BOOK 3

L201B ENGLISH IN THE WORLD

TALKING AND
WRITING IN ENGLISH
Introduction

• Our everyday language use is shaped in complex ways by the

context in which we communicate. Consider this classic
example from the United States in the 1960s involving an
African American doctor and a policeman, in which the
policeman’s choice of term of address is shaped by the
particular power relations between the two:
‘What’s your name, boy?’ the policeman asked ... ‘Dr Poussaint. I’m a physician ...’
‘What’s your first name, boy? ...’
‘Alvin.’
The policeman manages to insult Dr Poussaint three times in this short exchange; once by his
initial use of the term ‘boy’ which denies adult status on the grounds of race, secondly because
he ignores the doctor’s stated preference for how he should be addressed, and thirdly by
repeating the denigrating term ‘boy’ even when he knows the doctor’s name. Dr Poussaint’s own
experience of the encounter was ‘profound humiliation’ – ‘For the moment, my manhood had
been ripped from me’.
(Ervin-Tripp, 1969, quoted in Maybin, Mercer and Hewings, 2020, p. 18)

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Terms of Address

• Analysing this exchange helped sociolinguist Susan Ervin-Tripp to highlight the

sociolinguistic rules that tell us who has the right to use which terms to whom.
o Terms of address are a part of politeness conventions and will depend on:
 the difference in status between the speakers, [age, social position..]
 how well they know each other,
 the formality of the situation [somebody’s sister/ brother at one’s workplace]
 and the cultural and linguistic context. [e.g. significance of using full name vs.
full name, first name ...]/ [frequency of using ‘uncle, aunty in international
Englishes as opposed to their use by British or American English speakers. ]
Terms of address may indicate relation to the speaker (aunty, mum, dad, etc.) ,
profession, nicknames, gender.
In the United States of the 1960s, for example, the issue of segregation and civil
rights was at the fore of public conscience, so the policeman’s use of boy carried
deep and troubling social connotations (p.9)

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Language practices

• Communication in this book is going to be viewed in terms of language

practices i.e. routines or activities in which people take part for particular
purposes (e.g. typing in key words to a search engine to find something out,
pointing out the benefits to persuade persuade a friend of your point of view
or simply making ‘small talk’ at the school gates to build relationships with
other people). A language practices approach focuses on how language is
part of our daily routines and
how it functions to
a) help us get things done
b) establish and maintain relationships,
c) and express creativity and playfulness.
However, you’ll also sometimes focus in detail on the surface form of what people
have said or written, looking carefully at the way they use language.

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 BOOK 3
L201B ENGLISH IN THE WORLD

Talking
in English PART A
1 The structure and functions of talk

This chapter will describe how :

- Everyday talk works; how it’s structured in terms of each speaker taking
turns, and what sort of turn might be acceptable.
- You’ll also start looking at how talk can be written down in the form of a
transcript and how non-verbal features of communication can be
indicated. An important aspect of managing talk is how we maintain
politeness when we interact.
- First, you’ll see exactly what is meant by the kind of informal talk
usually known as conversation.

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Talk and Coversation (13)

• By talk, we mean any kind of spoken interaction between people, as well as the
use of sign language by deaf people. Although the word conversation is often
used with the same meaning as talk.
• Emanuel Schegloff (1999) defines conversation as the specific kind of talk that
people engage in when their spoken or signed interaction is not organized by
institutional rules.
• Schegloff (1999) exemplifies this distinction by contrasting the classroom (where
there are rules about who speaks when and in what way)(talk) with the
playground or schoolyard (where there are no such rules, enabling conversation
to occur). Other situations where people talk without necessarily engaging in
conversation would include job interviews, legal hearings and service encounters
(i.e. where one person sells a product or service to another).
• Note that conversation analysis can be used to analyze any kind of talk.

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Talk and Coversation (pp.12-14)

• While the term talk covers all spoken (or signed) language including planned,
formal monologues – whether university lectures or wedding speeches – informal
talk or conversation is largely unplanned because it arises spontaneously out of
fluid and changing everyday activities and relationships and has to be produced and
comprehended in real time. It’s a normal feature of spoken language to contain
inexplicit references, false starts, as well as unfinished and overlapping utterances
which look nothing like what most English speakers are taught to regard as
‘grammatical’ sentences.

• A key point about everyday conversation is that it’s dialogic. This means that each
person’s contributions are orientated towards other speakers: a point that Mikhail
Bakhtin (1986) made with regard to all language use. Particularly in conversation,
people constantly (although often implicitly) refer to what previous speakers have
said, anticipate what they might say next and assume a large amount of shared
experience. This helps conversations proceed smoothly and helps in maintaining
relationships between speakers.
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Functions of Coversation

• The main purpose of conversation, then, is what the

anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski (1923) called ‘phatic
communion’, meaning it takes place specifically to bind
people together and to establish an interactional
framework for the encounter. Following Michael Halliday
(1973) this is now usually called the interpersonal function
of language in contrast to the topic of conversation which is
termed the ideational function.

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Coversational Analysis

• In an attempt to reach an understanding of how people actually use spoken language to

communicate, sociologists Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson developed the
discipline of conversation analysis (CA), which examines naturally occurring talk in an
extremely detailed and methodical way (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, 1974; Sacks, 1995).

• As Sacks and later conversation analysts have shown, everyday conversations have an
organized (and often orderly) structure, despite the fact that they’re neither scripted nor
rehearsed. This can be seen in the phenomenon of turn-taking between speakers and the degree
to which any overlap – or speakers talking at the same time – is accepted.
• Where interactants are of equal status, they will often – though not always – take roughly equal
turns to co-create the text. Inequalities in turn-taking where one interlocutor has more or longer
turns or seems to be able to interrupt other speakers may thus indicate inequalities in the
relationship.
• It’s common for talk to comprise two part exchanges or adjacency pairs where the first pair
part is a question and the second part is the answer. For example, the short dialogue at the
beginning of this chapter began with a question + answer adjacency pair (What’s your name
[...]? + Dr Poussaint.). Other examples of adjacency pairs are compliment + acceptance (Great
earrings! + Thanks!), greeting + greeting, thanks + acknowledgement and statement + response.
Look again at Extract 1 (p. 16)

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Examples of Conversation
Extract 1
Extract 1 Raining

1. A: is it raining is that what I can hear

2. B: yeah
3. A: have you had much rain this year there was a lot of flooding last year wasn’t there?
4. B: yes so we had a lot of flooding in the winter
5. A: it was it’s been quite good
6. B: it’s very erm not for us er because Jo because of Jo’s illness erm she was cold all the time so I I had the heating on all the time
7. A: yeah
8. B: you know not twenty-four hours a day but a lot
(Adapted from BNC2014, 2021)
QUESTION ANSWER QUESTION
ANSWER
STATEMENT RESPONSE
CONTINUING STATEMENT

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Examples of Conversation
Turn-taking (transcription) Extract 2

Extract 2 Keeping order at the dinner table

1. Jen: Have some chee-put some cheese on your potato now and it will melt (10.0)
2. (Maggie starts to get up) Sit down I’ll get you a drink 3. Russell: And me please
4. Maggie: Milk
5. Jen: Milk or water Russ?
6. Russell: Water please (1.0) SIT DOWN
7. Maggie: I KNOW I SLIPPED
8. Jen: Ok there’s no need to [shout] at her
9. Russell: [If you] slipped you’re just standing there goin’= (does action of Maggie’s claimed slipping)
10. Maggie: =[No]=
11. Russell: =[Ooh] [I slipped!] (mimicking)
12. Maggie: [I went back]wards like that
13. (1.5)
14. Russell: SIT DO::WN
15. Maggie: I KNOW [don’t talk] with your mouth open 16. Jen: [She is love]y (sotto voce)
17. Russell: Hmm How am I meant to talk then?
18. Jen: Russell
(Adapted from Hester and Hester, 2010, p. 35)

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Transcription conventions

(10.0). indicates the length of a pause in seconds

: indicates that the preceding sound was lengthened
= indicates there is no pause between the end of one turn and the beginning of the next
italics indicate particularly strong emphasis
CAPITALS indicate shouting
(comment) indicates descriptive comments from the transcriber (sotto voce = ‘in a soft voice’)
[square brackets] indicates overlapping speech

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Maintaining Politeness

Social interactions through talk involve the constant management of one’s own and other
people’s face – a term used by the American sociologist Erving Goffman (1967) to denote
people’s public self-image and from which we gain the terms ‘saving face’ or ‘losing
face’. Loss of face for any speaker is disruptive and may need to be made good, for
example, by rephrasing a comment or through an explicit apology. Effort to maintain one’s
own or others’ face may involve strategic talk to boost or maintain status: an aspect of the
interpersonal function of language use.

Politeness also involves using strategies such as appropriate ways of referring to other
people and degrees of directness and formality, as you saw in the Introduction. These vary
according to people’s relative social status, the degree of social distance between them and
the extent of their solidarity with one another. For example, Eat up your lunch! might be
an appropriate command to a child, or even to an intimate friend, but not to one’s manager
at work
• Terms of address – the ways in which we refer to each other – are powerful ways of
expressing and asserting relationships. In multilingual communities, speakers have access
to a range of conventions deriving from different cultures and languages and may use their
choice of terms of address to invoke a particular set of values. (See pp.22-3 for activity)

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Digitally Mediated Talk
2 – Talk as digital
written interaction

The range of ways to communicate digitally now includes

both voice- based media such as Skype calls and video
blogs (vlogs) as well as text- based media such as text
messaging (by SMS or online messaging apps such as
WhatsApp), emails, blogs and comments, and social
media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. While
video communication is usually ‘synchronous’ (i.e.
carried out in real time with all interlocutors present),
communication carried out through technologies such as
text chat or WhatsApp may be conducted
‘asynchronously’ or almost synchronously if people
respond to text messages quickly enough. The focus of
this chapter is on this type of quasi-synchronous, written-
down talk carried out through online messaging apps
which is termed digital written interactions.
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Example of Digital Conversation
Examples 1,2&3 (See pp. 34 -36)
Functions of emojis in WhatsApp interaction among Omanis

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Transcription –
Difference between Spoken Interaction and Digital Written
Text A (spoken) Text B (digital written)
interaction) (p.28)

transcript is laid out as such with two interlocutors and each set out in two columns with each interlocutor’s talk occupying a
turn starting on a new line column – similar to the layout of most online messaging services

talk concerns the here and now with concrete, everyday lexis lexis is concrete and everyday, relating to plans for the near
and use of the present tense future

dialogic with two people taking turns to text, though the

the text is dialogic with two people taking turns to speak WhatsApp group comprises at least six people so others can read
the speakers appear familiar with each other the chat and join in. A turn can comprise two or more messages
the two people messaging appear to know each other well

relatively unplanned, but there is time to think through what to

unplanned as it’s produced in real time
write and edit before sending (quasi- synchronous)
questions drive the conversation forward
written as series of short statements inviting confirmation from
contains ‘dysfluencies’ such as repetitions (out- out),
the other person
hesitations, false starts (Where’s your erh) and pauses (filled
no full stops – the interactant shown on the right-hand side
[erh] and unfilled [indicated by (.)])
finishes most statements with a kiss (x) and both make use of
exclamation marks

informal language (gonna) contractions (He’s, doesn’t) informal language with abbreviations e.g. prob [probably], Kk
[okay], tog [together]

contains the non-verbal feature of laughter (shown in the the smiley face emoji is used to comment on a statement
transcript within square brackets) a photograph is used with comment to initiate a further
interaction

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Digital conversation analysis
Some points to note (pp.25-40)

• Conversations whether spoken or on chat are characterized by:

- using everyday concrete lexis
- Familiarity between interlocutors
- Discussing everyday matters
- Both are dialogic with participants taking turns ( in digital conversation, the turns involve
more than two participants who can take turns if they wish to join the group conversation
and can read the chats).
- Expressing emotions (laughter, higher tone, facial expressions (verbally) // smiley face &
other emojis , exclamation marks, capital letters for shouting (on whatsapp)
- Spoken conversation are unplanned have false starts, hesitations, false starts, repetitions
and repairs// digital conversation are relatively unplanned too, with series of short
sentences
- While spoken conversations use contractions like (don’t , can’t , won’t, etc.), digital
conversation uses abbreviations like (tog, prob, brb, idk, pls, etc.)

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 BOOK 3
L201B ENGLISH IN THE WORLD
Talking and Wring in English – Chapter 11

3 Exploring writing
practices
PART B
Exploring writing practices

• The last part of the chapter turns the focus to more

‘traditional’ written communication in English, focusing
particularly on text types and multimodal analysis. Attention
will also be drawn to the literacy practices that people
engage in: that is, the ways in which people interact with
texts (and with one another, through the use of texts). The
concept of the literacy practice was proposed by the social
anthropologist Brian Street (1984), who used it to
emphasize the connection between an individual’s use of
written language and their social identity. For example, in
many societies adults with young children are encouraged to
provide the sort of shared reading experience that can be
seen in Figure 6 – but this literacy practice is far from
universal (Chapter 12 looks at children learning to speak and
write in English).

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Genres

 Understanding people’s literacy practices entails consideration of the ways in which people produce and make use of
different types of texts. To do this, it’s helpful to think about the genre, or conventional type, of any text you
analyze.
• You may have come across the word genre in relation to literature. It’s the French word for ‘type’ or ‘kind’ and it’s
often used to refer to specific literary forms, such as tragedy, epic or satire.
• In linguistics, however, the term is used differently and refers to a text type characterized by particular formal
characteristics (such as choice of lexis), which emerge and become established through repeated social action
carried out through writing.
• For example, writing a text in the book review genre would mean writing a text with features conventional for this text
type and carrying out the social action of reviewing a book (see Grafton, 2010). Thus, science fiction novels are a
genre – but so are credit card bills, online pop-up adverts and restaurant menus.

 It’s worth emphasizing that every communicative text has a genre and will be typical of that genre in some way.
Just like tools, texts are designed to be used for particular purposes, and use necessarily affects form.
• For example, a menu that was completely unlike any other menu might be very difficult for restaurant customers to
use, and even experimental poetry is a genre in the sense that it involves a shared social purpose which encourages
some similarities in form.
• Genre has traditionally been analyzed in relation to writing (hence the focus here) but can also be applied to speech.
 Different genres may make use of different semiotic modes in order to create meaning.
• For example, you saw in Reading 11 how writers of WhatsApp text messages employ emojis alongside language to
add to the meaning of their messages. Understanding how different modes work together is often termed
multimodal literacy and is something we learn as part of our everyday literacy practices.

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Genres

So, in linguistics, a genre is a text type characterized

with a particular formal characteristics (such as choice
of lexis, structure and form of the text) which emerge
and become established through repeated social action
carried out through writing. The particular purpose of
a text and its use necessarily affects its form.
Different genres may make use of different semiotic modes
in order to create meaning.
• Understanding how different modes work together is
often termed multimodal literacy and is something
we learn as part of our everyday literacy practices.

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 Multimodal literacy and cultural difference
 Literacy practices may vary considerably between
groups of people and between different cultures, and so
too may the multimodal characteristics of the texts in
those literacy practices. This is because visual
representations have genres – from the self-portrait to
the road sign to the assembly diagram – and, like the
genres of speech and text, those genres are social
actions.
• Some meanings may be recognizable to almost anyone. Smiles
seem to express happiness in all human cultures, for example. On
the other hand, there are many cultural contexts in which the
teacher’s clothes would index not a conservative but a Western
identity.
• What about the speech bubbles? The directionality of the
writing?
• Multimodal analysis can be applied to both written and spoken
texts (where voice quality, stress, intonation, and other
paralinguistic features are analyzed).
(pp.47-50) Figure 9a and 9b Speech bubble and thought bubble

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