Being one of the group
by Nadia Mari, 5th October, 2007
An abstract of a project that analyzes how second-language learners and native speakers interact in small groups.
This is an abstract of a larger research project I took part in (“Iniziativa Didattica Studentesca” by Patrick Boylan and Nadia Mari, University of Rome La Sapienza), led by a team of teachers and students of English as a Second Language of the University La Sapienza of Rome. The project was presented at the 6th International Pragmatics Association Congress, Reims, 1996, in the form which you can find by clicking on this link http://digilander.libero.it/interculture/boylan/text/boylan01.htm. The project analyzes how second-language learners and native speakers interact in small groups. It focuses on how apparently marginal behavior, such as eye and head movement, may contribute to each participant's status as an ‘insider’ or ‘outsider’. To what degree, then, are eye/head movements culturally distinctive? What messages do they convey? How can we be sure we have understood them? Can adapting our eye/head movements improve communication? The paper argues that by studying conversations as ‘texts’, such questions cannot fully be answered. It then proposes the notion of ‘enactment of intent’ as the basic ‘unit’ making up conversations, and outlines an innovative research procedure based on experiential knowledge, better suited to ascertaining the local meaning of somatic as well as verbal and prosodic messages. This, it claims, is the kind of knowledge that learners of a second language (henceforth L2) need and that conversation analysis should consider investigating. The aims of the present research project were: Unfortunately, current language teaching methodology gives L2 learners neither the know-how nor the intellectual tools to acquire such know-how empirically in real-life situations. Thus it is common for even moderately fluent L2 learners to report that, in small group conversations with native speakers, they often feel stifled, ignored or, worse yet, condescendingly listened to during the occasional lulls in the ‘real’ conversation. In other words, these L2 learners do not feel accepted as ‘one of the group’. But, of course, how could they be? They have no idea of what it takes to gain a "footing" in the new culture. What can a teacher do to prepare L2 students to understand and assimilate the dynamics of the conversational interactions in which they find themselves? A first step would be to determine what indeed is required to gain a footing in a given foreign culture. Frake (1964) suggests, rather convincingly, that this involves learning to feel as ‘real’ what is ‘real’ for one's interlocutors. There is no doubt, in fact, that in multi-cultural group conversations L2 learners will tend to be ignored if the topics they raise — ‘real’ to people back home — appear pointless to the group or out or place. The same goes if these L2 learners, by lack of appropriate reaction, treat as pointless or irrelevant the topics that the rest of the group finds ‘really’ significant, controversial, humorous, scandalous or whatever. Indeed, to use a metaphor from transplant surgery, can we really blame the group for rejecting a body felt as foreign? After all, why should the group take seriously people who don't take seriously things that matter? It may be instructive but it is certainly not pleasurable to let an outsider, by her apparent disregard, call into question what one always thought mattered; and it must be remembered that conversation (fun) is different from discussion (work) precisely because it operates on the pleasure principle. If, on top of it all, the outsider makes conversation management a chore — by sending confusing signals through ‘strange’ eye and head movements or by maintaining a speaking style diametrically opposite from her interlocutors on such culturally indicative scales as physical-contact ~ distance, one-speaker-at-a-time ~ multiple-flooring, explicitness ~ allusiveness — she can hardly complain at being left out of the conversation. She has in fact opted out by not having opted in. What L2 learners need, then, is the capacity to meet their interlocutors a little more than half-way culturally. This does not mean memorizing lists of conversational topics and Do's & Don'ts. Actors get quickly unmasked. It means something much simpler but much more radical: sharing, at least in part, the existential value system at the bottom of the other culture. To be truly ‘one of the group’, L2 learners must truly feel they are. In this perspective, therefore, the stretches of talk ordinarily called ‘conversations’ — e.g., the talk that occurs between the lifting and the lowering of a phone receiver — are simply fragments of a single, uninterrupted conversation punctuating the lifetime of individuals and their community (and still unachieved when both pass away). Chats on the phone will of course have, like all conversational fragments, recognizable textual features (phone calls are partly ritual) and even goals. But insofar as the call is ‘conversation’, it will not be a ‘text’. In conclusion, a specific kind of non-textual competence is needed for analyzing a conversation as a researcher, as well as for co-creating one as a participant. By Nadia Mari
marinadia@libero.it
www.nmtranslations.it
© Nadia Mari
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