English Language Teaching in its Social Context

114 CELIA ROBERTS2 S: very expensive area anyway3 N: well this/ this is expensive this is less expensiveBy contrast Andrea’s strategies are reactive and he tends to develop only those themes whichthe estate agent has implicitly sanctioned:1 N: blackstock road er thats a one bedroom flat2 A: yeah3 ON: its not two bedrooms4 A: mhm(Roberts and Simonot, 1987)Santo’s socialisation into maintaining conversational involvement in service encountersmeans that he elicits more helpful and extended comments from the clerk. Andrea’sencounters are less successful, do not produce opportunities for learning how to do thistype of conversational involvement and, as ethnographic evidence shows, cumulatively,position Andrea as marginalised discursively and socially (Roberts and Simonot, 1987).For other informants in this project, the learning of socio-cultural knowledge isrefracted through their experience of living in a racist society. For example, Abdelmalck, aMoroccan worker in France, talks of his politeness strategies and how he has learnt ways ofbeing particularly polite in order to get a favourable response from the most racist of hisinterlocutors (Bremer et al., 1996).Data from multilingual British factories also shows how minority workers positionthemselves strategically in order to attempt to co-construct an argument in their favour. Inthis example (Roberts et a]., 1992, p. 39), the minority worker, IA, is trying to negotiate ajob for his son in the same factory as he works in.The problem is that his son is only sixteenyears old and is not allowed to work the regulation 55 hour week:Data Example 41 Mrs B: Can’t help him.2 IA: What for?3 Mrs B: All the men in this mill arc on 55 hours4 IA: 55 hours?5 MrsB: All themen6 IA: Oldmen?7 Mrs B: All men8 IA: Young men and just 8 hours every day9 Mrs S: Rut Mrs B says not the OLD men. All the men - everybody - must work 5510 Mrs B:hoursLadies work 40 hours11 IA: This is young boy, the same like lady (laughter)12 They are too young. If not wanted then too long time . . . just 40 hours perweekDespite the misunderstanding at line 6, IA, at lines 8 and 11-12, begins to negotiatehis way around the company rule. He does this by capping Mrs B’s assertion with his ownassertions about young men and prevents this from becoming a distancing strategy byclaiming solidarity through the joke that young men are similar to ladies. The conditions