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Speech Acts Bibliography:
Miscommunication
Tyler, A. (1995). The coconstruction of cross-cultural
miscommunication: Conflicts in perception, negotiation, and enactment
of participant role and status. Studies in Second Language Acquisition,
17 (2), 129-152.
Examines the miscommunication which occurred
in a videotaped tutoring session between a Korean tutor and an English
student. The student needed assistance writing a computer program that
would score bowling, while the tutor was enrolled in an English oral
communication course requiring students to offer help in their area
of expertise and afterwards discuss the videotaped session. After reviewing
the literature dealing with non-native speaker (NNS) and native-speaker
(NS) interaction, the author establishes this case as an example of
naturally-occurring miscommunication based upon differences in the cultural
foundations of discourse and the establishment of status. Eight minutes
of the videotape were transcribed, with each participant providing comments
reflecting their reactions at each troublesome point in the conversation.
The initial "clash" occurred when the student inquired if the tutor
knew how to score bowling. His reply, "Yes, approximately," was the
culturally-appropriate way in Korea to modestly claim expertise, but
the student interpreted his statement and later silences as ignorance.
After thus determining her higher status as possessor of cultural knowledge,
she could not accept her tutor's explanations as valid or useful, although
she knew little about scoring herself. While the Korean tutor's discourse
management style contributed to the initial difference in participant
frames, his use of an inductive schema to explain the topic, beginning
each time from scratch and gradually building upon previous information,
suggested to the student that he was trying to figure the rules out
for himself. Accustomed to the Korean formal relationship of status
between teacher and student, he assumed she would accept his expertise
unquestioned and interpreted her questioning as rudeness. In addition,
his use of contextualization cues such as may and might,
chosen out of politeness on his part, reinforced the student's image
of him as tentative and unsure of himself. In summary, the mutual miscommunication
occurred not because of either participant's uncooperativeness, as both
the tutor and student believed, but rather because differing cultural
frameworks for discourse caused each participant to negotiate the higher
status for themselves.
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