Language And Occupation Flashcards
John Swales 2011
Discourse communities.
A discourse community has members who: share a set of common goals, communicate internally using and ‘owning’ one or more genres, use specialist lexis and discourse, and possess a level of knowledge/skill to suitable participate in the community
He defined a discourse community as having members who:
>share a set of common goals
>communicate internally, using and ‘owning’ one or more genres of communication
>use specialist lexis and discourse
>possess a required level of knowledge and skill to be considered eligible to participate in the community.
Drew and Heritage- institutional talk
1992- believe institutional talk differs from ordinary conversation in various ways: goal orientation, turn-taking rules or restricios, allowable contributions, professional lexis, structure, asymmetry
Drew and Heritage inferential frameworks and power relations
1993
They suggest that members of a discourse community share inferential frameworks with each other.
This involves implicit ways of thinking, behaving and communicating.
They also suggest that there are strong hierarchies of power within organisations, with many asymmetrical power relations marked by language use
Koester- 2004- Phatic Talk
Looked at how employees can support each other in their tasks and shows how important Phatic talk is in getting jobs done.
Workers need to establish interpersonal relationships and have interactions that are not just about work-related procedures.
Although, some employers are represented as discouraging talk that is not strictly work-related, she shows that being personal and engaging in personal chat is an important aspect of effective working.
Solidarity, the ability to connect with one’s workmates, is an important aspect of workplace communication
Michael Nelson- 2000- Business Language
He wanted to investigate whether there was such a thing as business lexis.
He found that there was a ‘semantic field for business’ that involved a limited number of semantic categories.
Terms had to do with :
business people, companies, institutions, money, business events, places of business, time, modes of communication and technology.
He also found that certain language did NOT appear in business contexts. For exams, weekdays featured, but Saturday and Sunday did not.
There were also very few references to personal issues, house/home, family, society and personal activities
Cameron
2000- Call Centre Conversations. Studied telephone conversations in a call centre and found that they were highly formulaic rather than spontaneous.
She found questions asked by agents, and the order in which they are asked are determined by the software they are dealing with.
They need to elicit information from the caller and input it in to the computer in a specific order.
The customer should also feel he or she has been given good service, and therefore some of the things the agent says have to do with interpersonal or relational aspects of the encounter. - she is critical of these interactions.
She concludes that such conversations are
Coulthard and Sinclair 1975
found that teachers use the IRF (initiation - response - feedback) model.
IRF, is a pattern of discussion between the teacher and learner.
The teacher initiates, the learner responds, then the teacher gives feedback
Fairclough 2001
looked at the textual and contextual aspects of power:
1. Power in discourse = the ways in which power is conveyed through language.
2. Power behind discourse = the focus on social and ideological power. He also coined the phrase synthetic personalisation.
This refers to the way in which advertising and other forms of communication use personalised language such as the second person pronoun ‘you’ to construct an artificial relationship between the text producer and receiver
Goffman
1955- Face Theory:
FACE = a persons self-esteem and emotional needs.
FACE-THREATENING ACT = a communicative act that threatens face.
POSITIVE FACE = the need to feel wanted, liked and appreciated. NEGATIVE FACE = the need to have freedom of thought and action and not feel imposed on
Lakoff 2011
politeness principle - included three maxims to ensure that you won’t cause offence. 1. Don’t impose, 2. Give options, 3. Make the hearer feel good
Occupational Lexis
When we think of occupational language we tend to think of the lexical items that are part of that occupations semantic field.
This is because they are probably the most noticeable aspect of language use, especially if the terms are not exclusive to the occupation and not part of our more general vocabulary.
Specific Occupations
Most notably, law and medicine- not only use highly specialised lexis, but lexis that is heavily influenced by other languages. Many legal terms are based on French and Latin- these languages have been influential in the history of legal profession, as well as in the UK’s cultural history more generally.
Occupational Lexis focuses
> restricted usage
>usage that is shared with more general functions, but where the occupational usage has a particular meaning
Idiomatic expressions
Many idiomatic expressions in English started life more literally, as occupational references: for example, the phrases ‘bringing home the bacon’, ‘balancing the books’, ‘a close shave’ and ‘spinning a yarn’ all refer to different jobs.
Aspect of occupational language
Employees use language that is part of everyday discourse, but they resort to it more frequently than people outside that occupation.
Audience
The factor of audience for teaches’ reports is especially complex. They certainly have parents as one major audience, but they are also read by pupils, and in some cases, the reports actually address the students themselves.
Corpus (corpora plural)
A collection of searchable language data stored on a computer.
Modern language corpora are increasingly used to look at patterns in specialist domains. For example, Michael Nelson’s research at Manchester University on business English compared to a corpus of business language with a more general corpus, the British National Corpus (BNC), in order to investigate whether there was such a thing as business lexis.
Findings of Michael Nelson
He found what he describes as ‘a semantic field of business’ involving a limited number of semantic categories: terms to do with ‘business people, companies, institutions, money, business events, place of business, time, modes of communication and lexis concerned with technology’.
Comparison of Nelson
By comparing business English with the BNC, Nelson also showed what did not feature in business contexts. For example, while all the weekdays featured in business English, Saturday and Sunday did not. He also found little reference to personal issues, society, family, house and home, and personal activities.
Occupational grammar and discourse
Lexis is not the only language level that is useful when thinking about occupation.
Discourse structure
The internal structure of a text
Discourse community
An alternate term for a community of practise
Ethnography/ethnocentric
The study of how a group of people communicate. Ethnographers are often part of the community they study.
Predictable patterns?
Many occupations have use texts that have predictable patterns. For example, texts such as a doctor’s prescription; sheets showing earnings and expenditure in accountancy; a last will and testament; a marriage certificate; a police report, or a newspaper article all have predictable elements that are more or less flexible. All occupational discourses, and knowing how to write them is part of the knowledge held by any discourse community or community of practice.
Change of discourses
Discourses are constantly changing as members exercise their creativity in adapting and refreshing the language they use.
Occupational PRAGMATICS and power
Pragmatics and power are strongly interconnected because there is power in knowledge. If you know the rules of a community, you can participate in it; if you don’t, and you don’t know how to acquire knowledge of the rules, then you are destined to be an outsider.
Drew and heritage 2003
It suggests that members of a discourse community share inferential frameworks with each other, consisting of implicit ways of thinking, communicating and behaving. They also suggest that there are strong hierarchies of power within organisations, with many asymmetrical relationships marked by language use. One example of this is the idea that there are constraints on individuals dictating the language they are allowed to use.
Koester 2004 2
He shows how important phatic talk is, in getting jobs done. Workers need to establish interpersonal relationships and have interactions that are not just about work-related procedures. Koester shows that being sociable and engaging in personal chat is an important aspect of effective working. As well as power, then, solidarity- the ability to connect with one’s workmates- is an important dimension in the workplace communication.
Occupation and international English
International interactions are by no means simply about language skills of people who are using English as a second or additional language.
How might a teacher demonstrate instrumental power?
Direct and instruct students • Gain the attention of students • Challenge students • Dictate how and when students speak • Analyse transcript 1, focusing on the above categories. Can you find specific linguistic features that are used that fulfil these purposes?
John Sinclair and Malcolm Coulthard
1975:
IRF/IRE structure
Initiation
Response
Feedback or evaluation
This structure upholds the teachers power as the tecaher initiates the exchange and offers feedback after the student has responded, reflecting the asymmetrical relationship in the classroom.
Also , it points to the need for teachers to be positive, supporting and encouraging of their students.
Revoicing O’Connor and Michaels
When teachers include the students response in the subsequent discourse - they claim repeating what the student says serves several purposes:
• To draw other students’ attention to the comment and show its importance
• To encourage better understanding whilst still recognising and sharing the importance of
the contribution
To encourage further discussion and contribution (similar to IRF)
Wait time- Mary Budd Rowe
Research into the questions teachers use and particularly how long they wait.
• She found that when teachers ask questions of students, they typically wait 1 second or less for
the students to wait for a reply; after the student stops speaking they begin their reaction or offer
the next question in less than 1 second
However if the teacher waits longer there are pronounced changes in student use of language as
well as in student and teacher attitudes and expectations
Her research shows that the teacher is dictating the discourse in the classroom by introducing
wait time when questioning students
Standard language ideology
‘The effect of codification and prescription has been to legitimise the norms of formal registers of standard English rather than the norms of everyday spoken English’ (Milroy and Milroy 1991)
This led to the creation of a Standard Language Ideology:
• ‘Used to describe the pervasive belief systems that allow the privileging of
the standard variety to seem like commonsense and thereby allow discrimination
against non-standard varieties’ (Rosina Lippi-Green 2012)
• Standard English is a reflection of power hierarchies in society - it is the language
of those who hold power. It can also be used as a tool to discriminate against those
who don’t use it.
Basil Bernstein restricted and elaborated codes
Basil Bernstein - one of the first sociolinguists to write about language and class in the 1960s and 1970s
• He argued that there were two codes of language in existence that were used by different classes and for
different functions:
• Restricted code - tended to use simple grammatical
constructions, coordination of clauses, more concrete and
context-dependent vocabulary
• Elaborated Code: more complex grammatical constructions
(e.g. more use of subordination) and a more abstract vocabulary allowing more chance to theorise than the
restricted code
These weren’t exclusive to certain classes but tended to be
used differently by different occupations (which is a key
They are reductive
They make a false correlation between language use and
intelligence
Assumes that people who speak in dialects other than SE are unable to think in abstract ways
Upholds a Standard Language Ideology that favours SE over
other dialects factor in determining social class)
William Labov criticism
William Labov, wrote about this in ‘The logic of nonstandard
Language’ in 1972 following ethnographic research in Harlem
with black families.
About Bernstein’s codes he said: ‘Is the ‘elaborate code’ of
Bernstein really so ‘flexible, detailed and subtle’ as some
psychologists believe? Isn’t it also turgid, redundant, and empty?
Is it not simply an elaborated style, rather than a superior code
or system?’
From his research he concluded: ‘Our work in the speech
community makes it painfully obvious that in many ways
working-class speakers are more effective narrators, reasoners,
and debaters than many middle-class speakers who temporize,
qualify, and lose their argument in a mass of irrelevant detail’
Positive politeness
An attempt to ensure positive face is maintained; making the listener feel good about themselves. Friendliness, camaraderie- compliments, intent listening in group language
Negative politeness
Used to avoid the negative FTA of imposing on somebody. Apologising for bothering somebody trying to intrude or impede.
Hornyak 1994
Studied the link between language and occupation and noted that the shift from work talk to personal talk is always initiated by the highest ranking person in the room.
Michael Nelson
Compared the corpora of business English with more generic English corpora.
John salads
Came up with the idea of dixourse communities: a community of members with common goals; that communicate internally; that use specialist Lexis; that require a level of knowledge for participation
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