Читать книгу The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics - Carol A. Chapelle - Страница 51

The ways in which interactants organize dialogues while maintaining understanding reflect the larger social context in which communication takes place. Social context is important to the analysis of dialogues because communication is fundamentally about people, and the real‐life situations they are faced with (Malinowski, 1923). Aspects of social context include anything from the physical setting—for example, a hospital or dining room—to the institutional roles and social categories of the interactants—for instance, the relationship between doctor and patient or mother and daughter. Aspects of social context shape dialogues in many ways. The physical setting of a dialogue may compel interactants to communicate in a particular manner. For example, being in the confines of a library may oblige interactants to talk quietly, while speaking with increased voice amplitude is more socially acceptable in a bar or loud restaurant. Moreover, institutional roles sometimes dictate the flow of information in dialogues. For instance, a judge determines what is said and when it is said during courtroom deliberations. In a similar vein, a moderator during a televised debate allocates turns and organizes the dialogue according to a list of predetermined topics. Many more examples can be given, but the upshot is that everything said and done in dialogues can be understood in terms of its social context. This is true at the most micro levels of a dialogue. So, for example, an interactant can refer to herself or himself as “we”—instead of “I”—to bring authority to what is being said, as in “We do not accept your opinion,” as opposed to “I do not accept your opinion.” In a different social context, a “we” can be used to displace blame, as in “We have made the wrong decision,” as opposed to “I have made the wrong decision.” Accordingly, dialogues—including the meanings and functions of language—are intimately connected to social context. The idea that a dialogue is both a product of, and catalyst for, social context can be extended to psychological states. The work of discursive psychologists, for example, has shown that psychological or cognitive states (e.g., anger or recalling an experience) are constituted in and through dialogic exchanges, and reflect the normative actions and activities of social contexts (see Lester & O'Reilly, 2018).

The methodologies used to understand the relationship between dialogue and social context can be categorized into two, sometimes overlapping, domains of inquiry: a priori and data‐driven approaches. In a priori approaches, the researcher identifies, or is aware of, particular aspects of social context that are believed to be important to a dialogue. For example, the political history of a country, say South Korea, may be used to make observations about the reasons why a Korean dialogue participant is communicating in a particular way. That is to say, the dialogue is investigated with the “a priori” understanding that the political history of South Korea is omnirelevant to the ways in which the South Korean participates in a dialogue. Methodologies that are associated with a priori approaches include critical discourse analysis and social psychology. In data‐driven approaches, being Korean can be discussed as an observational finding if the researcher can show—in and through the organization of a dialogue—that this cultural identity is demonstrably relevant to the interactants. In other words, Korean is only one of many social categories that an interactant belongs to (e.g., male/female, teacher/student, husband/wife, Asian/non‐Asian), and it is the responsibility of the researcher using data‐driven approaches to show how any given social category is relevant to the local, situated practices of participating in a dialogue. Methodologies that are associated with data‐driven approaches include, but are not limited to, discursive psychology and conversation analysis.