication from
Nishizaka’s analysis is that even when participants’ cultural and linguistic
diversity defi ne the rationale for an entire social activity, as in the case of
the radio show, it nonetheless needs to be shown in the participants’ conduct
whether such identities are indeed relevant for the participants at
any given moment, how such relevancies are interactionally established,
and how they may be replaced by other social categories.
In subsequent CA and MCA research, the themes introduced by
Nishizaka have been further explored and expanded, together with the
range of activities and participant constellations. To start with the latter,
multiparty interaction affords participants a wider range of methods to
orient themselves to cultural membership than the dyadic interview.
Mori (2003) investigated how Japanese and American students initiate
topical talk as they get acquainted with each other during the fi rst meeting
at a ‘conversation table’, a student-arranged activity for practicing
Japanese. In the absence of a shared history, matters associated with cultural
membership furnish possible topics in fi rst encounters. Similar to
the radio host in Nishizaka’s studies, the participants categorize each
other as ‘Japanese’ and ‘American’ by asking questions about Japanese
and American cultural objects. For example by asking the American participants
if they have seen any Japanese fi lms, the questioner categorizes
the American students as relative novices to Japanese culture. But what is
more, specifi c to the multiparty interaction, the category questions prompt
a particular participation structure. In response to the Japanese student’s
question regarding Japanese movies, the American students respond as a
team and thereby categorize the parties in the interaction into ‘culturally
same’ and ‘culturally different’. Each party also aligns as a team to repair
problems in hearing or understanding in the question-answer sequences. 13
Other methods by which the participants achieve the construction of
‘within-group’ and ‘across-group’ relations are speech style and language
choice: The Japanese students use addressee-honorifi cs when talking to
the American students while using plain forms to their Japanese peers,
and all participants choose the language associated with their team for