Читать книгу The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics - Carol A. Chapelle - Страница 48

Most interactants go about their daily lives with little thought of how their dialogues with others are organized, and what role communication plays in organizing the world around them. This is because human encounters are often so mundane and practiced that the complexities of managing a dialogue are taken for granted. The analysis of dialogues is fundamentally concerned with understanding these complexities. Specifically, how do interactants make sense of each other and the context in which they find themselves communicating? Furthermore, how does human behavior define communicative contexts, and how do communicative contexts shape the conduct of people? While such questions have been addressed for many decades by scholars working in a range of disciplines (see Johnstone, 2018), Bakhtin's (1986) notion of an utterance is an excellent starting point in discussing how applied linguistics scholarship approaches the study of dialogues; Bakhtin argues that dialogues are made up of utterances that represent a complex interplay between a history of established rules of behavior and normative expectations co‐constructed in situ as individuals participate in social activities. For example, the way a student responds to a teacher in a classroom not only reflects a history or structure of institutional practices, but it also represents a single moment in the present time where individuals actively reveal their commonsense understanding of the pedagogical event.

The current encyclopedic entry begins with this ostensibly simple understanding of dialogues. As such, the introduction presented below addresses how spoken utterances are organized during human encounters, but the larger discussion of dialogues is not limited to aspects of turn taking and turn organization (cf. conversation analysis). Rather, dialogues are presented in the current entry by looking at three interdependent aspects of spoken communication: organization, intersubjectivity, and social context. Organization encompasses the mechanics of spoken interaction (e.g., turn taking); intersubjectivity is related to how interactants jointly construct meaning; and social context deals with the sociocultural issues, including historical factors, that shape dialogues. Each aspect of a dialogue will be discussed in this order.