Speech Acts Bibliography:
Miscommunication
Tyler, A. (1995). The coconstruction of cross-cultural miscommunication: Conflicts in perception, negotiation, and enactment of participant role and status. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 17 (2), 129-152.
Examines the miscommunication which occurred in a videotaped tutoring session between a Korean tutor and an English student. The student needed assistance writing a computer program that would score bowling, while the tutor was enrolled in an English oral communication course requiring students to offer help in their area of expertise and afterwards discuss the videotaped session. After reviewing the literature dealing with non-native speaker (NNS) and native-speaker (NS) interaction, the author establishes this case as an example of naturally-occurring miscommunication based upon differences in the cultural foundations of discourse and the establishment of status. Eight minutes of the videotape were transcribed, with each participant providing comments reflecting their reactions at each troublesome point in the conversation. The initial "clash" occurred when the student inquired if the tutor knew how to score bowling. His reply, "Yes, approximately," was the culturally-appropriate way in Korea to modestly claim expertise, but the student interpreted his statement and later silences as ignorance. After thus determining her higher status as possessor of cultural knowledge, she could not accept her tutor's explanations as valid or useful, although she knew little about scoring herself. While the Korean tutor's discourse management style contributed to the initial difference in participant frames, his use of an inductive schema to explain the topic, beginning each time from scratch and gradually building upon previous information, suggested to the student that he was trying to figure the rules out for himself. Accustomed to the Korean formal relationship of status between teacher and student, he assumed she would accept his expertise unquestioned and interpreted her questioning as rudeness. In addition, his use of contextualization cues such as may and might, chosen out of politeness on his part, reinforced the student's image of him as tentative and unsure of himself. In summary, the mutual miscommunication occurred not because of either participant's uncooperativeness, as both the tutor and student believed, but rather because differing cultural frameworks for discourse caused each participant to negotiate the higher status for themselves.