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5 - Negotiating interpretations in interethnic settings
- Edited by John J. Gumperz
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- Book:
- Language and Social Identity
- Published online:
- 24 November 2009
- Print publication:
- 20 January 1983, pp 85-94
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- Chapter
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Summary
The notion of a “speech community” has long been recognized as problematic since competent language users who are geographical neighbors may be linguistic distant cousins at best. They assume they share a common code, but their ability to enter into fruitful exchanges may at times be limited. Our data derive from an ethnographic group interview recorded in 1969 involving a university professor and a group of inner-city teenagers enrolled in an urban alternative high school. The meeting took place in the home of a young black social worker less than a mile away from the professor's residence located in a medium-sized California city. The researcher had asked the social worker to arrange the group discussion to give him an opportunity to tape informal Black English conversation. Communication problems at the meeting provide striking evidence of the interpretive difficulties that can arise even among long-term residents of the same urban environment.
Although linguists concerned with Black English have concentrated on phonological and grammatical differences, the problem here is rather one of conversational conventions embodied in prosody and formulaic speech which draw upon knowledge specific to the Afro-American cultural traditions in the United States.
In attempting to isolate the relevant conversational conventions, we begin by focusing on empirical evidence of conversational breakdown occurring in the course of the discussion. Our purpose is to identify culturally specific contextualization cues that have signalling values for individuals familiar with the Afro-American tradition but that are not noticed or interpreted by the middle-class white interviewers.
Conversational conventions are those organizational filters that the listener uses when making the connection between speaker's intent and meaning.
8 - Performance and ethnic style in job interviews
- Edited by John J. Gumperz
-
- Book:
- Language and Social Identity
- Published online:
- 24 November 2009
- Print publication:
- 20 January 1983, pp 119-144
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- Chapter
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Summary
Introduction
This chapter provides a theoretical framework for analyzing conversational data derived from job interviews and reports a case study using such a framework. Our data derive from simulated interviews given to 12 Afro-American students of a CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) job training program in Oakland, California in the summer of 1978. Our goal is to highlight those communicative conditions that can lead to negative evaluation in stressful speech encounters like job interviews.
We describe (1) the structural and communicative characteristics of the job interview, (2) the nature and inferential implications of interview questions, and (3) the nature of communicative tasks, showing how interview conversation differs from ordinary conversation. We then go on to compare the responses of two candidates to a similar set of interview questions, using three major parameters of communicative effectiveness in interview conversation: stylistic expectations, content, and underlying patterns. The comparison shows how the accretion of ethnic discourse features that diverge from established conventions of interview talks leads to a negative evaluation of one of the candidates.
The job interview
The interview as a kind of conversation is probably as old as language itself. In its simplest form, it is prototypically manifested as an interrogative encounter between someone who has the right or privilege to know and another in a less powerful position who is obliged to respond, rather defensively, to justify his/her action, to explain his/her problems, to give up him/herself for evaluation. (God's interview of Adam after the latter had eaten the forbidden fruit provides an archetype.