FW: Non-member submission from ["Cynthia Dunn" <dunn at csbs.csbs.uni.edu>]

[Richard J. Senghas]

From: "Cynthia Dunn" <dunn at csbs.csbs.uni.edu>
Organization: College of Social & Behav Sciences
To: linganth at cc.rochester.EDU, samuels at anthro.umass.EDU
Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 09:14:41 -0600

I've been using Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach by the
Scollons this fall and have found it quite good.  It's not a standard
textbook in the sense of giving a history and overview of the field.
Rather, it is oriented towards a presentation of the analytical concepts
necessary to understand and analyze discourse practices among different
cultural groups.   Thus they discuss concepts like sentence meaning vs.
utterance meaning, the ethnography of speaking outline of a speech event,
positive and negative politeness, and a once-over-lightly on some discourse
and CA type concepts, and then show how these and broader
cultural/ideological patterns play out in the business world, communication
between generations, gender, etc.  I've been using it together with
Duranti's reader in a class where the students conduct a semester long
ethnography of communication on a local speech community or situation
(courtrooms, churches, sororities, service encounters, daycare centers).  I
break it into stages including an ethnographic description of a speech
event, tape recording and transcription, and an analysis of some feature in
their transcript (pauses, interruptions, positive politeness strategies).


Cyndi Dunn
Department of Soc-Anth-Crim
University of Northern Iowa
Cedar Falls IA 50614-0513
Cyndi.Dunn at uni.edu