Being one of the group - Second Part
5. Hypotheses, predictions
5.1 The present research hypothesized that:
1. at least a few kinds of eye/head movements would be identifiable as either typically American or typically Italian; moreover it would be possible to grasp the idiosyncratic meaning of these movements by vicariously ‘willing the enactment’ in which they appear, on the basis of how the participants reported having lived that enactment;
2. participants who used meaningfully and appropriately the eye/head movements typical of a given culture would be perceived as ‘insiders’ by the members of that culture: they would be included in the web of intersecting gazes uniting the members of the culture in phatic communion and would receive through gazes, although to a lesser extent, more invitations to speak and greater attention when they spoke.
5.2 To test these extremely complex hypotheses, we formulated two simple, narrowly-focused predictions dealing with how one value, assent, is communicated through eye/head movement. On the basis of informal observations made during a pre-encounter held with the American students, we predicted that, in our video-recorded encounter:
1. in a majority of the enactments of assent, most Americans would nod amply and continually; most Italians would use brief, contained nods or jerk their heads backward while opening their mouths slightly (individuality would be expressed, if at all, by varying the other signals bundled with the nod or jerk);
2. during each enactment of assent, participants would gaze principally at whoever gesticulated as they did, regardless of that person’s nationality. This means, given the first prediction, that during most of the choruses of assent typical of friendly group conversations, the Americans would gaze at whoever was nodding amply (in practice, at their fellow Americans, plus any Italian adopting such behavior) and vice versa, creating de facto two ‘phatic communion’ groups based on communicative style.
6. Results
6.1 The data gathered was initially compared with classical studies on gaze and head positions (see Section 1.b) to give the student-researchers practice in noting and collocating visual cues. The nomenclature and data categories for describing eye/head movement in Kendon (1967) and Argyle & Cook (1976) were found applicable to our data; no observations disconfirmed these authors’ findings. Allen & Guy's (1974) findings matched observations, too, except for the following conjecture that left us flabbergasted (p.137).
We do not claim that the various head movements make any distinctive communication, and for the most part they do not. [...] If head tosses are not part of the signal system, then what part do they play? We think it is a form of exercise which is inherently rewarding to the actor. It also provides variety and interest for the partner because he has a mobile object of attention.
Commenting on Birdwhistell's (1970) stimulating text would require a separate article. Pezzato and Poggi 's (1998) typology of gaze was not available for verification.
6.2 As for confirmation of our two predictions, results were disappointing. No regularities of the kind predicted were found. The causes: there were too many dependent variables involved; the video-recording was much too brief; and ‘typical’ gestures, we discovered, are not exhibited as regularly as we had thought they would be. As a consequence, we were not able to furnish quantitative evidence for our two hypotheses. We could only try to verify them through case-by-case studies of ‘presumably’ culturally-marked behavior (not necessarily the predicted eye/head movements) associated with ‘apparent’ inclusion/exclusion (not necessarily manifested as predicted, i.e., through a communion of gaze). In other words, we had to fall back on the hermeneutic practices we had hoped to avoid having to use exclusively. The example which follows shows the kind of ‘knowledge’ we were able to obtain by examining one of the frames we created for our storyboard (frame 4; duration: 0.5 seconds). We framed that particular one-half-second sequence of video because in it we vaguely sensed various enactments of intentionality, of which assent. Let us now try to give them more specific meaning.
6.3 In frame 4, EMILY and BOB nod at PHIL, while BARBARA turns toward him and starts to nod (amply in frame 5). The Italians finish turning their heads toward PHIL and remain immobile; NADIA, immobile, smiles faintly (EMANUELA and MINO, too?).
The group stance captured in this frame seems to be one of general assent. So why are the postures different? One explanation is that there are culturally-different ways of enacting assent: by ‘nodding’ (USA) and by a more reserved style, ‘immobility-with-a-polite-smile’ (Italy), one which we had failed to predict for the Italians. But are the Italians really assenting? Is not their immobility simply due to the fact that PHIL is addressing his question to the Americans (by implication and by gazing at BOB)? And is not immobility the way any bona fide member of the group-as-a-whole would behave, when not questioned directly? In that case, there is indeed a cultural division here, but not because of different styles of assenting. The Italians are simply awaiting their turn.
On the other hand, it is not really clear that PHIL’s question was in fact directed only to the Americans. ‘Keying into’ the spirit of the conversation, through debriefing, we felt the question to be fairly open. And in any case the Italians still could have shrugged, cocked their heads or expressed bystander assent through semi-nodding (back-channeling). In other words, the evident division here into two cultural sub-groups is not simply due to turn assignments. The Italian sub-group is manifesting disinterest through lack of somatic participation (although their gaze is on PHIL, in unison with the Americans).
Or perhaps not. Additional debriefing made us sense two intentionalities in the Italians’ stance: assent to PHIL’s implicit assertion that "Idioms can certainly be curious";non-assent to PHIL’s implicit claim that "Being American makes an idiom OK" (we still felt "Give me a break!" to be illogical). If this is so, then the Italians are indeed participating: they are enacting only partial assent. Note that we are not confirming our initial explanation: ‘nodding’ and ‘immobility-with-polite-smile’ are not two culturally-different ways of expressing the same assent. They are enactments of different kinds of assent, i.e., different positions on the acceptability of a certain idiom (undoubtedly due to culture, but that is another question). Our second prediction is therefore disconfirmed with respect to gaze and unverifiable as to the creation of sub-groups by gestural affinity.
As for the first prediction (head movements as culturally typical, at least among Americans), our data offered no real confirmations. Classical studies of assent, using larger samplings (Argyle & Cook 1976), tell us that, in fact, most of the (American) subjects in the investigator's experiment nodded to say "yes". On closer examination, however, this finding turns out to be fairly worthless: it does not tell us who nodded, how and in what circumstances. Nodding in relaxed laboratory conditions does not make nodding universal: had they felt intimidated by a touchy question, Argyle & Cook’s subjects might have simply smiled to assent (like our Italian students here). Most of all, the findings do not tell us the intent of the subjects who ‘nodded to assent’. Perhaps assent was not the message they intended to communicate at all. For example, debriefing revealed that BARBARA's stance (frame 5), facing PHIL head on and nodding, was one of confrontation; she was not assenting but saying: "OK, you've spoken; now let me get on with chatting up BOB; you've already stopped me twice!" One could even look for finer shadings. EMILY's tilting nod differs from BOB's ‘typical’ straight nod: she may therefore mean something other than "yes" or, if "yes", she may be adding a touch of personal warmth. (This would disconfirm our prediction that ample straight nodding is standard among Americans, with idiosyncrasies appearing in the bundled signals, e.g., squinting, which in fact EMILY does). EMILY was unable to tell us later what she had meant.
To conclude, in frame 4 it is probable that the Italian students, although they did not nod or jerk their heads back, were assenting in some way; but it is not easy to say in what way or how they would have enacted assent if the implied question had been simply "Aren’t idioms curious!?" It is also probable that one or more of the Americans who nodded meant something other than assent (but what?) and that the ample nod used by one of them is not so typical of Americans as we had thought (but why did we think so?). This is all the ‘knowledge’ we were able to obtain: not very much and not very certain.
Yet the web of subtle signals creating the group stance in frame 4 is, we would argue, both perceived and ‘understood’ (unconsciously) by everyone. In making up both group and individual stances, these signals acquire connotations of intent. Sensing them is part of the conversational competence that an L2 learner, or any speaker, must acquire (4.2.3). Not only is classical (distributional) research methodology unable to define them, it does not, we claim, constitute a valid means of ever understanding them in situ.
6.4 Paradoxically, our major research finding was that the kind of study we had initially undertaken could not furnish the kind of knowledge we were seeking. Even if we had had a longer video tape to examine, it could only have allowed us to confirm (or disconfirm) that, in general: 1. Americans nod more amply than Italians; 2. Italians who nod amply get looked at more often by Americans. These would be interesting findings, of course. But even using debriefing to add qualitative data to these quantitative findings, we still would be unable to tell L2 learners how to nod when conversing with Americans. Certainly not all the time, nor for every assent, nor always amply. When, then, should they nod? in what circumstances, in what manner, to what effect? With what intent?
Thus, our failure to find answers to our research questions turned out to be relatively unimportant as soon as we discovered that the questions we had asked were relatively unimportant. The debriefing technique used to give meaning to our analyses had had the effect of making us realize how much we were ignoring (or misunderstanding) in our video-recorded conversations by considering them simply as texts with behavioral regularities to be catalogued. Debriefing alone, however, could not furnish the knowledge we sought. Another research tool — or even paradigm — was felt to be necessary.
6.5 To see in what terms, let us leave our research questions aside and examine another frame with the sole purpose of trying to assign meaning to the eye/head movements we perceive. In frame 6 PHIL's posture can be labeled head droop with hands in pockets. But what is his stance? What is that posture saying in (and to) the group?
6.5.1 If we were to forget the considerations raised in Section 4.7, we might be tempted to indulge in the kind of projective interpretation that is typical of second-rate literary critics: we would project upon frame 6 our vision of what Americans like PHIL must be like and then look around for American cultural icons that ‘prove’ we are right. For example, our minds filled with Norman Rockwell paintings and John Ford films, we might interpret PHIL's stance as expressing typical American small-town informality (and as our Sociocultural Questionnaire showed, PHIL had in fact lived in a small town). Or perhaps we might have declared, with equal certitude, that PHIL's stance marks typical American male shyness in the company of women (according to the movie cowboy stereotype PHIL's posture suggests). Or, remembering the "I-have-spoken" American ‘Indian’ stereotype, we might have interpreted PHIL's posture as a culturally-marked turn-relinquishment cue (although this is contradicted by BARBARA who, in frame 3, seems to stick her hands in her pockets as a bid for the floor in order to speak to BOB).
6.5.2 To avoid the arbitrariness of superficial hermeneutic analyses like these, we might assign to PHIL's posture only the very general meaning it has in any circumstance (its ‘dictionary meaning’). Birdwhistell (1970) claims that ‘downward’ always indicates some kind of ‘diminishment’. So to play safe, we might want to limit ourselves to saying that PHIL is signaling an ‘easing-up’. But while such an affirmation is undoubtedly true, it tells us almost nothing. Is the ‘easing-up’ a proclamation of greater informality, a manifestation of embarrassment after having guffawed before women, or a signal of turn-relinquishment (to repeat the three previous hypotheses)? Or is it something else again?
According to our premises (Section 4), there can be no answer if we study a gesture in isolation. PHIL's posture will become a ‘stance’ only when we see it as part of a contribution, i.e., as part of a perceived enactment of individual/collective historical will.
6.5.3 The concept of "game" (Goffman 1981) would seem to offer just such a perspective. Games, in fact, link a series of events temporarily and causally. This allows us to avoid the trap of studying a phenomenon in isolation; it also gives every move historical density. Moreover, games simplify human activity: behavior is explained as the rational maximization of gains, a principle that characterizes human activity (at least in part) universally. This allows us to avoid the trap of cultural stereotyping.
All of PHIL’s actions in frames 1-6 can, in fact, be viewed as game-like responses to a stimulus in the previous frame. In frames 1 and 2 MINO expresses surprise at the strangeness of the American expression "Give me a break!" If we hypothesize that calling into question the reasonableness of people's language, especially by a foreign speaker of that language, is tantamount to calling into question the reasonableness of their culture, then we can read PHIL's movements in Frames 2 and 4 as a challenge to MINO's attack. PHIL is using his voice and gaze to rally his fellow Americans around the flag. In frames 4 and 5, PHIL's compatriots nod their assent while the Italians at least acquiesce by their immobility. Thus, in frame 6 PHIL is responding with a self-congratulatory stance: he is taking a modest bow for his victory over MINO.
But this ‘game model’, to work, requires creating a ‘story’ based exclusively on rules of competition that ignore other psychological and cultural drives possibly at work. Above all, it views the interaction as a ‘text’, the sense of which is reconstructed from the outside — just like the other interpretations. It is therefore just as (potentially) arbitrary.
6.5.4 What we need is to be able to interact with the events (the interplays of minds and wills) that produce meaning in a conversation. We could then test reactively the sense that a ‘word+tone+gesture’ acquires reactively. Hermeneutics (6.5.1), inductive systematics (6.5.2), formalism (6.5.3) are clearly not interactive. A mixed hermeneutic/empirical method, that uses debriefing to countercheck interpretations, comes closer. It is, in fact, the method used in this project (6.3). Still, it does not offer experimental validation of falsifiable claims, like experimental science. Debriefing gives, not ‘proofs’, but clues that require interpretation as much as the conversation itself.
The reader will recall, for example, the sense we assigned to the Italian students’ immobile heads in frame 4. Debriefing (supposedly) revealed that the students’ intended message was only partial assent. But were the students sincere and accurate in recalling, during debriefing, their intentional states? Perhaps if we had given more weight to certain clues (their hesitations and hypercriticism), we might have come up with a less charitable but possibly more realistic interpretation of their immobility during PHIL’s call for consensus in frame 4. We might have concluded that, having such poor conversational skills in English, the Italian students simply did not understand what PHIL wanted and therefore limited themselves to a polite smile. In other words, the intent to distance themselves from PHIL’s call to rally around American English, was something that the Italians felt only during debriefing, as a rationalization. This interpretation does not change the conclusions we reached in 6.3; but it shows how unreliable debriefing can be.
In short, debriefing requires subjects with a rare
capacity for minute recall, can provoke false memories, works only if
participants are always willing and available to be debriefed (PHIL,
for example, wasn't) and requires interpretation anyway.
What we needed, then, was a technique that would allow us to
participate in the genesis of meaning as it happens. For if
conversations are simply texts, then they only need to be analyzed to
be understood. But if conversations are events, then they must
be lived to be understood.
7. Lessons learned
7.1 Three lessons were learned from the present experimentation. The most important was a clarification of the notion of sense in discourse. This question may seem futile to a lay person who sees conversations as: 1. purely epistemic transactions (information exchanges), 2. conducted entirely through words (frameable as text), 3. by interlocutors who are culturally/psychologically unproblematic (for themselves and for the observer). But as soon as that person engages in ‘small talk’ within some group as an outsider (by age, nationality, social class, tastes/interests, etc.) — and fails to ‘key in’ — these three idealizations quickly crumble. Indeed, not even we, as bilingual insiders, were able to make complete sense of the behavior in our videos (analyzed postmortem as ‘texts’) until we hit upon an alternative research method for CA. Let us now try to describe it.
We just recalled how debriefing showed us the limits of studying conversations as ‘texts’; and yet debriefing itself can be quite unreliable, due to memory lapses and false recollections. Why not then, we started asking ourselves, turn the researcher into a conversationalist trained to assimilate her interlocutors’ Weltanschauung, appropriate their stances, and then debrief herself on the spot? Memory would no longer be a problem and, more important, the researcher could experiment with the sense of the stances she feels she has grasped. This is what ethnographers and psychotherapists do all the time. We would only have to shift the focus from words/deeds as revelatory of a cultural system (ethnography) or a psyche (psychotherapy), to words/deeds as revelatory of the existential meaning-making event we call conversation. In fact, this is what conversation analysts do all the time, too, except that, in practicing introspection to ascertain the probable meaning of someone else’s utterances, they do not always use systematic strategies to limit projection and accept the ‘dictates of the object’ (see 4.2.2).
Our alternative CA research paradigm therefore sees the analyst as a co-conversationalist, someone who creates existential meaning-making events conjointly with her informants as a peer, i.e.,adhering to their values (but see 7.1.3) and thereby learning to interpret the events from within their culture. Like an ethnographer, the researcher accepts to be a ‘dumb but willing learner’ in the eyes of her interlocutors. Like a therapist, she uses transference and countertransference as her investigative tools. Unlike either, she does not seek to fit her interactions with her interlocutors into a system. Her holistic, collegial procedure (like conversation itself) aims at obtaining, not ‘laws’ or ‘models’, but rather transient, situated, non-formalized intuitions of the intentionalities enacted.
At first glance, this kind of knowledge may not seem ‘scientific’. It is in fact a non-epistemic variety that Aristotle calls phronesis (Nicomachean Ethics, VI, 1140a), translated generically as ‘wisdom’ but best rendered by ‘discernment that generates rules of procedure’. It is knowledge as ‘sure’ as that of any social science. An example will make its specificity clearer. Phronesis is the knowledge of, say, political history that a top-rate diplomat has: he ‘sees’ history in the choices to be made...and is usually right; his books on history, however, are often judged by Academia as accurate but ‘impressionistic’. (Note that phronesis is not practical expertise, i.e., techne in Aristotle’s trilogy: the diplomat may be a brilliant analyst but a poor negotiator.) Epistemic knowledge, on the other hand, is the knowledge of political history that a top-rate historian has: in his books he can demonstrate his assertions...and is usually right; but his capacity to ‘see’ history in the making may be judged by seasoned diplomats as ‘schematic’ and ‘inaccurate’. (Note that epistemic knowledge is not necessarily theoretical: the historian, if pedantic, may infer facts brilliantly from available data but have no theories to offer. Note, too, that it goes together with technical know-how: every great historian is also a paleographer.) Universities traditionally teach episteme and techne, not phronesis, and thus produce knowledgeable graduates who don’t know how to use their knowledge. As we shall suggest in our conclusions, the kind of student-led research that we are proposing here may provide an answer. In any case, let us now try to justify experiential/procedural knowledge (phronesis) as a valid research tool in conversation analysis.
7.1.1 As is well known, Saussure distinguished two objects of linguistic inquiry: parole, i.e., what people effectively say and mean using language, and langue, i.e., the semantic/linguistic forms inferable from what people have actually said and presumably meant. He then proceeded, as is equally well known, to treat only the latter and three generations of linguists have followed him. (Among the isolated exceptions was Saussure's co-editor Bally himself.) But what many linguists seem not to have noticed is that parole is not the mere application of langue to a specific context. Instead, langue is an abstraction from parole and a partial abstraction at that— a frail skeleton that gives only a hint of what the real body, parole, is like. Parole is "the sum of individual cases" (Saussure, in De Mauro 1972:30,395, our transl.) and thus cannot be reduced to langue.
One would have thought that pragmaticists, intent on studying real acts of speech, might have redressed the imbalance that has favored the study of langue. To some extent they have, of course. But this has not led to the study of parole as immanence,i.e., as discourse produced and apprehended through phronesis. Indeed, some pragmaticists seek to create, as it were, a langue of pragmatic effects — thus, once again, a ‘disembodiment’ of parole. Their efforts are commendable in that they enable us to put handles on regularities. But communication specialists — discourse analysts, international negotiators, L2 learners — need to come to grips with what is unrepeatable in a communicative event, not simply with what is generalizable. If a musicologist were to show us that melodies in every part of the globe can be reduced to a few combinations of notes, recursively expandable, she would undoubtedly help us to understand why music is a universal language. But if we were musicians looking for new styles, we would still need to know what makes the traditional music of Dakar or Bali or Sofia unique.
The majority of pragmaticists, of course, do study conversational interactions as parole; but they tend to treat those interactions as ‘texts’, seldom as ‘events’. (For an example of an ‘event’ approach, see Contento 1998.) Like historians, they carefully transcribe the exchange (usually only the words, however); take note of settings, roles, and relationships; then use these materials to explain how the ‘text’ — which, we claim, is not the event — develops. To discover meaning on a deeper level, some even proceed to analyze the ‘text’ hermeneutically: they reconstruct it, as literary critics do with a novel.
7.1.2 But why take for models the methods of historians and literary critics, specialists in the study of words imprisoned on a page? Pragmatics, after all, deals with live communication. Surely we can learn from specialists in the experiential/procedural comprehension of discourse events: sociologists engaged in participant observation, ethnographers in the field, group therapists, social workers, diplomats, trial lawyers, even the archeologists of Lejre, Denmark (Bibby 1970), who, to grasp the meaning of the Neolithic tools they had unearthed, created a prehistoric-like camp in which they dressed and lived as the users of those tools presumably did. Indeed, their example illustrates admirably the central, neo-Saussurean thesis of this paper: language as parole is not ‘words’, nor even ‘words+tones+gestures’, but the enactment of a historical will in a communicative event. Words, tools, empires are but the residue of that will — the meager formalizations studied by linguistics, anthropology and history (4.2.1).Parole itself can be grasped only experientially, by making the will that created it one’s own.
7.1.3 The professionals just listed all possess heuristics for grasping their interlocutor's meaning from her standpoint, heuristics which vary considerably. For example, testing the real values of one's interlocutor by provoking her verbally is something diplomats and trial lawyers do commonly, social workers and group therapists do less, and participant observers or ethnographers only rarely. On the other hand, participant observers and ethnographers usually adapt to the value system of the host population, group therapists and social workers remain themselves while creating a group identity with their interlocutors, and diplomats and trial lawyers usually keep their identities and their distance.
7.1.4 We hypothesize that it is possible to use combinations of these heuristics in order to grasp the meaning of conversational behavior from the point of view of an insider. To get an idea of what me mean concretely by ‘heuristic’, the reader may now turn to Appendix 4 and inspect one of the modules of the training program in participant observation that we developed subsequently for our student-researchers.
This article will not go into further detail in describing the acquisition of the various heuristics. Our aim here is to describe the kind of knowledge such heuristics can give. In Section 7.1 we defined it as phronesis: but what does that mean in practice? What, for example, would one of our student-researchers have learned if she had used the participant observation heuristic in the conversation pictured in our storyboard? Let us imagine that we are that student-researcher.We are an ESL learner with only a rudimentary knowledge of English, standing where NADIA is standing in the pictures.
7.1.5 So how would we perceive the conversational event and PHIL’s vocal, prosodic, and somatic behavior? The answer is easy. Even with no training in any heuristic, we could not help but sense PHIL’s behavior as a ‘contribution’ (see Note 8). Even if his words are unclear, his intent ("Hear this!") impinges itself upon us, as does the group’s intent ("Hear him!"). With appropriate training, on the other hand, we would be more attuned. For example, if we had internalized reciprocal rousing as a value (i.e., what young American males do typically when they greet each other boisterously or when they slap each others' hands after some kind of victory), we would intuitively feel PHIL’s stance as rousing and his /HUH?/ as a call, more than a question; our reaction might be to tilt our head up with a smile and with an exclamation already forming on our lips. This is what BOB is doing in frame 4 and his gesture is greeted with a twinkle in PHIL’s eye. But what if the sense of PHIL’s stance — for him — is not rousing, as it is for the group? What if, let’s say, PHIL has a heartburn and, for some reason, has guffawed to express pain? In that case our glance and smile would be met with a wave of the hand ("No, that’s just me."); if we persevere, with a reprimand ("Forget it, forget it..."). In other words, by acting coherently with PHIL’s culture, we would get him at least to correct us (and not simply ‘look through’ us, as often happens in native/non-native encounters). This is what we mean by experimenting stances in order to grasp the sense they have for the ‘natives’. The insight gained is what allows us to analyze the videos of our conversations more competently, seeing stances and contributions as they were seen.
7.1.6 But what do we do if we did not participate experimentally in a conversation we now wish to analyze? In that case we simply replicate the situation, like the archeologists of Lejre. This is, in fact, how we finally answered our question about PHIL’s posture in frame 6. So what does PHIL’s head droop with hands in pockets mean? Students of a following year accepted to try out behaving like PHIL when conversing with American friends. Whenever someone expressed perplexity over some fact of life, they would erupt with a guffaw, claim normality ("That’s life!"), rouse consensus (/HUH?/), muse a moment and then go into the downward posture. Moreover, they would do so while adopting temporarily PHIL’s value system (reconstructed from our Questionnaire).
What PHIL’s head movement surely meant, according to our veteran experimenters, was something we might label "swallowing food for thought". In fact, after musing a moment over the fact for which they had claimed normality, the experimenters needed to break with their thoughts. Letting their heads droop (then brusquely rise: not pictured) helped them to do so; furthermore, stuffing their hands into their pockets was a way of steeling themselves for the break and returning to the group in a battle-ready stance.
7.1.7 As for the validity of our ‘game’ hypothesis (according to which PHIL’s posture is a self-congratulatory stance, i.e., "taking a modest bow": 6.5.3), it was judged dubious by our experimenters. They felt victorious in having normalized a perplexity, not victorious over whoever had expressed it. They did feel ‘strategic interaction’ with the group as a whole, however, which is in fact what Goffman meant. We are therefore considering developing a game-theoretical explanatory apparatus fed with data from our simulations (as in experimental microeconomics) to sift out the competitive behavioral constants from the communicative practices we observe in multi-cultural encounters.
7.1.8 As for the first two of our three projective interpretations ("typical American sign of informality"; "cowboy shyness in female company": 6.5.1), our experimenters judged them parochial. After all, PHIL certainly felt his posture as normal, not "typically American" and "highly informal" (as it would be seen in Italy). And, in fact, "normal" is how our experimenters felt that posture in their reenactments, thanks to cultural assimilation. Moreover, while PHIL’s body language in female company might be seen as "shy" in Italy, our experimenters lived it as ordinary self-control. Clearly, then, the first two projective interpretations tell us more about their (Italian) framers’ mentality than about their object: PHIL’s posture as meaningful to him and his compatriots (see 4.2.2.). An element of truth was recognized, however, in the third interpretation: "solemn American-’Indian’-like turn-relinquishment". In fact, the experimenters reported feeling under pressure after having roused consensus — all eyes were upon them (just as in our storyboard, frame 4) — and so they gazed downward to ‘think in peace’ about what they had said. Kendon (1967) rightly notes that a downward gaze while thinking liberates speakers from their interlocutors’ stare and does not count as a turn relinquishment. But our more introspective experimenters reported that their intent to muse contained a hidden intent to cede the floor (in contrast with a concurrent, more conscious intent to keep the floor in case they thought of some quip to make). In frames 5 and 6 of our storyboard, PHIL’s stance seems to share this ambivalence: for EMILY, PHIL’s stance says he has ceded the turn to MINO (she gazes at MINO who apparently looks blank; so she looks away but not at PHIL); for the others PHIL is still claiming the floor.
7.1.9 In conclusion, our final answer is that, in frame 6, PHIL is signaling a break with his thoughts (and a quasi-relinquishment of turn), together with a brusque return to invigilating the conversation; his is a retake-control stance.
The experimenters added that, as Italians, they would never put their hands in their pockets to muse or to conclude their thoughts although, after having adopted PHIL’s Weltanschauung, they felt natural doing so in English. Indeed, the gesture gave them a greater feeling of self-possession and self-control, two of PHIL’s values they had chosen to internalize to be more in tune with their American conversation partners. And feeling those values more, they found that they communicated better with their partners.
Our second hypothesis (5.1) thus receives an unexpected (albeit partial) confirmation. Adopting every so often PHIL’s hands-in-pockets stance actually helped these Italian students to feel — and to be — ‘one of the group’. But their success, let us quickly add, does not prove that ‘similar conversational behavior’ and ‘acceptance as an insider’ are mechanically linked. Something more subtle had occurred in the interpersonal and group dynamics. As one of the student-experimenters reported: "My American friends did not consider me ‘closer’ because I put my hands in my pockets; but by putting my hands in my pockets, I considered myself ‘closer’ to them... and so they treated me that way."
7.2 A second lesson was learned from the research project illustrated in this paper: a reciprocal relationship between research and teaching can be extremely enriching, not only at the graduate level (as is currently practiced), but at the undergraduate level as well.
Normally, undergraduate students are not considered motivated enough to want to learn the basic concepts and tools of a discipline through conducting a research project, since this means a lot of self-study (terminology, etc.) to save class time for original investigations. Thus, university systems have students study, for four years, the rote ‘factual’ knowledge of all the various disciplines. Then if they go on to graduate studies, students get to study the discipline ‘hands on’ by carrying out research on a topic of interest.
This educational practice, we suggest, may actually be counterproductive: knowledge is either ‘hands on’ or it is just words. Wouldn't it be better to have biology graduates with perhaps less encyclopedic knowledge of history and language but with real knowledge (phronesis) of what documenting a historical fact and learning a natural language mean? The same applies, naturally, for history or language students with respect to biology.
In any case, it is worth noting that the research questions asked in the present study — and so the perspective given to the study of conversational interaction (what we "chose to notice": 4.1) — were dictated by the needs and curiosities of the ESL students who were the material executioners of the project. In other words, without the bi-directional interaction between teaching and research, this would have been a paper on statistically relevant concordances between gaze and head movements in some sample population.
7.3 Finally, the research procedure described here calls into question ‘obvious’ contradictions like those said to exist between theoretical research, applied research and technological implementation. The very terms are full of ambiguity and mask issues worthier of discussion (for instance, the interplay with experiential knowledge, phronesis).
Was this project, then, an example of ‘applied
research’? It did in fact spring from a real need to know
expressed by the participating L2 teachers and students.
Still, the methodological issues that this project raised (and that
are discussed throughout this paper) were, if anything, theoretical.
The question, then, is not
whether we need more theoretical or more applied research. The
question is whose needs should we try to satisfy better by
creating new elaborations and procedures resulting in what?
Only when we fail to answer that question — when our ends
become simply furthering some tradition or innovation (or simply some
interest) — do the mental elaborations called "theoretical"
seem disjointed from those called "applied" or
"technological". The ends of the research project
presented here were to furnish L2 students and instructors — in
a university system which had no consideration for second language
studies as an academic discipline, and provided little or no support
for teaching and research in that field — with tools to acquire
(and to help others acquire) intercultural conversational competence
of the kind needed in today’s global village. The
parole-centered, experiential investigative apparatus
hypothesized here was created in response to that need.
____________________________________________________________________________________
The project reported here, Spontaneous Conversation in English, was financed with funds for extra-curricular student activities (Iniziativa Didattica Studentesca 40, 1982-83) provided by theUniversity of Rome La Sapienza. This paper is a rewriting by P. Boylan of N. Mari's 1983 eight-page unpublished report on eye/head movement in the video-recorded interaction. The other student reports, also to be rewritten for publication, treat other aspects of kinesics (G. De Lorenzo, P. Noce), prosody (I. Avvenente, A. Lamanna, S. Meli), oral syntax (F. Franchi, G. Panico), and conversation routines (E. Agostini, N. De Cillis, G. Runcio). Thanks to Adam Kendon for suggestions on the final draft of this paper. Belated thanks to the student volunteers who, in 1983, helped with the staging (A. Roselli), lighting (M. Cassano), filming (G. Concetti), sound recording (G. Saporaro), editing (C. Mosticone) and transportation (N. Fioravanti). A very warm grazie to the students from Pitzer College, Temple University and Trinity College and to their teachers, respectively L. Marquis, E. Miller and P. De Martino.
___________________________________________________________________________________
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Send comments or questions
to
:
Patrick Boylan
Department of Linguistics
University of Rome III
via Ostiense 236,
00146 Rome, Italy
Tel. (+39) 06 491 973
Fax: (+39) 06 233 213 106
<patrick @ boylan.it>
Appendix 1: Storyboard of a fragment of a multi-cultural multi-party conversation
Appendix 2: Description of the Storyboard
(Contribution) — Duration: 6 seconds
Participants, clockwise from far left (numbers give position on an imaginary dial):
9: PHIL / USA; 10:EMILY / USA;
12:NADIA / Italy; 2: BOB / USA; 3:
BARBARA / USA (a young ESL teacher in Rome; she knew
only Emanuela); 6: EMANUELA / Italy;7:
MINO / Italy
FRAME 1 (1 second): MINO is speaking to BOB, while gazing at him. The OTHERS are looking at MINO but with their heads pointing toward the center of the circle, thus obliquely in most cases. Only EMANUELA turns her head to look at MINO directly.
MINO: you SAID , +GIVE me a BREAK —
Note: "Give me a break!" is an
idiomatic American English expression meaning "That’s
enough!"
FRAME 2 (1 second): MINO is repeating his utterance. EMANUELA is turning her head back to the center and probably glancing at BOB, as are the OTHERS (except NADIA). BOB is lowering his eyes, smiling, and emitting a very soft, constrained chuckle. After MINO finishes speaking, PHIL intervenes with a guffaw and attracts NADIA's gaze.
MINO: GIVE me a BREAK —
PHIL: HA +HA !
FRAME 3 (0.5 seconds): Now EMILY is looking at PHIL, too, without moving her head. So is BOB who, lifting his eyes, is passing from a low chuckle to a chortle. PHIL is cocking his head toward MINO while uttering something out of the corner of his mouth. BARBARA, sticking her hands in her dress pockets, is turning her head toward BOB.
PHIL: =THAT’s -aMERican .
FRAME 4 (0.5 seconds): PHIL, turning his head back to the center of the circle (and looking directly at BOB), is uttering an even louder guffaw mixed with a monosyllabic utterance. BOB is nodding and uttering another low, less constrained chuckle. EMILY is cocking her head toward PHIL and nodding slightly with a wide smile, closing her eyes partially. Both MINO and EMANUELA finish turning their heads toward PHIL and remain immobile. NADIA, immobile, has a faint smile. BARBARA, who was turning her body to face BOB directly, brusquely begins turning back to her original position while smiling.
PHIL: HUH ?
FRAME 5 (1 second): PHIL is lowering his eyes and repeating MINO's utterance (with a citation tone). EMILY is turning her gaze toward MINO who is lowering his head (and gaze?) slightly. BARBARA, finishing turning 180°, is now facing PHIL head on. She nods amply.
PHIL: +GIVE me a BREA::K .
FRAME 6 (2 seconds): EMILY, after glancing at BARBARA, is turning her head back and upward, looking into space. NADIA is beginning to smile more broadly as her eyes follow the direction EMILY is indicating with her glance. PHIL, smiling with a closed mouth now, lowers his head, stoops his shoulders while moving them slightly, and sticks his hands in his pockets.
GROUP: ‘ ‘
Appendix 3: Transcription conventions
Utterances are aligned along a horizontal time bar to
show overlapping/chaining. Paralinguistic realizations are
given in the description in Appendix 2. Silence is indicated
by apostrophes: ' ' (2 seconds); a prolonged
phoneme, with colons: No::: (0.3 seconds).
A pretonic syllable is indicated by capsand a tonic
syllable by underlined caps. A pretonic or tonic
higher than usual for an utterance-type is marked by a plus
sign + ; if lower by a minus
sign – ;
if much lower by a double minus sign = .
The tonic syllable can have one of six possible tone
movements, indicated by using six punctuation marks:
1. Fall from middle or middle-high to very low (the conclusive tone): .
2. The same as above but with a fall to middle low (non conclusive tone): —
3. Middle or middle high tone slightly rising at the end (introductory phrase tone): ...
4. Middle high to (very) low, then sharply to very high (question tone): ? (??)
5. Rise from middle high to high and then sharp fall to very low (exclamatory tone): !
6. Middle low or very low tone slightly rising at the end (parenthetical tone): ,
"," can also follow "." or
"!" to attenuate affirmations or express worried surprised.
Appendix 4: Preparation for field research / Participant observation: Empathy
The module below seeks to enhance the student-researcher’s capacity for empathy, usually considered a "rather vague notion" (Mondada 1998:159) or, at best, a ‘gift of nature’. It is taken from a training program developed between 1984–1991 as part of an ‘alternative’ English course at the Teachers’ College of the University of Rome. The course taught English in a perspective akin to what is now called Intercultural Communication (Jensen et al. 1995). Further details may be found in Boylan (forthcoming/b).
1. Observe foreign ‘twin’; playact her or him
Change: subjects define target values, see how their ‘self’ hinders perception
Tools: ethnographic checklists/practices à la Malinowski
2. Formulate intuited values as maxims
Change: from an epistemic to a volitional stance
Tools: Stanislavski's State of "I am" and Through Action
3. Divest (existentially)
Change: from willfulness to anomie
Tools: Bracketing à la Husserl
4. Invest (existentially)
Change: from anomie to new willfulness
Tools: Guided associations (Freud) using maxims
5. Act and verify
Change: new needs, intents, perceptions
Tools: Simulations with colleagues, thenreal-life interaction, first in controlled situations; subsequent debriefing and, if necessary, reformulation of target values.