Politeness and social interaction in study abroad - Digital Conservancy

492 Pages·2008·1.11 MB·English

by  Rachel Shively

Politeness and social interaction in study abroad:
Service encounters in L2 Spanish
A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
BY
Rachel Louise Shively
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Advisor: Dr. Carol A. Klee
June 2008
Copyright Rachel Louise Shively 2008
Acknowledgments
I have many people to thank for the opportunity to conduct the research for this
dissertation and for their help along the way. First and foremost, I want to wholeheartedly
thank the participants in this study for volunteering their time for this research. Second,
I’d like to give a big thanks to all of the people who made my research in Toledo
possible: the great staff at the home study abroad office and onsite at the Toledo program
office—thanks a million! Another sincere thanks goes to my advisor and to my other
dissertation committee members for their insights on my research. Last, but not least,
thanks so much to my family and friends for their support and encouragement.
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Abstract
This study examines the second language (L2) learning of politeness and social
interaction in study abroad within a sociocultural and rapport management framework,
reporting on longitudinal, ethnographic research of service encounters recorded in situ
between L2 learners of Spanish and local Spanish service providers in Toledo, Spain.
Service encounters are defined as interactions between a customer and a service provider
in which some commodity will potentially be exchanged.
The participants in the study were seven U.S. American students who studied
abroad for one semester in Spain during 2007. The data consist of naturalistic digital
recordings that participants made of themselves while visiting local stores, banks,
information desks, and other service providers. The study was longitudinal with five
recordings made at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester by each student, for
113 recordings total. Other sources of data included students’ weekly journals describing
their service encounters and learning of politeness, interviews with participants and local
Spaniards, and the researcher’s field notes as a participant observer.
The findings indicate that, during the semester abroad, participants learned target
language norms of politeness regarding requests, openings, and discourse markers. These
developments over time in L2 politeness were connected to students’ descriptions about
how they learned specific politeness features, namely, through explicit instruction,
observation of Spaniards, participation in service encounters, and reactions of
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interlocutors. Learners managed rapport in service encounters through tone of voice,
positive assessments, and other face-enhancing moves.
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Table of Contents
I. Chapter 1: Introduction. ..............................................................................9
Background and rationale for the study. ..........................................................9
Research questions. ........................................................................................14
Significance of the study. ..............................................................................14
Organization of the dissertation. ....................................................................16
II. Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework and Review of the Literature. ........17
Language socialization. ..................................................................................18
Vygotskian Sociocultural Theory. ..................................................................33
Politeness Theory. ..........................................................................................52
Empirical Research. .......................................................................................72
Conclusion: Review of the literature. .............................................................109
III.Chapter 3: Method. .....................................................................................110
Description of the Research Site. ...................................................................110
Participants. ....................................................................................................115
Recruitment and participant orientation. ........................................................130
Data collection tools and procedures. ............................................................131
Data analysis. .................................................................................................143
IV.Chapter 4: Results. .......................................................................................145
Overview of the characteristics of students’ service encounter interactions. 145
Research Question 1: How do L2 learners’ interactions in service encounters
change over the course of one semester studying abroad? What politeness features
do they acquire? Do their interactions become more similar to those of the target
speech community?. .......................................................................................187
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Research Question 2: How do students report learning about the politeness
features of service encounters?. .....................................................................238
Research Question 3: What is the role of the interlocutor and the social context in
L2 learners’ performance of service encounters?. ..........................................259
Research Question 4: How do students manage rapport in service encounter
interactions?. ..................................................................................................322
V. Chapter 5: Discussion and Conclusions. ....................................................358
Research Question 1: Changes in politeness behavior over time. .................359
Research Question 2: Learning politeness features. ......................................385
Research Question 3: Role of the social context. ..........................................398
Research Question 4: Rapport management. .................................................407
Limitations of the study. ................................................................................416
Pedagogical implications. ..............................................................................419
Conclusions. ...................................................................................................433
VI.Appendices. ...................................................................................................436
Appendix A: Materials used to teach requests in the Maximizing Study Abroad
class. ...............................................................................................................436
Appendix B: Student recording assignment. .................................................438
Appendix C: Service Encounter Information Form. ......................................441
Appendix D: Description of journal assignments. .........................................442
Appendix E: Weekly journal assignment. ......................................................443
Appendix F: Background questionnaire. ........................................................444
Appendix G: Language contact questionnaire. ..............................................448
Appendix H: Student interview questions. ....................................................456
VII.Bibliography. ...............................................................................................457
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List of Tables
Table 1: Cultural contents of autonomy and affiliation face (p. 59)
Table 2: Stages of request development (p. 100)
Table 3: Topics and sequence for Maximizing Study Abroad course (p. 106)
Table 4: Summary of the background characteristics of the participants (p. 108)
Table 5: Calendar of recording assignments for students (p. 130)
Table 6: Summary of service encounters recorded by students by week (p. 138)
Table 7: Students’ frequency of use of the informal (tú) and formal (usted) pronouns by
week (p. 143)
Table 8: Frequency of greeting types by student (p. 145)
Table 9: Strategies students used to request services or information (p. 150)
Table 10: Frequency of request strategy types by students in food, retail, and information
desk service encounters (p. 183)
Table 11: Instances of relational talk in the service encounters by student (p. 252)
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Chapter 1: Introduction
Background and rationale for the study
While early research in second language acquisition (SLA) emphasized
cognitivist approaches to understanding the processes involved in learning a second
language (L2), the last decade has seen a “social turn” in SLA (Block, 2003; Ortega,
2006), that is, a rise in the number of studies examining SLA from approaches that situate
learning in the social and cultural sphere. One area of investigation that can benefit from
a sociocultural approach is the learning of L2 pragmatics in study abroad contexts
(Kasper, 2001). With several notable exceptions (cf. DuFon, 1999; Siegal, 1994; 1995;
1996) most previous research on the learning of pragmatics (i.e., interlanguage
pragmatics) by study abroad students has not taken a sociocultural approach.
Findings from previous interlanguage pragmatics studies in study abroad contexts
indicate that in many cases, during a stay abroad, learners become somewhat more
native-like in their use of the L2 with regard to perception and/or production of routine
formulae (Barron, 2003; DuFon, 1999; Hoffman-Hicks, 1999; Kondo, 1997; Marriott,
1995; Owen, 2002; Rodríguez, 2001), terms of address (Kinginger & Belz, 2005;
Marriott, 1995), implicatures (Bouton, 1999), lexical and phrasal mitigation (Barron,
2003), internal morphosyntactic mitigation (Cohen & Shively, 2007), upgraders (Barron,
2007), and semantic strategies (Barron, 2003; Kondo, 1997; Matsumura, 2001;
Rodríguez, 2001; Schauer, 2004; 2007). In addition to these issues, a few studies have
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addressed the issue of communicative or interactional competence (Lafford, 1995; Dings,
2006), with findings suggesting overall that study abroad learners make gains in their
ability to carry on a conversation in the target language (TL), which includes issues such
as opening a conversation, providing backchannel responses, and using cohesive devices
(e.g., entonces, después).
On the other hand, learners do not always move in the direction of becoming
more target-like in their speech behavior, and movement away from target language
norms during study abroad is also attested (Barron, 2003; DuFon, 1999; Hoffman-Hicks,
1999; Kondo, 1997). Furthermore, pragmatic development varies among individual
learners (Barron, 2003; Cohen, Paige, Shively, Emert, & Hoff, 2005; DuFon, 1999;
Kinginger & Belz, 2005; Siegal, 1996).
While more studies are needed on interlanguage pragmatics in study abroad
(Lafford, 2006), previous research generally suggests that study abroad students improve
their pragmatic behaviors to some extent over the course of four to ten months of study in
an L2-speaking country (Barron & Warga, 2007; Churchill & DuFon, 2006). What many
previous studies do not provide, however, is an analysis of how and why students’
pragmatic abilities do or do not change over time, the answers to which can be found—in
part—through a closer examination of learning over time in the larger social context.
Indeed, the social aspect of learning is the feature that has perhaps most attracted
SLA researchers to investigate study abroad. What is special about study abroad is its
status as a second- rather than a foreign-language (FL) learning context, one in which L2
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