Rosina Márquez Reiter

Task difficulty in speaking tests

The difficulty of speaking tasks has only recently become a topic of investigation in language testing. This has been prompted by work on discourse variability in second language acquisition (SLA) research, new classificatory systems for describing tasks, and the advent of statistical techniques that enable the prediction of task difficulty. This article reviews assumptions underlying approaches to research into speaking task difficulty and questions the view that test scores always vary with task conditions or discourse variation. A new approach to defining task difficulty in terms of the interaction between pragmatic task features and first language (L1) cultural background is offered, and the results of a study to investigate the impact of these variables on test scores are presented. The relevance for the generalizability of score meaning and the definition of constructs in speaking tests is discussed.

Complaint calls to a caregiver service company: The case of desahogo

Abstract This study examines pragmatic strategies employed by Uruguayan (Montevidean) service providers and customers in 15 authentic telephone calls within an institutional context characteristic of contemporary Uruguay: a caregiver service company. More specifically, it analyzes the strategies deployed by callers in constructing their complaints and those by call-takers in responding to them with special attention to the expression of desahogo, a self-disclosure pragmatic strategy used by callers when they realize that they have been unsuccessful in obtaining their main transactional goal. The desahogo  functions as a verbal avenue through which interlocutors, in this case callers, express frustration about the service received, even if remedial action is unlikely to occur. The findings indicate that the pragmatic strategies observed, and in particular that of desahogo, reflect a broader Uruguayan (Montevidean) socio-cultural reality; one in which venting to a complete stranger appears to be an accepted mode of behavior. In the context of these calls, desahogo is explained by: 1) a shared cultural understanding of the type and amount of personal information considered to be appropriate and / or inappropriate to disclose in task-oriented interactions with complete strangers; and 2) Uruguay’s developing socio-economic infrastructure, which does not yet fully safeguard consumers’ rights.

Intra-cultural variation: Explanations in service calls to two Montevidean service providers.

Abstract This article offers an intra-cultural pragmatic analysis of some aspects of the interactional behaviour of Uruguayans (Montevideans) in non-emergency service calls to two telephone service centres. In both sets of calls customers telephone to confirm delivery of a service for which there has been some delay. In particular, this study investigates the strategies employed by service representatives to apologize for a perceived companys shortfall. The findings show similarities in the overall organization of both sets of calls as well as in the type of apologizing sub-strategy deployed. Service representatives in both companies coincided in choosing explanations as an expression of remedial work. Although explanations figured in both sets of calls, those given by the call-takers of one of the companies consisted of justifications for the service shortfall and contained explicit expressions of apology, while those of the other company comprised excuses and expressions of evasion of responsibility. The choice of apologizing sub-strategy is explained by the fact that the offence was regarded as non-severe and by the state of consumer rights in the country. The variation observed in the way the explanations were constructed is attributed to the different micro cultures of the companies.

Im)politeness in Service Encounters

This chapter examines sociopragmatic research on commercial service encounters. It offers a precis of the studies that have utilised service encounters as a vehicle to examine (Im)politeness manifestations. It addresses the methodological advantages of the service encounter as a relatively formalised interactional site in which sociability and efficiency are managed, hence as a locus for the emergence of (Im)politeness orientations. The chapter traces the evolution of (Im)politeness research and discusses the complexities of capturing (Im)politeness practices in transformation: from face-to-face and telephone-mediated encounters to newer communicative arenas resulting from technological advances such as online websites. In so doing, it discusses the analytic challenges involved in understanding (Im)politeness across a multiplicity of prior and current interactions with other parties alongside the exchange with service provider.

Banal interculturalism: Latin Americans in Elephant and Castle, London

ABSTRACT This paper discusses banal interculturalism as produced in an interview situation with migrants of Latin American background in London. Banal interculturalism emerges within discursive semiotic processes that allow the participants to display their (cultural) knowledge about co-ethnics and their practices, to position themselves in opposition to the ‘others’ within diaspora, and to justify their, typically negative, views towards other migrants. Sources of that knowledge can be experiential, though in most cases consist of hearsay evidence. This notion may assist intercultural communication scholars in understanding how intra-group relations are conceived and the consequences for migrants of the discourses they themselves spread within the wider group.

A ella no le gusta que le digan María y a mí que me traten de tú. A window into Latin American diversity

In this paper I explore sociolinguistic and pragmatic aspects of institutional discourse in a Spanish-speaking modern, mediated and regulated site of talk, namely a telephone conversation gathered at a call centre which had recently been set up in a South American financial hub. I focus on instances of interactional misfires in a service call between a Montevidean institutional agent and a Bogotano client by examining how they unfold, the possible reasons behind them and the implications for (mediated) communication in a globalized world.

Examining Linguistic Politeness Phenomena

The last twenty to thirty years have seen a proliferation of studies in linguistic politeness (Kasper, 1996). The increasing interest in this area has led some scholars to see politeness as a sub-discipline of pragmatics (Thomas, 1995).

Conversation Analysis: Examining stretches of talk

In this chapter we look at the approach to the examination of conversation or stretches of talk advocated by conversation analysts, aspects of which have been highly influential in sociopragmatics. We refer here to ‘ethnomethodological’ conversation analysis or CA, as it is commonly labelled, rather than to linguistic or other approaches to the study of conversation (Markee, 2000). That is, we refer to the approach to the examination of ‘talk-in-interaction’ (Schegloff, 1982) which was developed in the 1960s by Harvey Sacks, together with Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson, and which has its roots in ethnomethodology, a branch of sociology (see 3.1). Within this approach, talk-in-interaction is regarded as ‘the primordial site of sociality’ (Schegloff, 1986) in that ‘the organization of persons dealing with one another in interaction is the vehicle through which those institutions [‘(the) society’ — the economy, the polity, the law, etc.] get their work done’ (p. 112). The object of study for conversation analysts is, therefore, how talk is used in the construction of social (inter)action. For sociopragmaticists, the examination of language as a vehicle for social interaction is also central, although not from the same perspective (see 3.4). As we will see in section 3.5, most work carried out by Hispanists where CA analytical concepts are employed cannot be labelled ethnomethodological as their work reflects a different understanding of reality (see chapter 6). The goal of most Hispanists is to go beyond the description of structures of talk-in-interaction to the explanation of their use in relation to sociocultural factors, and to achieve this goal, they may make use of experimental rather than naturally occurring data.

Examining Sociopragmatic Variation

In the preceding chapters, we saw that the main bulk of the studies carried out in the sociopragmatics of Spanish has focused on the examination of particular phenomena (the realization of speech acts, aspects of the organization of conversation, politeness manifestations) in a variety of Spanish in contrast with another language, with English and Swedish constituting the contrasting languages par excellence. Contrastive studies of Spanish(es), however, have so far received considerably less attention and, in their vast majority, have only implicitly touched upon the notion of sociopragmatic variation (see, for example, the studies undertaken in Scandinavia, 5.2.2).

Research Methods in Sociopragmatics

As we saw in Chapter 1, pragmatics is a relatively new discipline whose nature of inquiry intersects with that of a number of other social sciences, such as linguistics (applied linguistics, (critical) discourse analysis, semantics, sociolinguistics), sociology, psychology and anthropology. Pragmatics does not have a methodology of its own but draws upon the methodology employed in other social sciences, in linguistics, anthropology and sociology, for example. As the field of pragmatics is broad and covers a variety of strands, from the study of (contextualized) sentence meaning (Fraser, 1998) to the study of meaning in interaction (Thomas, 1995), the way in which data are collected and analysed depends on the pragmatic perspective adopted by the researcher, as well as on the object of study. This book has focused on sociopragmatics; namely, on the study of the underlying norms of speaker and hearer meaning as reflected in the (appropriate) realization of speech acts, the organization of conversation, politeness manifestations and sociopragmatic variation. Furthermore, most of the empirical studies discussed in the book have concentrated on different aspects of ‘spoken interaction’, gathered in a variety of ways: from the employment of production questionnaires, aimed at eliciting instances of spoken data, to the use of naturalistic data collection methods. Rather than provide a precis on social research, the aim of this chapter is to review the main data collection methods that have been employed to study different aspects of (Spanish) sociopragmatics. This decision has been taken for two reasons: firstly, there is already available an array of specialized publications on the subject of social research and, secondly, as evidenced by the empirical studies reported in previous chapters, sociopragmaticists have favoured some social research instruments more than others, for example, questionnaires v. interviews.