Interlanguage Pragmatics Exploring Institutional Talk
Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig (Editor), Beverly S. HartfordBooks.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
This edited volume brings discourse analysis into the study of second language pragmatics as an analytic paradigm. A well-regarded team of researchers addresses a difficult area for the interlanguage pragmatics research community-the balance between experimental method and the use of conversational data. The goal of the book is to demonstrate how the investigation of institutional talk balances the researcher's need for comparable and replicable interactions with the need to observe authentic outcomes. Institutional talk provides authentic and consequential talk. The chapters present empirical studies based on quantitative and qualitative analyses, which are carefully illustrated by the real-world variables that each institution controls. The chapters span a range of institutions including the university writing center, hotels, secondary schools, and employment offices. The variables examined include those traditionally investigated in interlanguage pragmatics, such as status, directness, and social distance, as well as new concepts like trust, authority, equality, and discourse style.Interlanguage Proagmatics: Exploring Institutional Talk will be of great interest to both researchers and students of interlanguage pragmatics in applied linguistics, TESOL programs, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistics.
Synopsis
Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford (both TESOL and applied linguistics, Indiana U.) present a collection of previously unpublished studies introducing interlanguage pragmatics researchers to "institutional talk"—talk that occurs in the course of carrying out an institution's business, usually between an institutional representative and a client. The studies are set in a variety of institutions in which both native and non-native speakers participate in the dialogues, including a university writing center, a university physics laboratory, a variety of secondary school classrooms, an employment agency, and a four-star hotel. Institutional talk is shown to provide a rich source of authentic discourse data which is also characterized by the highly controlled production tasks yielding comparable language samples necessary for interlanguage pragmatics research. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR