"CREDITO
DI LABORATORIO"
Supplementary credit of 1 CFU
For
students intending to give the Final Exam in the Summer Session
Due
date: any time up to May
29th, 2006
Consign your project during office
hours, 5:30
to 6:30 pm, Room 3.09.
(Before coming, check
if I'm absent by clicking here>
.)
Note:
On Monday, May 29th, you can consign your project
either
-- at the end of my Second Year lesson (it ends at
2 pm) in Aula B
-- or during office hours 5:30-6:30 pm in my
office (Room 3.09)
For
students giving the Final Exam in the Autumn Session
the
due
date to consign the Credito Laboratorio
project is:
Monday, September 11th, 2006
from
5:30 to 6:30 pm in my office (Room
3.09)
_____________________________________________
THE
PROJECT
_____________________________________________
1.
Analysis of Native/Non-native communication in English
using the constructs, procedures and terminology
presented in Clyne.
- The
non-native you analyze is yourself.
- The
native is a speaker of a
marginal variety of an "inner circle" English or ANY of the
Englishes
from the outer circle (second ring), as
described by Kachru here.
In a word, choose any native speaker of English who uses a variety of
English other than R.P. (British Received Pronunciation) or G.A.
(General American). You must first
conduct a recorded conversation with this person, then
transcribe and analyze the recording. To maximize spontaneity, the
recorder should not be visible.
Note:
The laws of privacy do not forbid recording a person; they forbid
making the recording public without the person's consent. You
may therefore explain to your interviewee, after the conversation,
that you have recorded it for a university assignment and that if he
has any objection, you will erase the tape immediately, on the spot,
In any case, you should eliminate from your transcription any
indications which could be used to identify the speaker(s),)
If you do not feel comfortable using a hidden recorder, then use the
recorder out in the open.
- The
constructs (linguistic, pragmatic, ethnomethodological, etc.)
are those described in Chapters 3 and 4 of Clyne. In other words,
Clyne thinks he has described adequately the phenomena involved in
intercultural interaction by defining what locutionary, illocutionary
and perlocutionary effects are generated (this is the pragmatic
construct); what parts of the utterances are said with a high
pitch apparently for emphasis (this is part of the intonational
marking of the transcript, and the concept of intonation is one of
the linguistic constructs he uses), and so on.
But is
Clyne right? After applying all his constructs to the “reality”
of the data gathered, has Clyne really understood the dynamics of the
intercultural exchanges that he thinks he has described?
Note:
Actually, in this book Clyne was only trying to establish a method --
this is why many students find his examples "boring" and
his analyses "senseless nitpicking". You are
therefore expected to build on his work and offer more satisfying
descriptions of your intercultural breakdowns and
breakthroughs -- explanations which, using the concepts discussed in
class, illuminate the dynamics of intercultural communication as the
search for a common code through creating a "third space".to
the extent that this is possible, or at least entering into the space
and world of your interlocutor.
2.
You will observe and analyze
(a.) the communication
breakdowns due to a lack of linguistic knowledge, misuse of
pragmatic rules (such as the politeness behavior described by Brown
and Levinson) or to cultural misunderstandings or incompatibilities
due to a cultural gap:
(b.) the communication breakthroughs
thanks to the successful application of linguistic knowledge,
pragmatic rules and intercultural awareness.
3. The report,
typed on a computer, should be at least 4 pages, no more than 6, of
text (i. e., not including the pictures, diagrams, background web
pages, etc. that you may wish to include). As to form, the paper is
to be addressed to the British academic community, so you should
research on the Internet what the norms are – see, for example,
here>
.
Your report will consist essentially of the
transcription (plus commentary) of a few significant moments of your
conversation using the transcription procedures adopted by Clyne and
after each transcription you will explain (better than Clyne does, I
hope) in linguistic, pragmatic and cultural terms “what went
wrong” and “what went right” in the excerpt
transcribed.
But, according to Anglo academic style,
before you begin to give your transcriptions and explanations,
you will start your report by giving the conclusion:
what your experiment demonstrated (or didn't demonstrate if you found
no significant moments).
In addition, before you begin
to give your transcriptions and explanations. you will make your
procedure explicit: you will thoroughly describe the setting of your
conversation and you will give a biographical, sociolinguistic and
sociocultural description of your conversation partner,.
Then
you will present your transcriptions and comments.
Then, after
you give your transcriptions and explanations, you will state your
conclusion once again, except this time you will
develop it more in detail. In particular, you will use the evidence
you uncovered to take a position with respect to the usefulness and
the validity of researching intercultural encounters using Clyne's
methodology.
In other words, you will practice that
methodology and then you will conclude with an evaluation of its
worth – its scientific value (does it really demonstrate
anything?), its didactic value (does it help a non-native speaker
improve his/her English?), its personal worth (is it rewarding and
satisfying as an intellectual endeavor?)..
And that's it.
Practical
considerations
“Where
can I find native speakers of English in Rome?”
1.
Use the list of places you will find here >
2.
Use your imagination.
Some students go to
Ciampino airport when the RyanAir plane from London or Glasgow or
Belfast arrives (according to whether they would like to interview a
Brit, a Scotsman or an Irishman -- you can check here).
The students do NOT go by car, they take the bus from via Marsala:
Terravision Ciampino-Roma Bus Lines, www.terravision.it
06 79494572 Then, on the bus coming
back to Rome, they sit next to one of the passengers who has just
come from Scotland or Ireland or London and converse with him with a
hidden tape recorder.
Other students
visit the hostels (cheap hotels for students) and bed-and-breakfast
places around via Marsala. They ask if there are any guests from
Ireland, Scotland, London etc. and, if there are, the students invite
the young tourist(s) to have a cup of tea in exchange for an
interview.
What
do you mean when you say “evaluate the scientific worth”
of the kind of work Clyne does, by reproducing it and then
criticizing it?
THE PURPOSE OF THIS
TASK IS NOT JUST TO LEARN A FEW WORDS OF ENGLISH. YOU CAN DO THAT
WITH A DICTIONARY. IT IS NOT TO SPEAK A FEW WORDS IN ENGLISH -- YOU
CAN DO THAT WITH ANYONE YOU MEET IN A PUB AT CAMPO DEI' FIORI. IT IS
TO UNDERSTAND WHAT IT MEANS TO "KNOW" SOMETHING ABOUT
ENGLISH. THAT IS WHY IT IS PART OF A UNIVERSITY COURSE IN
ENGLISH.
Let me give you an example of what it
means to do linguistic research and, at the same time, continually
ask yourself the meaning of the methods and methodology you use.
If
you read in an Italian dictionary that "cocomero" is
"anguria nel dialetto del Lazio", should you believe this
affirmation ? How does the lexicographer know? Maybe that is just his
impression. Maybe you can find the word in Abruzzo and Campana and
Puglia, so it is not just "del Lazio". Maybe people use it
all over Italy today, so now it is not dialect but standard Italian.
Maybe it was derived from the word used in Latin and was therefore
used in Toscana for centuries but then the Tuscans switched to
"anguria", a word imported from the northern regions. So
maybe it is "anguria" which should be considered dialectal,
not “cocomero”. Or perhaps... etc. etc.
So you can
decide that you will do scientific (linguistic) research to find out
“the truth”.
So you formulate a hypotheses, for
example that in fact "cocomero" is indeed "anguria
nel dialetto del Lazio". Then you get in a car, drive
around Lazio, Toscana, Abruzzo etc., show people a picture of a
watermelon and ask them what it is called.
But maybe you get
bad results. Maybe your informants in Abruzzo say “anguria”
and not “cocomero” to YOU (while they say “cocomero”
among each other just like Laziali) because they know the word
“anguria” from school and want to sound "educated"
to an outsider like you.
So if you start thinking critically
of what you are doing as research methodology, you will probably
realize that you have to invent a way of asking the question to get
an honest answer Otherwise, after your travels around Central
and Southern Italy, you will not have localized the word accurately
and will risk making an isogloss that does not describe real
usage.
So how do you know if you have invented a way of asking
a question that gives you honest answers?
The answer is that
you never know. Scientific knowledge is always difficult to obtain
and uncertain. You can be confident in your findings only to a
certain extent.
To
what extent? This is what you will discuss after doing your research
on breakdowns and breakthroughs in intercultural communication, using
Clyne's methodology. The bottom line is that a “scientific
inquiry” is “scientific, not because it “demonstrates
objectively the truth” but only because:
1) it makes its
premises and reasonings explicit (so that anyone can criticize them
and suggest perhaps better ways – and you should be the
first to criticize them);
2) it implements a procedure
that can be “replicated” (duplicated) by anyone, to see
if the same results are obtained.
In conclusion, your report
should present your conclusions as “evidence to support this or
that hypothesis”, but only evidence (not “objective
fact”); it should make premises and reasonings and procedures
explicit and therefore accountable and, finally, it should give
enough details so that anyone can replicate the experiment.