South African business-news interview talk : its typicality and implications for materials design in the domain of ESP

[摘要] Drew and Heritage (1992) have focused attention on the influential role ConversationAnalysis (CA) has played in the study of interaction in institutional settings. One suchsetting is the news interview, and a number of researchers (e.g. Clayman, 1991;Heritage and Greatbatch, 1991; Greatbatch, 1992) have noted that interviewers (IRs)regularly adhere to the institutionalised language practices that govern the managementof topical agendas within the news interview turn-taking system. In this research study,the researcher postulates that the findings of CA studies of news interview talk may beused by language practitioners in the domain of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) togenerate meta-communicative and communicative teaching materials for prospectiveSouth African news IRs in the field of business.In order to achieve this applied linguistic aim, the role of the IR in managing newsinterview talk is described in terms of Clayman's (1991) study of news interviewopenings as well as within the framework of Heritage and Greatbatch's (1991) analysisof news interview talk. Aspects of Clayman's (1992) study of the strategies IRs employto maintain a neutralistic stance are also included in the description of the IR's role.The researcher posits that, if the generality of the discourse findings of these CAanalysts are verified in an analysis of South African news interview talk, the analysismay be regarded as a target-centred needs analysis (Cf. Jordan, 1997: 25). That is, theanalysis specifies the areas of knowledge and skills prospective news IRs need tofunction effectively in the news interview situation. To establish generality, the principlesof qualitative research are adhered to in this study. That is, in a preliminary analysis, acorpus of South African business-news interview talk is scrutinised to determine whetherthe discourse patterns in it replicate those identified by the CA analysts. An exhaustiveanalysis of the full corpus of lingual data is then made, and finally, the researchercollects and recycles through the data in order to validate the findings (Seliger andShohamy, 1989: 121-124). This CA study shows that the patterns of discourse reflectedin South African business-news interviews replicate those identified by Clayman (1991;1992) and Heritage and Greatbatch (1991).Based on the analysis, ESP activities that conform to Van Lier's (1996) Awareness,Authenticity and Autonomy curriculum model are designed for prospective news IRs.Next, one of the activities is implemented in the language classroom and a criticalreflectiveanalysis is made of the activity in order to determine whether it simulatesSouth African news interview discourse. The analysis shows that cycles of criticalreflection cannot be omitted by language practitioners if they wish to cross-validate theauthenticity and credibility of their teaching materials. Finally, future areas of researchare considered.An important justification for this research study is that a review of the literature hasrevealed that most studies of professional contexts are unrelated to the teaching of ESP(Cf. Gunnarsson, Linell and Nordberg, 1997). Moreover, as this study aims todemonstrate, the discourse features characteristic of the activities devised in thematerials design phase reflect most of the specific outcomes of OBE (outcomes-basededucation).

[发布机构] University of the Free State