An Introduction to Applied Linguistics

4.4 Workplace communication
Away from education, the workplace is probably the major setting for necessary
communication. Typically, it is the migrant for whom communication at work
presents at the least misunderstandings and hostility and at the worst loss of job (or
failure to obtain one). Those applied linguists who study communication in the
workplace have a dual purpose: to extend our knowledge of language genre so as to
add to the theoretical base of language variety; and to provide input to the design of
language-teaching materials for use in training courses on workplace communication
for migrants, or to provide advice for administrators about how to minimise mis -
communication.
Those who work in settings which during the past twenty years have been the
research sites for studies of workplace discourse include doctors, psychologists,
commodity dealers and personnel managers. These studies have contributed to
our understanding of institutional discourse and communicative relationships in the
workplace. The problem for applied linguists who work in these settings is their
tendency to underestimate the complexity of working with non-language pro -
fessionals while avoiding being seen as both patronising and as irrelevant outsiders.
To be successful in these settings, applied linguistics needs ‘a set of conceptual and
analytic tools which are sensitive to the particular work contexts in which they work’.
Developing these tools is possible only by interaction between applied linguists and
field professionals, the ambition being to achieve the integration of theory with
practice (Roberts et al. 1997).
The 1979 film 
Crosstalk
(Gumperz et al. 1979) set out to analyse and remedy
cross-cultural communication in the workplace, with particular reference to the
experience of Asian migrants in the UK. The film and its accompanying training
methods are based on the analysis of differential features in the English of Asian-born
speakers of English and in the English of UK-born speakers of English. What this
analysis shows is that there are distinct cultural conventions used to infer meaning
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and attitudes. Use of such features (on both sides) causes misunderstandings and
break-downs of communication:
It is at the level of grasping the overall significance of what is being said and of
drawing the correct inferences, that is of reading between the lines as to what
is really intended, that the Asian-English system and the English-English [com -
munication between two native speakers of British English] system of linguistic
signals for information and attitude differ most.
(ibid 1979: 9–10)
For example English-English people are confused by Asian-English lack of stress
patterns and by their wrong use of turn-taking, while Asian-English people are con -
fused by apologetic or polite and repetitive uses of English and by their appearance
of not listening to what is being said.
In for example a job interview in which an Asian is applying for a post as librarian
in a college, a number of ‘indirect’ questions were raised with the candidate concern -
ing his reasons for his interest in this particular job. The point of this type of question
was to determine whether the candidate saw the post for which he was being inter -
viewed as part of a strategy of careful career development. The candidate, however,
interpreted all questions of this sort as direct rather than indirect and therefore as
challenging his right to want a job at all. As a result he found this line of questioning
insulting.
The professionals involved in the interview were officials of the college where the
applicant sought employment. They were the Vice-Principal, the Head of Depart -
ment and the Chief Administrative Officer. The film and materials are based on the
combined analysis by these officials and the project applied linguists of the form and
purpose of typical job interviews and the ways in which these are linguistically
encoded.