Addressing Difficult Situations in Foreign-Language Learning

Confusion, Impoliteness, and Hostility

Gerrard Mugford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429810114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book examines a neglected area of foreign-language teaching and learning: difficult and aggressive situations. The author presents the real-life experiences of language users and analyses how these individuals have dealt with confusion, impoliteness and hostility in target-language contexts in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom and within their home country. By constructing a student-centred pedagogical model around the data collected, the author considers the choices available to language learners in difficult situations, as well as tools for language learners to develop pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic resources.

1
Introduction

When studying a foreign language (FL), learners usually focus on how to employ language resources to interact effectively and appropriately in target-language (TL) contexts and successfully negotiate a wide range of predictable communicative situations. However, FL users often face uncomfortable and problematic situations in which they need to interact under difficult, erratic and demanding circumstances. Participants need to make on-the-spot decisions, often making use of limited information and performing under tense communicative pressure to produce quick and socially acceptable responses. Language proficiency in itself may not provide sufficient resources to negotiate negative or uncomfortable situations. This is an area of FL or second-language (L2) learning and teaching that needs to receive much greater attention and has to some extent been ignored in the teaching of English whether it be as English as a Foreign Language (EFL) or as English as a Second Language (ESL)—a distinction which is challenged in this book.

Uncomfortable and difficult situations can be experienced by FL speakers when they encounter a lack of cooperation and support as they communicate in the TL. They may sense uneasiness in a given social relationship or may face openly hostile remarks from other language users. Such feelings cannot be just dismissed as purely subjective experiences and explained away as a lack of language competence. They illustrate, rightly or wrongly, real-life perceptions, evaluations and reactions and reflect demanding communicative challenges for FL users.

In order to understand problems and challenges confronting both EFL/ESL users, I have specifically focused on Mexican advanced English-language users. I also argue that these findings are just as relevant to FL/L2 users from other countries and, indeed, in other FL contexts. To support this argument, experiences of Mexican speakers of German, French and Italian are also highlighted.

Mexican English-language users were asked to recall difficult, impolite and aggressive situations they had experienced or witnessed in TL contexts. By adopting a discourse analysis approach to narratives in this book, FL users’ histories and experiences can provide valuable insights into how EFL/ESL interactants reacted to and dealt with confusion, impoliteness and hostility in the TL. Whilst Mexican English-language users’ accounts are obviously partial, one-sided and anecdotal and were conducted after the event, such recollections do provide important understandings into the long-term effects of an event having made a lasting impression on them. Past experiences can serve as a basis for a pedagogy that prepares language users to negotiate potentially problematic situations. Such a teaching approach needs to come from the learners themselves as they evaluate a given negative situation, assess the linguistic response options available and react accordingly. The previously mentioned procedure is afforded by the Illustration–Interaction–Induction (i + i + i) mode (Carter, 2004; Carter & McCarthy, 1995; McCarthy, 1998; McCarthy & Carter, 1995) which encourages learners to research, record and experiment with TL use. Students can examine the choices that others have made and study how they would react in similar circumstances. They are then given the opportunity to try out and decide how they want to come across in those same situations in terms of face (Goffman, 1967) and stance (Du Bois, 2007; Englebretson, 2007a) and thus prepare themselves for negative and difficult situations. Face refers to the way an interactant wants to project him- or herself in a given situation, and stance refers to the position to be taken.

This line of research and teaching reflects an emic approach regarding how EFL/ESL users themselves understand and react to difficult situations in terms of face and stance. In this book, I undertake a detailed examination of face with regard to FL interaction by going beyond face as an individual concept and studying group and national face. When projecting their face, L2 speakers need to adopt a stance or positionality when confronted with difficult situations, impoliteness and hostility. This means that they have to assess a given TL situation and subsequently take a decision regarding their desired reaction. Therefore, I argue that a framework of face and stance provides the groundwork for the analytical study of uncomfortable, impolite and aggressive actions because it provides FL users with real-life communicative choices.

In this introductory chapter, I argue for the importance of face and stance in helping FL speakers confront difficult situations, whilst going into more detail in the following chapter. I then describe the participants in this study in terms of speaker characteristics and communicative objectives and critically examine the proclaimed differences between EFL and ESL users with regard to difficult situations, impoliteness and hostility. Next, I outline the pedagogic focus of the book which aims to prepare learners to negotiate difficult situations, impoliteness and hostility. Subsequently, I explain the research approach and the analytical framework employed. Finally, I provide an overview and brief description of chapters of the book.

Importance of Face

FL speakers’ negative experiences of difficult, impolite and aggressive incidents can be analysed in terms of a denial of face (Goffman, 1967); that is, the image that they want to project is rejected by other language users. TL speakers may not accept FL users as bona fide and fully fledged participants in a given interaction. Goffman defines face as ‘the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself [sic] by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact’ (1967, p. 5). In successful interaction, participants validate each other’s position or face and support an interlocutor’s line, that is, ‘a pattern of verbal and nonverbal acts by which he [sic] expresses his view of the situation …’ (1967, p. 5). However, in difficult and uncomfortable situations, interactants may encounter trouble in having their face accepted by other participants. Consequently, they fail to successfully pursue the line they wish to take. Goffman remarks that such participants are ‘out of face’ or may even ‘lose face.’ Whilst native TL speakers may have access to the necessary pragmatic and discoursal resources to overcome a loss of face, EFL/ESL users have to develop their own sense of awareness regarding how interactional complications can be surmounted and subsequently develop strategies and courses of action to deal with communicative difficulties.

Such courses of action are afforded by Spencer-Oatey’s (2008b) concepts of face and rapport management. Examining interpersonal language use in terms of face management, management of sociality rights and obligations, and management of interactional goals, Spencer-Oatey argues that

face is associated with personal/relational/social value, and is concerned with people’s sense of worth, dignity, honour, reputation, competence, and so on. Sociality rights and obligations, on the other hand, are concerned with social expectancies, and reflect personal concerns over fairness, consideration and behavioural appropriateness. Interactional goals refer to the specific task and/or relational goals that people may have when they interact with each other.

(2008b, pp. 13–14)

In FL contexts, interactants’ senses of worth, dignity, competence and so on become very real issues when negotiating difficult situations and trying to overcome language, cultural and contextual problems. At the same time, L2 speakers enter into TL interaction with expectancies regarding how they will be viewed and treated, for example with fairness and supportively. This may not be the case if they are denied face by TL speakers who do not accept them as competent and genuine TL users. Finally, interactants may face pragmatic and discoursal difficulties in trying to resolve relational and transactional problems in novel and previously culturally unattempted language contexts.

In the data presented in this book, participants’ experiences reveal that they had to deal with uncooperative interlocutors, linguistic impoliteness and verbal aggression. Uncooperative interaction involves problems and difficulties in pursuing transactional and interactional goals when an interactant’s face is not validated as he or she struggles to be taken seriously as a fully participative member of a given speech community. Difficulties may range from the challenge of buying a simple meal to being told that one cannot be understood in the TL. Linguistic impoliteness involves both intentional and unintentional behaviour that directly threatens and undermines the face of an interactant. Such incidents include being laughed at for one’s pronunciation and being refused anticipated help from native speakers. Aggression involves a manifest attack on the face of an interactant. This can be examined in terms of conflict, rejection and denial. Such incidents include being openly attacked for one’s customs and behavioural practices and receiving racial slurs such as, in the case of the Mexican participants, being called a ‘wetback.’

Whilst no clear-cut division was made by participants regarding the terms uncooperative interaction, linguistic impoliteness and verbal aggression, the categories do reflect a data-driven approach to classifying participants’ experiences and reflections. These real-life incidents sit in opposition to invented examples and Discourse Completion Texts which aim to substantiate the researcher’s preselected analytic terminology. These categories allow for the development of a deeper understanding of the challenges that FL interactants face and offer identifiable contexts that can be explored in the EFL/ESL classroom.

Stance

When encountering difficult and uncomfortable situations, participants have choices regarding how they wish to react and respond. There can be no onesize-fits-all response; situation, participants, communicative goals, genre, norms of interaction and so on (Hymes, 1974) all need to be taken into consideration during spoken interaction before a suitable reply can be formulated. Furthermore, in verbalising their responses, interactants have the communicative option of coming across in predictable and standardised ways or by interacting in a very individualistic and creative manner. Within such a framework of communicative variables and choices, FL users need to position themselves with regard to how they want to respond. The concept of stance (Englebretson, 2007a; Jaffe, 2009) offers one way for L2 speakers to develop and structure their responses. By determining a stance (or positionality), interactants are in a much stronger position to confront and to seek solutions in difficult situations.

When negotiating difficult contexts, stance involves

• assessment of the TL situation (including one’s personal standpoint and others’ attitudes and beliefs),
• interactional response (the construction and negotiation of face and line that participants wish to pursue) and
• intersubjectivity (efforts by FL users to relate to and cooperate with others).

Such a framework allows interlocutors to develop and carry out a principled plan of action when engaged in awkward and problematic situations.

As a first step in assessing the TL situation, interactants need to build on their existing pragmatic and discursive knowledge which comes from their first language, or what Bourdieu (1972) refers to as habitus, that is interactional patterns and practices based on recent experiences and previous histories. Such background knowledge enables FL users to notice how language is used in a given context (Taguchi & Roever, 2017; Schmidt, 1990) and focus on the features of uncooperative interaction, linguistic impoliteness and verbal aggression. Noticing can help participants understand critical moments (i.e. when the perceived communicative difficulties surface and become salient) and assess the degree of face damage that has occurred and how they want to react. On a pragmatic dimension, participants need to identify both pragma-linguistic and sociopragmatic resources which offer a means of understanding the communicative intentions of interactants. Pragmalinguistics studies the varied ways of undertaking communicative acts (Kasper & Rose, 2001, p. 3) and includes bluntness/evasiveness and directness/indirectness. Pragmalinguistics is especially concerned with ‘the particular resources which a given language provides for conveying particular illocutions’ (Leech, 1983, p. 11). These are often described in terms of speech acts, style and register. Meanwhile, sociopragmatics refers to ‘more specific “local” conditions on language use’ (Leech, 1983, p. 10) and involves making appropriate choices in terms of closeness/distance, involvement/detachment, formality/informality and so on. Choices made will depend on the specific context in which the interactants are involved and the nature of the communicative event (Kasper & Rose, 2001, p. 3). Discursive knowledge entails identification and orderliness (Aston, 1988) and conversational patterns and practices (e.g. turn-taking, interrupting and topic shift). Therefore, the assessment stage in stance involves language users noticing interactional patterns and practices and identifying critical instances of language use so that interlocutors can determine how they want to react.

Interactional response involves activating pragmatic and discursive knowledge that was gained through evaluation and previous experiences (habitus). Participants should be able to employ relevant pragmalinguistic and socio-pragmatic resources so that they project the face they want to communicate and fulfil their face expectations. Interactive practices when confronted by uncooperative interactants, linguistic impoliteness and verbal aggression may range from opting out of the difficult situation and ‘letting it pass’ (Firth, 1996) to openly confronting other interlocutors with supporting arguments and points of view. Between these two extremes, there are a considerable number of options as identified by Beebe and Waring (2005) when they examined possible responses to rudeness. They identify three clusters of strategies which they classify as aggressing, persistent and acquiescing modes of action. These strategies allow interactants to choose between challenging and vigorously responding to other interactants through to apologising and conceding. Whatever decision is taken, it should be based on pursuing a preferred strategy and not be the result of insufficient or deficient communicative knowledge and resources which have prevented interactants from selecting a preferred course of action.

Intersubjectivity involves participants in trying to achieve a degree of convergence with other interactants in difficult situations and, in the case of FL users especially, to achieve face validity. Whilst it may be unduly optimistic to aim for, and attain, harmonious relationships in conflictual situations, interlocutors may nevertheless be able to reach what Goffman has identified as a working consens...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Choice: Importance of Face and Stance
• 3 Facing Up to Difficult Situations: Confronting Confusion
• 4 Impoliteness: Positionality and Adopting a Stance
• 5 Hostile and Aggressive Situations: Formulating a Response
• 6 Pedagogy: Raising Awareness and Stance-Taking
• 7 Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Questionnaire: Negative Incidents
• Appendix 2: Questionnaire: Impolite/Rude Incidents
• Appendix 3: Questionnaire: Hostile Incidents
• References
• Index