Doing being applied linguists: the importance of experience
SEVEN CASE STUDIES
Workplace communication
Away from education, the workplace is probably the major setting for necessary communication. Typically, it is the migrant for whom communication at work presents at the least misunderstandings and hostility and at the worst loss of job (or failure to obtain one). Those applied linguists who study communication in the workplace have a dual purpose: to extend our knowledge of language genre so as to add to the theoretical base of language variety; and to provide input to the design of language-teaching materials for use in training courses on workplace communication for migrants, or to provide advice for administrators about how to minimize mis communication.
Those who work in settings which during the past twenty years have been the research sites for studies of workplace discourse include doctors, psychologists, commodity dealers and personnel managers. These studies have contributed to our understanding of institutional discourse and communicative relationships in the workplace. The problem for applied linguists who work in these settings is their tendency to underestimate the complexity of working with non-language professionals while avoiding being seen as both patronizing and as irrelevant outsiders.
To be successful in these settings, applied linguistics needs ‘a set of conceptual and analytic tools which are sensitive to the particular work contexts in which they work’. Developing these tools is possible only by interaction between applied linguists and field professionals, the ambition being to achieve the integration of theory with practice (Roberts et al. 1997).
The 1979 film Crosstalk (Gumperz et al. 1979) set out to analyze and remedy cross-cultural communication in the workplace, with particular reference to the experience of Asian migrants in the UK. The film and its accompanying training methods are based on the analysis of differential features in the English of Asian-born speakers of English and in the English of UK-born speakers of English. What this analysis shows is that there are distinct cultural conventions used to infer meaning and attitudes. Use of such features (on both sides) causes misunderstandings and break-downs of communication:
It is at the level of grasping the overall significance of what is being said and of drawing the correct inferences, that is of reading between the lines as to what is really intended, that the Asian-English system and the English-English [communication between two native speakers of British English] system of linguistic signals for information and attitude differ most.
(ibid 1979: 9–10)
For example English-English people are confused by Asian-English lack of stress patterns and by their wrong use of turn-taking, while Asian-English people are confused by apologetic or polite and repetitive uses of English and by their appearance of not listening to what is being said.
In for example a job interview in which an Asian is applying for a post as librarian in a college, a number of ‘indirect’ questions were raised with the candidate concerning his reasons for his interest in this particular job. The point of this type of question was to determine whether the candidate saw the post for which he was being inter viewed as part of a strategy of careful career development. The candidate, however, interpreted all questions of this sort as direct rather than indirect and therefore as challenging his right to want a job at all. As a result he found this line of questioning insulting.
The professionals involved in the interview were officials of the college where the applicant sought employment. They were the Vice-Principal, the Head of Department and the Chief Administrative Officer. The film and materials are based on the combined analysis by these officials and the project applied linguists of the form and purpose of typical job interviews and the ways in which these are linguistically encoded.
