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The Coconstruction of Cross-Cultural Miscommunication

Conflicts in Perception, Negotiation, and Enactment of Participant Role and Status Andrea Tyler

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2008

Andrea Tyler
Andrea Tyler
Affiliation:
Georgetown University
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Abstract

This paper examines the sources of miscommunication in a videotaped tutoring session involving a native speaker of Korean and a native speaker of U.S. English. Analysis revealed an initial nonmutual interpretation of participant role and status. These divergent interpretations appear to have resulted from the Korean tutor's transfer of a Korean conversational routine, which he defined as involving polite speaker modesty, to the U.S. English context. The initial conflicting interpretations are maintained and solidified by additional mismatches in discourse management strategies, schema, and contextualization cues. The cumulative effect of these mismatches was the judgment on the part of each of the interlocutors that the other was uncooperative.

Type
Articles
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , June 1995 , pp. 129 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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