Schedule 71. StuTS + 31. TaCoS

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected and mobility increases, more and more encounters take place in which people interact despite the absence of a shared named language in their linguistic repertoires. Such communicative encounters may occur, for example, in tourism or between refugees and local authorities, when those involved have no lingua franca at their disposal. The study of communicative practices in such situations has largely been neglected so far. Yet, a better understanding of such practices would have important implications for numerous fields, including crisis response, social work and labor more generally in migration societies as well as language learning and teaching.

In this paper, I therefore present a close interactional analysis of an interaction without shared named languages, examining the communication strategies (Selinker, 1972; Dörnyei & Scott, 1997) and resources (Mondada 2019; Kidwell 2013) employed. The analysis is based on an audiovisual recording of a simulated restaurant visit in which four South Tyrolean secondary school students interacted with a Russian waitress and a tourist from Morocco seated at the same table. While all four students disposed of several named languages and varieties in their linguistic repertoires, none of them spoke Russian or (Moroccan) Arabic. In this paper, I investigate the communication strategies and semiotic resources which the interactants employed during this task, such as the use of deictic gestures and particles to establish a common focus and the use of objects and representational gestures in combination with speech to make verbal resources available to the co-interactants. In total, I show that interactants cooperatively establish common ground through the reflective, constantly adapting management of all available resources.

References:
Dörnyei, Z., & Scott, M. L. (1997). Communication strategies in a second language: Definitions and taxonomies. In Language Learning (Vol. 47, Issue 1, pp. 173–210). Blackwell Publishing Inc.

Kidwell, M. (2013). Framing, grounding, and coordinating conversational interaction: Posture, gaze, facial expression, and movement in space. In C. Müller, A. Cienki, E. Fricke, S. Ladewig, D.
McNeill, & S. Teßendorf (Eds.), Body–language–communication: An international handbook on multimodality in human interaction (Vol. 1, pp. 100–113). De Gruyter.

Mondada, L. (2019). Contemporary issues in conversation analysis: Embodiment and materiality, multimodality and multisensoriality in social interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 145, 47–62.

Selinker, L. (1972). Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 10(3), 209–231.

Info

Day: 2022-05-28
Start time: 14:00
Duration: 00:30
Room: Decartes (2.36)
Track: Applied Linguistics
Language: en

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