The Interpretation of Match-seeking Posts in Mandarin Conversational Classroom Interactions
Interlanguage pragmatics and cross-cultural communication have long been a focus of intercultural studies. A growing literature has explored interculturality as either situationally emergent (Nishizaka, 1995), or as a phenomenon that is socially and interactionally constructed by relying on relative cultural models or norms (Kecskes, 2020). The sociocognitive approach (SCA) to communication and pragmatics homes in on what really happens during the communicative process, focusing on how participants produce and holistically interpret speech, relying on their accessible knowledge or prior experience during reciprocal meaning co-construction and comprehension.
Adopting the SCA, this study investigates the discourse in an Advanced Mandarin conversational classroom, where L1 and L2 Mandarin speakers compare and contrast a set of match-seeking posts in English or Chinese, before presenting their analysis of the social or cultural motivations behind the differences they have discovered. Scrutinizing over nine hours of classroom video-recordings of 13 students in four-group discussions, the author investigates the interactional course of each group, focusing on the dynamic process that underlie their comprehension of English and Chinese wording differences, negotiation of meaning nuances, and co-construction of common ground in the target language.
Through multimodal conversational analysis — a methodology that has been widely used in classroom interactional research — this study examines the under-investigated interactions in a Chinese conversational classroom. First, participants are revealed to demonstrate egocentric behavior, as termed in Barr and Keysar (2005), relying on students’ own epistemological understanding during their conversations in finding common ground or forming conclusions. Second, culturally-specific meaning comprehension is achieved via mutually supportive interactions by the interlocutor’s orientation to the salient part of their relative L1 knowledge, rather than cultural affiliation. Third, groups present their unique interpretation of the contrasting posts, demonstrating that their understanding is the result of interplay between intention and different attention, motivated by each individual’s sociocultural background.