Language & Occupation What is special about the language of work? How does the language of work vary in different workplace settings?

Can you guess the ‘occupation’? Leg, handrail, route cards, leg descriptors, aim work… Duke of Edinburgh expedition leader Plummeting temperatures, windy with showers, slowly clearing to the East… Weather forecasters The net present value is negative, fiscal year end close, the primary driver… Director of Finance

Your own experiences: discuss and share your observations & experiences of the workplace: Have you ever had to learn any specialised terminology? Why do you think this is essential? How do address colleagues and those who are senior (or junior)? Have you ever received any training in terms of how you should talk to customers/clients, and how you may have had to adapt your ‘normal’, or non-occupational language use? Have you ever found yourself using any ‘in house’ lexis when talking with other employees?

What kind of questions can we ask about workplace discourse? What is the agenda of the participants? Who is controlling the agenda? What makes them able to control the agenda? What kind of language structures are they using to achieve this?

Workplace Conversation Specialised terminology? Ways in which colleagues address each other? Example 1.1 1 Dave [ … ] Basically I’ve used their old. price list, 2 Val Right, 3 Dave And … I’ve made a few changes. 4 Val Yeah, 5 Dave An’ then there’s the cover. 6 Val Right, 7 Dave So that– ↓ I got sent down a few things, I got that up this morning, Uh … This … She wanted to know, if we’ve done this before, I went through the … file, it didn’t look like it had. [ … ]

Drew and Heritage

For each of the professional contexts given: Identify the professional context.(e.g personnel or human resources) What genre is the extract? (e.g arranging a meeting) Who are the speakers or writers and readers and what are their roles? What clues in the text, including the structure, vocabulary, grammar and style (formal or informal), helped you identify the register and genre? If the text is incomplete, what part (beginning, middle or end?) is shown and what parts are missing? What is the communicative goal or purpose of the genre? Page 8 and 9 The Language of Work

Q: How Different are Casual and Workplace Conversations? Terminology to include in your response: Goal orientation Turn taking rules/restrictions Allowable contributions Professional lexis Structure Asymmetry How are the two conversations different? Identify and make notes about these differences relating to each of the Drew and Heritage characteristics of workplace conversation. Write up your findings into an essay to answer the question. The language of work page 3 and 4

More Terminology Minimal response/backchannelling Feedback provided by listeners to show comprehension or interest while someone is speaking: for example, yeah, mhm, really Context & shared knowledge Broader social situation Discourse community/community of practice A professional, academic or other social group with a common set of goals, mechanisms of intercommunication and one or more genres, which it uses in pursuing its aims. Discourse communities can be very large, for example an international community of academics or scientists within a particular area of research or much smaller, such as a group of co-workers. Discourse marker Words like and, so, but, then which show how different parts of the discourse relate to one another. They are often used to mark a change of topic. Face/face threatening act/politeness strategies Positive face is the positive self-image one wishes to present, including the desire that this self-image be appreciated. Negative face is the claim to freedom of action and freedom of imposition. FTA- danger that positive or negative face may be lost. Through ‘face-work’, ie by using politeness strategies, speakers try to reduce the impact of FTAs. Hedges Words or phrases which soften or weaken the force with which something is said, e.g adverbs – just, quite, really, sort of..

These examples demonstrate some of the variation found in workplace conversations. First of all they show that people engage in a range of workplace tasks, for instance in the first extract a speaker briefs a co- worker about a job, and in the third example the two participants discuss how they can set up a particular procedure. While there is considerable variation in the types of spoken interaction occurring across different workplaces, many interactions have similar goals. The above extracts also show that discourse participants may be more or less task- focused in their interactions with one another at work: in Example 1.1, the speakers remain task- focused throughout, while Example 1.2 consists entirely of small talk; Example 1.3 again deals with a workplace task, but contains some elements of relational talk.

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