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Native and Non-Native Speaker Interpersonal Skills at Conferences: Managing Self-Mentions and Humour

2013; Springer International Publishing; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-319-02526-1_11

2193-7656

Francisco Javier Fernández Polo,

Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies

Getting the audience on your side seems crucial to the success of a conference presentation (Rowley-Jolivet and Carter-Thomas ). Yet, non-native speakers seem to minimize the importance of this element, focusing on propositional content and neglecting interaction (Swales ). Two strategies typically used by successful speakers to create interpersonal links with their audiences are self-mentions and humour. Research on personal references in academic discourse has traditionally focused on writing (Ivanič ; Fløttum et al. ). Contrastive research on self-mentions in academic writing (Lorés ; Mur Dueñas ) suggests the existence of culture-specific practices that might transfer into the non-native speakers’ English writings. No evidence exists of the implications for their speech practices. The role of humour in academic speech has been studied by Fillmore () and, more recently, by Lee (), but only in the contexts of PhD defenses and university teaching. The use of humour at conferences by non-native English speakers has been cursorily explored by Frobert-Adamo () and Vassileva (), but their data are scarce and their analyses slightly outdated. In this chapter we explore differences between native and non-native speaker scholars regarding their use of self-mentions and “non-seriousness” (Chafe ) at international conferences in English. Our corpus consists of two subsets of CPs, totaling 228 minutes of speech. The field is Linguistics and the presentations are broadly comparable in terms of field and other situational features. The analysis takes a multimodal perspective, based on written transcriptions, and audio and video materials. In our study, self-mentions include both subject and object pronouns and possessive adjectives. Instances of “non-seriousness” were identified following Chafe’s () definition and taxonomy. The analysis of self-mentions reveals: (a) a very high incidence of these forms, compared to similar written materials; (b) no major differences in the number of self-mentions in both native and non-native presentations, but (c) important differences in the nature of the verbs in “I + verb” structures, generally, more formal and written-like in the NNS presentations. As regards non-seriousness, the analysis indicates that: (a) episodes of non-seriousness tend to be less frequent, shorter and less strategically located in NNS presentations; (b) both groups use non-seriousness for much the same purposes, to minimize the effects of various undesirable and abnormal situations arising in the context of the presentation, such as slips of the tongue, unreasonably long examples or the use of unfamiliar terminology. All in all, our group of native speakers shows a keener awareness of the need to connect with their audiences, by adopting a more colloquial, casual style and introducing moments of shared amusement to gain their allegiance and support. The present research leaves open whether the NNS’s distinctive behaviour in our research is the result of the transfer of native linguistic and cultural practices, or is intrinsically characteristic of L2 production. We would favour, pending further research, this second interpretation. Some of the lexical and pragmatic choices made by our NNSs have been shown to coincide with those observed in ELF speakers elsewhere. One characteristic feature of ELF is the tendency to overemphasize the importance of the ideational function of discourse.