Dialogue in and between Different Cultures - International ...

12 Jagdish Kaur
influence how often speakers repeat themselves in talk, the findings of the present
study suggest that it does not however affect the actual use of this resource when
shared understanding is at stake. Participants of diverse cultural groups have been
found in this study to repeat themselves in identical ways in the same contexts in
order to facilitate and enhance understanding in English as a lingua franca.
5. Conclusion
The study set out to establish how the practice of repeating was employed by a
group of non-native speakers of English to negotiate and co-construct
understanding in a language that was not their native language, namely in English
as a lingua franca. While repetition was found to be employed in various contexts
for a variety of purposes, this paper has focused on the use of repetition in two
specific contexts, namely after overlap and after an open class repair initiator. In
the case of the former, repetition provided the recipient with another opportunity
at hearing the segment of talk produced in overlap, hence possibly pre-empting a
problem of understanding that may have occurred as a result of the overlap. In the
case of the latter, repetition was used as a means of resolving a problem of
hearing or understanding that had occurred as indicated by the recipient’s use of a
repair initiator.
While the number of examples examined in this paper has necessarily been
small as a result of limitations of space, they represent for the most part the many
instances of repetition in the aforementioned contexts found to occur in the data.
The participants were found to employ the practice of repeating consistently in
these two contexts irrespective of their lingua-cultural background. Further, the
way in which this practice was employed showed no discernible differences. The
participants repeated prior segments of talk produced in overlap when overlap
was thought to possibly impair the recipient’s understanding of that segment of
talk. Similarly, the participants repeated a prior turn when the recipient signalled
that the turn was problematic in some way. In both cases, the participants sought
to provide redundancy as a means of addressing a problem of understanding, both
real and potential. In this regard, the practice of repeating appears to function as a
universal device used by speakers of English as a lingua franca to contribute
towards shared understanding.
References
Bremer, Katharina, Marie-Therese Vasseur & Margaret Simonot. 1996. Achieving Understanding:
Discourse in intercultural encounters. London: Longman.
Drew, Paul. 1997. “’Open Class Repair Initiators in Response to Sequential Sources of Troubles in
Conversation”. Journal of Pragmatics 28:69-101.
Firth, Allan. 1990. “‘Lingua franca’ Negotiations: Towards an interactional approach”. World
Englishes 9/3:269-280.