Exploring The Power Of Social Talk In A Foreign Language
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Exploring the Power of Social Talk in a Foreign Language
This book examines the fundamental interactional dimension to foreign language communication, including the establishment, development, consolidation and maintenance of interpersonal relations. It argues that interpersonal language use such as small talk, casual conversation and gossipy talk is not only key to meaningful and productive communication but that it is an essential dimension with respect to successful foreign language interaction and that engaging in interpersonal language is communicatively valuable and worthwhile in its own right. Crucially, it explores how teaching and learning can utilise the role of social talk and relational engagement in helping interactants to express, voice and convey their own values, attitudes and beliefs. Finally, it develops a critical relational pedagogy focused on language speakers’ needs, objectives and desires. Redressing the imbalance between transactional and interactional language teaching, and stressing the importance of phatic and relational language use in helping language users achieve their communicative goals, it will appeal to researchers, postgraduates and scholars in the fields of education and linguistics.
Status and Power in Verbal Interaction
Author: Julie Diamond
language: en
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Release Date: 1996-01-01
Status and Power in Verbal Interaction is a sociolinguistic study of conversation in a social context. Using an ethnographic methodology and a network analysis of the social roles and relationships in a particular language community, the book explores how speakers negotiate status, relationship, and ultimately contest power through discourse. Of chief concern to the study is how speakers manage to negotiate relationship roles — which here consists of institutional status as well as the more variable social standing — using conversation. Discourse is seen to be not only what people say, but how they say it — how speakers take the floor, bring new topic to the floor, interrupt each other, and become a resource person in a conversation. The study revolves around the idea that power, while intricately tied to social standing and institutional status, is more than the sum of one's institutional standing, age, education, race and gender. Though these factors convey rank, conversants nonetheless use discourse to jockey for position and contest their relational role vis-a-vis their discourse partners. While institutional standing may be more or less fixed, power of relational roles fluctuates greatly because, as the study shows, power is accorded through a process of ratifying the positive self-image of a speaker. Thus, one's standing in a group is a community negotiation. By investigating power in community at a micro-level of analysis, this study adds a new dimension to existing understandings of power.
Critical Foreign Language Teaching
This book develops the theory and practice of critical foreign language pedagogy. Written by a distinguished scholar of pragmatics and sociolinguistics, it encourages educators to think beyond traditional methods of language teaching to consider both the social reality of being a foreign language user and the personal goals and experiences of each learner. It emphasises the need to teach students how to navigate the types of interactional difficulties, power imbalances, and hostility they may experience outside of the classroom as well as how to recognise and analyse ‘native’ speaker norms and practices. It further stresses the importance of first-language knowledge in developing foreign language expertise, encouraging educators to build on the skills learners already have to empower them to express their personality and individuality in their target language. A significant contribution to foreign language pedagogy, this book offers language teachers, bilingual speakers, and researchers practicable insights into how to support learners to attain and realise their own goals and aspirations in their target language.