Download (23MB) - University of Salford Institutional Repository

contributions, with the former set of concerns leading to a focus on
interpersonal harmony, and the latter to substantive development of talk and
focus on propositional content. Thus dominant positive social values were
shown to guide participants in talk and which, through their various
conversational practices, participants in both milieu sought to claim and have
ratified by their fellow participants.
This body of work has provided invaluable insight into German and
English orientations to conversational interaction. However, perhaps the most
comprehensive piece of US-English - German comparative research,
specifically addressing salient variations in conversational style was that
conducted by Straehle (1997). Drawing on these earlier findings, Straehle
(1997) further explored differences in the ways in which participants in German
and American talk worked towards producing casual conversatio n7
. Specifically,
Straehle focused on the various 'involvement strategies' (Tannen 1984) used by
US and German conversational ists as part and parcel of the development of
ongoing conversation, that is, how members of each culture conversationally
signalled their aliveness to and involvement in ongoing conversational
interaction. In producing such talk, salient differences emerged in the way
participants from each culture both normatively oriented to the collaborative
activity of topic development, and variously focused on self or other face
concerns. One important finding to emerge from Straehle's study was the
apparent tendency for US-English speakers to focus on deference in talk
(Goffman 1967), and German to-focus on demeanour.
Straehle's analysis of US-English and German conversation was
conducted against a backdrop of interview data from informants from both
cultures which largely corroborated Byrnes's earlier work on US-English and
German conversational differences. For instance, in attempting to define 'good
conversation', Straehle's German informants listed such things as being able to
learn something, having one's standpoint challenged and being able to defend
it, having the opportunity to challenge and 'beat' others in argumentation, a
reciprocal granting of uninterrupted attention to each others' standpoints, and a
necessary thematic focus on the developing topic. Conversely, Americans listed
such things as the sharing of experience, discovery of commonality and areas
5cl