Okada2023
| Okada2023 | |
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| BibType | INCOLLECTION |
| Key | Okada2023 |
| Author(s) | Yusuke Okada, Aki Siegel |
| Title | “Awkward moments” during first-time informal online ELF interaction and its social relational consequence |
| Editor(s) | Bushnell, Cade Moody, Steve |
| Tag(s) | EMCA, ELF, Online, Friendship, Empathy |
| Publisher | Routledge |
| Year | 2023 |
| Language | English |
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| Pages | 32-53 |
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| Howpublished | |
| Book title | Navigating Friendships in Interaction: Discursive and Ethnographic Perspectives |
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Abstract
Initial interactions between unacquainted participants have been studied to reveal how “friendship” between them arises in the process of communica- tion. It has been suggested that in addition to sharing knowledge on an issue or thing, sharing an affective stance on an issue or event is one of the keys for building a friendship relationship in initial interaction; that is, the recipient’s display of a relevant affective stance that matches the speaker’s affective stance indicated in the speaker’s telling of an event is considered to be a practice of a close relationship (e.g., Jefferson, 1988; Mandelbaum, 1991; Svennevig, 1999, 2014; Wong, 2021). It is a moral order for the recipient to provide an affectively relevant response after the previous speaker’s affectively loaded telling of an event (see Heritage, 2011: 160–161) to build empathic commu- nication; morality seems to be sustained even in initial interaction (Flint et al., 2019). However, to the best of our knowledge, the question of whether and how the display of a relevant affective (re)action leads to the construction of friendship, or any close relationship, between unacquainted participants in the initial interaction has not been fully investigated. Is the establishment of an empathic moment at the turn level sufficient to build a friendship? This chapter aims to closely examine actual interactional sequences of empathic communication between unacquainted participants in an English as lingua franca (ELF) initial interaction and the subsequent development of the sequences in their discussions. The study particularly focuses on empathic com- munication that contains an “awkward moment,” where neither interlocutor takes a turn and both remain silent after a possible empathic moment. Such a moment indicates a problem in the preceding empathic communication. We demonstrate through the analysis that achieving empathetic moments in talk at the turn level does not necessarily indicate a close interpersonal relationship being built between the speakers. Paradoxically, such a study will suggest what should not be done for unacquainted participants to go beyond becoming acquainted. In the following sections, we will first explain the findings of discourse analytic studies on initial interactions between unacquainted participants, and studies on empathy in interactions and how it is concerned with interpersonal and social relationships. We then describe the data used for this study and show detailed analyses of selected excerpts of the actual initial ELF encounters between L2 English speakers. As a conclusion, we discuss the main contri- butions of this study, namely, how speakers’ orientation to self-presentation sometimes prevents the subsequent development of reciprocal empathic exchange after a turn-level empathic moment, and how such undeveloped talk represents a seemingly similar but critically different identity in the partici- pants, which is consequential to the interpersonal relationship.
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