27.4202, Review: Applied Ling; Gen Ling: Joyce (2016)

Wed Oct 19 13:30:00 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-4202. Wed Oct 19 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.4202, Review: Applied Ling; Gen Ling: Joyce (2016)

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Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2016 09:29:30
From: Zsuzsanna Zsubrinszky [zsubrinszky.zsuzsanna at uni-bge.hu]
Subject: Language at Work

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-1070.html

EDITOR: Helen  de Silva Joyce
TITLE: Language at Work
SUBTITLE: Analysing Language Use in Work, Education, Medical and Museum Contexts
PUBLISHER: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Zsuzsanna Zsubrinszky, Budapest Business School

Reviews Editor: Robert A. Cote 

SUMMARY 

The volume “Language at Work: Analysing Language Use in Work, Education,
Medical and Museum Contexts” by Helen de Silva Joyce brings together 13
chapters that reflect recent linguistic and broader multimodal research in a
cross-section of institutions – museums, schools, defence, non-government
organisations, universities, hospitals and corporations, as well as
Asian-based call centres. 

The book is divided into four parts, the titles of which indicate the broad
context that the chapters explore in various ways. Part 1, “Language at Work
in Workplace Contexts” is concerned with how language within the workplace is
used to build customer relations, group solidarity, and partnerships between
organisations. Part 2, “Language at Work in Education Contexts” ranges from
broader perspectives on how institutional policy documents position teachers
to implement curriculum change and how school-based professional development
impacts on student outcomes to analysis of the day-to-day work of teachers and
university lecturers. Part 3, “Language at Work in Medical Contexts’”focuses
on how language in the routine processes of the hospital can put patients at
risk, reinterprets the subjective experiences of medical and mental health
patients and on how senior clinicians integrate their teaching role into
discussions about patients. The final section, Part 4, “Language at Work in
Museum Contexts” deals with the role of language in relation to museum
visitors, how the visitor is constructed, informed and educated through museum
texts, and what this means for social groups who are seen as “traditional
museum patrons.” 

Part I, “Language at Work in Workplace Contexts” opens with Chapter 1,
“Innovations in Workplace Communications Assessment: Measuring Performance in
Asian Call Centres” by Jane Lookwood, who demonstrates how subject matter
experts and linguists worked together to develop ‘a quality assurance
scorecard’ – incorporating pronunciation, lexico-grammatical choice,
interactional and strategic language use and discourse − to use for
‘communication skills appraisal and diagnostic coaching feedback’. In Chapter
2, “Making it on the Team: Achieving Team Membership through Banter in Defence
Work Context”, Elizabeth A. Thomson shifts the language focus to the role of
everyday talk in aligning people around shared norms and building team
membership. The analysis focuses on banter using a casual conversation network
(Eggins and Slade, 1997) to identify turn-taking choices for player and
non-player moves. Chapter 3, “The Language of Collaboration: NGOs and
Corporations Working Together” by Theo Van Leeuwen, Ken Tann and Suzanne Benn
considers the language of environmental partnerships between World Wildlife
Fund (WWF) and two commercial organisations. Linguistic and
recontextualisation analyses relate the micro-analysis of texts systematically
to the macro-analysis of their contexts and provide an approach to evaluating
what partnerships achieve. 

Part II, “Language at Work in Education Contexts” begins with Chapter 4,
“Developing Teachers’ Professional Knowledge for Discipline Literacy
Instruction” by Sally Humphry and Lucy Macnaught. Drawing on surveys,
linguistic analysis of teacher feedback to students and examples of classroom
texts from the subject area of Technology and Applied Sciences, the authors
investigate how literacy instruction can be integrated with what teachers
recognise as core business content learning. Continuing the focus on education
in Chapter 5, “Negotiating the Australian Curriculum: Exploring Institutional
Policy through Textual Analysis”, Lesley Farrell and Ken Tann tackle the
social effects of education policy. The authors map the ruling relations
surrounding the curriculum documentation and apply the tools of Systemic
Functional Linguistics to examine how the documentation positions stakeholders
at various levels, and what this implies for teachers’ knowledge and
practices. Chapter 6, “The Lecturer at Work: Language, the Body and Space in
the Structuring of Disciplinary Knowledge in Law” by Susan Hood and Patricia
Maggiora shifts to a particular university context (a law lecture) in which
they explore how a lecturer’s verbal language and body language cooperate in
the pedagogic task of building disciplinary knowledge. The study reveals that
the lecturer’s position and movement can offer a meaningful potential to be
exploited in scaffolding students in acquiring knowledge of their discipline
and open space for the design and critique of renovations to teaching and
learning in higher education. In Chapter 7, “The Literacy Demands of the
Teaching Workplace”, Susan Feez shows teachers how to unpack for students the
meanings made by language in order to help them learn the literacy practices
of each subject area. For this purpose four teachers kept a literacy diary,
noting the reading and writing they undertook in four categories: curriculum
and teaching, student welfare, administration and other areas such as
professional learning and accreditation. The participants’ responses imply
that there are certain features of the teaching workplace that pose barriers
to both teachers and students developing their literacy skills. 

Part III, “Language at Work in Medical Contexts” highlights ineffective
communication between clinicians and patients in hospitals, which is
considered to be a well-recognized contribution to patient harm undergoing
hospital care. In Chapter 8, “Potential Risk Points in Doctor-Patient
Communication: An Analysis of Hong Kong Emergency Department Medical
Consultations”, Diana Slade, Jack Pun, Graham Lock and Suzanne Eggins describe
a research project that draws on tools of Social Functional Linguistics (SFL)
to explore the links between risk, satisfaction, and communication in
interactions (admission, diagnosis, examinations and consultation) between
Hong Kong emergency department doctors and patients. The analysis of these
interactions provides a useful first step in locating points of vulnerability
or risk that may impact on patient safety and satisfaction. In Chapter 9, “As
a Doctor, You’re Always Learning: Discourse Strategies Senior Clinicians Use
to Teach Junior Clinicians on the Job”, Suzanne Eggins presents the ways in
which senior doctors mentor junior doctors in Australian public hospitals
through routine interactions, which are recorded and then analysed. The
clinicians are seen to model key medical activities by thinking out loud with
junior doctors, to interpose ad hoc teaching into interactions and to instruct
through dialogic insertions sequences and shared completion of discourse. In
the final medical chapter, Chapter 10, “Disciplinary Discourses: Contrasting
Representations of the Patient in Medical and Mental Health Handover
Interactions”, Suzanne Eggins, Nayia Cominos and John Walsh use critical
social-functional linguistic analyses (e.g., the multi-voiced dissection of
the patient, technicality and clinical nominalisations) to contrast how
patients are represented in medical and mental health hospital handovers. The
results indicate that in medical interactions the patient’s account is swamped
by attributions from medical artefacts and experts, while in mental health
handovers, the patient’s account is juxtaposed with conflicting accounts. 

In the final part of the book, Part IV, “Language at Work in Museum Contexts”,
three chapters deal with museums and museum visitors from different
perspectives. In Chapter 11, “Designing in/Designing out: Literacies and the
Construction of the Museum Visitor”, Jacqueline Widin and Keiko Yasukawa
examine the literacy practices of traditional and non-traditional museum
visitors and museum staff. The multi-layered research approach peeled back the
layers of power relations the imbue museum practices and suggested literacy is
a key design consideration for museums that are serious about transforming
their visitor demographics. Jennifer Blunden in Chapter 12, “Boundary Riders:
Museums, Language and the In-between”, focuses on spoken and written museum
texts and describes how she worked with museum staff to make them aware of the
impact of language in museum texts on the communication with the visitors. 

The volume concludes with Chapter 13, “Family Matters in Museums” by Helen
Whitty, who is concerned with non-mainstream museum visitors, not in terms of
deficits but how these visitors engaged with what the museums offer. The
author argues that museums can be performative spaces where assemblages of
families, objects and texts are simultaneously demonstrating literacies and
where researchers, like families, can creatively engage. 

EVALUATION 

Over recent decades, linguists have used various theoretical frameworks to
investigate the language of workplace and public institutions, and this volume
continues to expand into new social contexts by fulfilling various applied
purposes, e.g., to improve communication within organisations and with
external clients, and to develop communication and language training
programmes. 

One of the merits of the book is that although four different fields
(workplace, education, hospital and museum) of organisational communication
comprise the volume, the relationship among contributions is maintained. Also,
the bibliographies at the end of each paper offer the reader ample
opportunities to further explore the topic. Not only is the book an
interesting read for scholars, teachers, and students of linguistics, but it
is also very beneficial to business professionals and readers who are
interested in organisational communication. 

It is always invaluable to have authentic documents (e.g., student response to
a Year 7 Industrial Arts worksheet (p. 75) or a teacher’s literacy diary (p.
136) incorporated in a research article, however, the scanning process of
Figure 4. 2. (Chapter 4) has made the document fairly illegible. Perhaps a
sample self-reflection sheet accompanied with the answers to the specific
questions would have been a better solution to display the student’s feedback.

“A lecturer at work” (Chapter 6) might be of particular interest for
university lecturers as it provides an exceptionally interesting approach to
conveying knowledge through verbal and non-verbal communications in live
lectures, which the majority of lecturers might not be aware of. 

The discourse practices of hospitals and museums raise the question whether it
is the language that is an issue or there might be some other problems for
which language is to be blamed. The book makes us understand the language in
these settings, which can also help both teachers and people working within
the context. 

All in all, the volume edited by Helen de Silva Joyce is a worthwhile read and
welcome contribution to the fast-evolving field of organisational
communication. The chapters will be of interest to students and scholars of
linguistics, language teachers, museum curators, trainers and educators, in
addition to the general reader interested in organisational communication. The
book is of manageable size, well-organised and referenced, clearly worded,
useful and opens new avenues for future research and study.

REFERENCES 

Eggins, S. & Slade, D. (1997). Analysing casual conversation. London: Equinox.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Zsuzsanna Zsubrinszky is Associate Professor in the English Department at
Budapest Business School, College of International Management and Business.
Her research interests include discourse analysis, intercultural
communication, digital communication and English for Specific Purposes. She
has published on business communication, intercultural communication and
politeness issues in business emails.

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