Study event interactions

The speech events were transcribed following the SELF project transcription instructions, but a slightly modified version of the transcriptions is used in the extracts of this book to increase their readability (see appendix A for the transcription conventions). In the analysis, I used sound files alongside the transcriptions in order not to miss possible important details left out in the transcriptions.

My approach to analysing spoken interaction is based on the understanding of language and social interaction as mutually interpenetrating and jointly constituted, which means that language is seen to be shaped by the actions we use it for. I view communication as a situated, moment-to-moment sense-making practice in which speakers, as Rampton (2006: 24) puts it, (a) seek to construct utterances so that they are roughly in line with their recipients’ understanding of the social world and their communicative history together, (b) provide and draw on various verbal and non-verbal signs to steer their interlocutors, and (c) continuously monitor their interlocutors’ reactions. In exploring regulatory practices, the analysis focuses on the third aspect of monitoring one another’s reactions during interaction.

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I draw on CA to the extent that close attention is paid to talk as situated social practice. However, contrary to CA, I do not see context to be restricted to what is displayed in the sequential unfolding of utterances, or to something that is mutually achieved (see Blum-Kulka 2005: 276–277). Rather, drawing on ethnographic approaches, the study events are seen to provide a frame of reference for meaning making in the interactions. The ethnographically-informed data collection with non-participant observation is seen to increase understanding of the local practices, which in turn increases the analyst’s ability to find most likely interpretations for the occurrence of specific features or phenomena.

The language-regulatory practices focused on are:

• language correcting (i.e. correcting an interlocutor’s language) • commentary on language

• embedded repairs

• reformulations and mediation • lexical accommodation

I chose these regulatory practices based on fieldwork observations, close reading of the transcriptions and repeated listening of the recordings. The practices by no means form an exhaustive list (for example, speakers’ self-corrections and other forms of accommodation also fall under regulatory practices), but they cover a range of different kinds of practices. The first two practices are explicit ways of regulating language, and they define boundaries for acceptability, and particularly, correctness. They can give answers to questions such as who can take on the role of language expert, and what kind of language speakers consider to be unacceptable. Being explicit, they also tell us about participant perspectives on regulation. The last three bullet points represent more tacit regulatory practices, and they shed light on the nuances of acceptability construction, particularly the scope of acceptability. By focusing on a number of different regulatory practices, then, I manage to cover both explicit and more tacit ways of regulating language.

I used different tools to best explore the regulatory practices. My analysis of language correcting draws on conversation analytic studies on repairs (e.g. Egbert 2004; Schegloff 2000; Schegloff et al. 1977), but I only focus on other-corrections, as in example 4.2, where T1 corrects S4.

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(4.2)42

S4: ((…)) they have different climatic conditions er ranging from (sahara) or semi- arid zone to the tropical zone where annual rainfall is er is 100 or 15,000 millimetre annually but er [beekeeping]

T1: [not 15,000] 1000- er 1500

S4: yeah 1500 yeah 1500 1000 and 500 millimetre annually but er it’s still in separate areas scattered area(s) ((…))

(V08D3Sp) I collected all such instances of corrections and classified them into different types of corrections that I then analysed in more detail.

For commentary on language, I draw on metalinguistics and focus on those parts of the interaction where a speaker explicitly talks about language. The analysis looks into instances of metalingual comments (Berry 2005: 8–12), by which I mean overt references to and comments on both one’s own and one’s interlocutors’ language (e.g. what’s that in English, when you are pronouncing the word). All metalingual comments were collected and classified according to who did the commenting, and if the commenting was allocated, who assigned the language expert role to whom. Metadiscourse, or talk about the talk itself (e.g. as I said before, does this sound…to you), is excluded from the analysis (for studies on metadiscourse, see e.g. papers in Ädel and Mauranen 2010).

For the analysis of embedded repairs, and reformulations and mediation, I again draw on conversation analytic studies dealing with similar phenomena (e.g. Drew 1998; Garfinkel & Sacks 1970; Jefferson 1987; Kurhila 2003, 2006), but I also incorporate aspects of interactional sociolinguistics (Schiffrin 1994) when focusing on a special case of reformulations, that is, mediation (section 5.2.2). These language-regulatory practices represent more tacit ways of regulation. Like language correcting and commenting, they too tell us about interlocutor reactions to language use, and sometimes also about the ways speakers43 _{react to the intervention of the interlocutor. This reflects the focus of this} study on the ways that language is managed and monitored by co-interactants, rather than how speakers manage and monitor their own speech, for instance, by self-rephrasing (see Kaur 2009; Mauranen 2006b). Examples of self-rephrasing can be seen in example 4.2 above: is er is 100 or 15,000 millimetre and [not 15,000] 1000- er 1500.

42 _{In the examples, bold font is used to highlight important segments discussed in the text.}

43 _{Speaker is here used to refer to the current speaker, and interlocutor to the others present in the} interaction and reacting to the current speaker’s turn(s). Naturally, the roles of speaker and interlocutor shift during the interaction.

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The last regulatory practice, lexical accommodation, however, exemplifies how speakers make adjustments to their own speech. I included this practice to see whether ELF speakers adopt ‘unconventional’ elements from each other’s talk, thus stretching the boundaries of acceptability. The analysis of accommodation makes use of CAT (Giles & Coupland 1991; Giles et al. 1991; Gallois et al. 2005), although the focus is on communicative behaviour, rather than on speaker motivations guiding the accommodative practice.

I describe all the analytical methods in more detail in chapter 5, where I analyse the study event interactions. In the analysis, I focus on each regulatory practice in turn. I do not systematically search for differences between the study events, but rather, I only comment on the differences when they appear relevant in terms of the regulatory practice focused on.