Page 224 - Beyond Methods

212 Contextualizing linguistic input
Several newspapers in the United States criticized the woman for asking such a question and the president for responding to it the way he did. They considered this exchange highly inappropriate.
Reflective task 9.4
What is or is not appropriate about this exchange? How would you use this or a similar example to teach the concept of appropriateness to L2 learners?
Extrasituational Context
The problem of what is and what is not appropriate becomes even more acute in an extrasituational context, or the context of culture, to use Malinowski’s term. Communicative appropriateness depends on the social, cultural, political, or ideological contexts that shape meaning in a particular speech event. It depends largely on the norms of interpretation, which varies from culture to culture. Ac- quiring knowledge of how extrasituational factors contribute to the process of meaning-making implies acquiring knowledge of how language features interface with cultural norms. Such a cultural view of language and language use, as McCarthy and Carter (1994, p. 150) point out, explores “the ways in which forms of language, from individual words to complete discourse structures, encode something of the beliefs and values held by the language user.”
More than the mastery of linguistic features, it is the mastery of cultural norms of interpretation that poses a severe challenge to L2 learners and users. Margie Berns (1990, p. 34) narrates a typical cross- cultural encounter in which a statement made with good intentions could easily lead to misunderstanding. One day a valued friend of hers from Zambia greeted her with “Hello, Margie. How are you? Oh, I see you’ve put on weight,” an utterance that is linguistically well formed and situationally well framed. But, as an American speaker operating within American cultural values and expectations, Berns considered it inappropriate. She initially interpreted the remark as a rude and thoughtless one.
When confronted, her friend explained that his intention was nothing more than to express his pleasure at her apparent good