Towards a ‘prosodics’ of interaction
Hall (1999) takes a wider view than Bouton of the nature and function of
conversation. She writes of everyday conversation (1999: 138):
Much of this talk consists of interactive practices, that is, goal-oriented,
recurring moments of face-to-face interaction, through which we
manage our family relationships, engage in a variety of community-
and-work-related tasks, and nurture our social networks.
Up to a point, then, Hall dissolves the boundary between interactive and
transactional talk – both are goal-oriented. Interactional talk, however, is
implicitly directed towards managing our membership of a range of commu-
nities. This is the ongoing cultural function of ‘casual conversation’, and it is
managed differently by different communities within a single society,
whether these communities are defined by age group, social class, gender,
ethnicity, profession, or indeed leisure interest. Hall advocates advanced
learners becoming ethnographers, and proposes a framework for analysing
what she calls ‘the prosodics of interaction’, that is, the elements that combine
to structure interactional talk. Judd (1999: 162) proposes a similar model, and
the synthesis below contains elements of both:
Setting
:
Physical location, time, and duration of speech events.
Participants
: Their age, ethnicity, gender, and geographic origin. What
is the relative status of the participants (inferior
to superior; peers)?
Expected goals/outcomes
: These may be transactional (‘to make a pur-
chase’) or interactional (‘to strengthen social bonds by telling a story
that affirms group values’).
Topics
: The situation will influence what gets talked about. At social
events, we might expect gossip about the transgressions of absent com-
munity members, while in classroom situations, we would expect talk
to be determined by the objects of study.
The constitutive speech acts and their development
: How are the utterances
to be interpreted? Here we focus on the form and function of the utter-
ances; for example, in what kinds of situation do we find questions
answered by indirect affirmations such as ‘Is the Pope Catholic?’, and
in what kinds of situation might questions be responded to by under-
stated criticism, such as ‘Well, it certainly is different’? How structured
is the speech event – is it ritualised, as for example a religious service
might be, or
is it relatively unstructured, as in a casual conversation?
The participation structures
: How is the taking of conversational ‘turns’
managed among the participants? Are speakers self-selecting or nomi-
nated? How many can speak at one time? Who interrupts and who
‘yields the floor’? What strategies do speakers use to take the floor,
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Intercultural Approaches to ELT
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maintain the floor, and keep the conversation going? Again, participa-
tion structures will vary from context to context: in a classroom, the
teacher will usually keep the floor and nominate other speakers, while
in a casual conversation the floor will be negotiated more freely.
Formulaic openings and closings
: Some speech events have ritualised or
expected openings and closings. Transactions often begin with ‘Can I
help you?’ while story-telling within a conversation might start with a
cue such as ‘Well . . . ’.
Relevance to learners
: Will the learners ever encounter this kind of
speech event? Does it have an equivalent in their home culture? If so,
does the speech event in the home culture have similar or different
characteristics to that of the target culture?
Hall and Judd’s frameworks for the analysis of speech events usefully
guide learners towards an ethnographic analysis of the speech event – one
that will raise to their consciousness salient aspects of the way language is
used both transactionally and interactionally. Judd, however, is rightly
cautious about enthusiastically recommending that learners become
amateur ethnographers: this kind of analysis takes training, skill and time,
and a certain level of maturity – only teenagers and above will be able to
cope with the sophistication of this analysis. Moreover, it is not always easy
for teachers and learners in EFL contexts to find examples of ‘authentic’
native-speaker discourse to analyse. Judd recommends that learners in EFL
situations turn to media discourse for speech events to analyse but, as we
shall see in Chapter 8, this strategy has its drawbacks.
If an intercultural approach is to be implemented, then, some guidance
needs to be given both in ethnographic analysis and in developing
classroom tasks that focus on the cultural functions of casual conversation.
The following sections are intended to provide such guidance.
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