How to use the Book
The title of this book suggests a combination of two activities that people do but rarely combine in the same thought: language and interaction. Language has been studied for centuries, but what we know about language is strongly influenced by writing and written language and, because writing and reading are most often done in isolation, many theories have ignored the social life of language. Obviously, interaction&social interaction&does not happen in isolation; it involves people doing things and influencing each other by what they do. To combine these two in a single thought means asking: How does social interaction happen through language? And how does our knowledge of language change when we consider it to be primarily a means of social interaction? These are the two questions that this book addresses. It is written for readers who are interested in language and for readers who are interested in society, social institutions, and social relationships. These are often two separate groups of people, and this book has something to say to both.
The presentation of ideas in this book is organized into three parts, titled Foundations, Analysis, and Consequences. In Part 1 Foundations, the main ideas about the relationship between language and social interaction are presented and reviewed. Many ideas have come from philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, and linguists, and these people have been concerned with spoken language because social interaction is so easy to see when people are speaking to each other. Some of the most exciting and innovative ways of understanding how language works in social interaction, however, have emerged not from studies of conversation but from studies of the novel and other forms of literature by the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin.
In Part 2 of the book, Analysis, the fundamental concepts of language and social interaction introduced in Part 1 are applied to analyze actual instances of social interaction through language. The approach that is taken here is not to look first at language but to focus attention instead on the activities that people are doing and only then consider how language helps them to organize those activities. The activities that we consider throughout the book have a recognizable shape that is often repeated and is related to the social and power relations between participants and in the broader society. This approach to language in interaction derives from linguistic anthropology and is called Practice Theory, the focus of which is discursive practice. In the second part of the book, two methods of analyzing discursive practice are presented: one that originated in the linguistic theory known as systemic functional grammar and the other, the procedures of conversation analysis, which had their origin in sociology.
Because language is used in social interaction it has important consequences in people's lives. The third and final part of the book, Consequences, examines how people construct their social identities through the language they use, how individuals form communities of people who share similar values and ways of using language, and how people learn to become members of those communities. The analytical frameworks that are presented in Part 2 are used to show the consequences of using language in a certain way.
Depending on your background, you may find that topics raised in the later parts of the book are more interesting than topics discussed earlier and you are, of course, free to pick and choose those pieces of the book that appear to be most relevant to you. But the book is not designed as a buffet, and there is a benefit from consuming the three parts in the order in which they are presented. Part 1Foundations supports the analyses of language and interaction in Part 2, and those analyses inform the understanding of the social consequences of language use in Part 3.
There is somewhat less of an intended sequence in the materials presented in Sections A, B, and C. The three sections of each unit are held together by a common topic as you can see, for example, from the titles of the sections of Unit 2&A2 Talk in Context, B2 Talk in Context, and C2 Exploring the Nature of Context&or Unit 8&A8 Community and Communities, B8 Discourse Communities, and C8 Discovering Communities. Each section with the same number is designed to engage the reader with the same ideas in different ways.
In Section A, the main terms and concepts are introduced and exemplified in discursive practices as diverse as a civil rights leader's speech, a music lesson at school, and interaction in an online social networking community. These units are designed for active readers, with tasks interspersed throughout the presentation to help readers relate some of the concepts to their own experience. The material in Section A is presented in ways that are accessible to readers without an academic background in linguistics, anthropology, or sociology. The ideas presented there, however, did originate in the writings of eminent scholars in those fields, and extracts from their writings are presented in Section B. Each unit in Section B contains an overview of the topic and an introduction to the reading. The activity of reading itself is presented in Section B as an interactive process with a set of preview questions that help to familiarize the reader with the theme of the reading, several reflective activities located at key points throughout the text, and a brief discussion of the main points following the reading. A summary of ideas and concerns raised in the readings concludes each unit in Section B.
Section C is where you, the reader, provide most of the input through directed research activities. Each unit is designed to be action-oriented and practical. Units in Section C present a set of data and a variety of activities designed to help readers hone their research skills both in the field (by going out and collecting data) and in the library (by extensive reading and interpretation of key texts). All units in this section contain an introduction, which gives background to the data and includes an overview of some of the methods for collecting and analyzing the data. They include two or three tasks requiring readers to engage with the data, a discussion section with comments on possible interpretations of the data, and a set of questions and tasks to help readers begin similar explorations in their own contexts. The final sections of the C units are titled Questions and Activities for Future Exploration and provide suggestions for large-scale research projects.
Some readers may prefer to proceed through these three sections alphabetically, but different routes are possible. Starting with a key reading in Section B provides a basis for evaluating the presentation in Section A, but it would be best done by readers with some background in the academic field from which the Section B author hails. Readers who start with the research projects in Section C and who, only after completing some of the projects, proceed to the other sections will be well grounded in their analyses of social interaction through language and may use that grounding to evaluate the theories presented in the other two sections. This route would be suitable for readers with some previous experience of research in the field or in the library.
Finally, because this book is about language use in social interaction, one the most effective ways into the field is for readers to interact with other readers in the same study group or with other readers over the internet. Use the book as a springboard for interacting and for reflecting on interaction and how it is achieved through language. By the end of the process, you should be able to take a position on one of the great controversies of modern linguistics: Is language a structured set of forms that are used to represent things and ideas in the world? Or is language a set of meaningful actions and cultural practices through which people intervene in the world?