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Language Learning, Discourse and Cognition: Studies in the tradition of Andrea Tyler
Edited by Lucy Pickering and Vyvyan Evans
[Human Cognitive Processing 64] 2018
► pp. 11–36

Chapter 1
Culture, gender, ethnicity, identity in discourse

Exploring cross-cultural communicative competence in American university contexts

International teaching assistants in charge of undergraduate classes in American universities present the anomalous situation of the non-native speaker in the role of higher authority, but the native-speaker having greater communicative resources and cultural knowledge. This interactional sociolinguistic case study of a facilitated negotiation of discourse style in conversations between a Chinese teaching assistant and an African-American undergraduate explores the situated enactment and interpretation of identity in relation to culture, gender, and ethnicity. A multilayered analysis involves videotaped role-plays based on a prototypical teacher/student interaction with conflicting goals, guided feedback, repeat enactments, playback sessions, and reverse role-plays. It explores the situated presentation of self and the attempt to exercise power, and reveals difficulties in the development of cross-cultural communicative competence when a discourse style is associated with values incompatible with presentation of self and thus emotionally unacceptable (in this case, to the African-American undergraduate).

Keywords: American university discourse, international teaching assistants, pragmatics, role-plays
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology and data
  • 3.The first role-play
    • 3.1The first enactment of the first role-play
    • 3.2Guided feedback on the first enactment
    • 3.3The second enactment of the first role-play
    • 3.4Immediate guided feedback after second enactment of first role-play
    • 3.5Discussion of the first role-play
  • 4.The second role-play
    • 4.1Discussion of the second role-play
  • 5.The reverse role-plays
    • 5.1Reverse role-play with Chinese TA playing role of student
    • 5.2Immediate feedback on reverse role-play with Chinese ITA playing role of student
    • 5.3Reverse role-play with American student playing Chinese student role
    • 5.4Immediate feedback on reverse role-play with American student playing Chinese student role
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 20 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.64.02dav
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Attardo, Salvatore & Lucy Pickering
2018. Afterword. The theoretical and applied foundations of Andrea Tyler’s approach to the study of language. In Language Learning, Discourse and Cognition [Human Cognitive Processing, 64], ► pp. 301 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2021. Bibliography. In Pragmatics and its Applications to TESOL and SLA, ► pp. 198 ff. DOI logo

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