Co-constructing meaning in international meetings – an approach to plurilingual interactions

ABSTRACT

Communication in international meetings represents a challenge for the participants, who need to make choices about the language(s) they use to co-construct meaning and guarantee the success of their work. In this context, plurilingual interactions may offer an invaluable opportunity for power balanced relations and intercultural flexibility. In this paper, we present an analysis of a plurilingual corpus based on the intercomprehension (IC) approach. We will analyse the IC strategies at work by characterising the specific features that appear in this context and stressing the essential role of interproduction skills for the success of communication processes. This will allow us to determine the impact of IC in the accomplishment of successful intercultural and interlinguistic encounters as well as its contribution to pluricultural (lifelong) education.

KEYWORDS:

• Plurilingual interactions
• intercomprehension
• interproduction
• co-construction of meaning
• repair

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Filomena Capucho, PhD. Agreg, is a Professor at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Viseu, and a researcher at the Centre for Studies in Communication and Culture (CECC) of the same university. She presently teaches Portuguese Foreign Language to international students, Communication in Health Surroundings and Communication for Managers. Doctor in Contrastive Interactional Sociolinguistics, Filomena Capucho is an expert in Applied Linguistics, Discourse Analysis and Plurilingualism. Her main research interests concern the notion of Intercomprehension.

Maria da Piedade Silva teaches English as a Foreign Language at Agrupamento de Escolas de Sátão and she is a teacher trainer (Edufor Training Centre) and a Certified Microsoft Innovative Educator awarded several eTwinning Quality Labels, the European eTwinning Prize 2014 and two European Language Labels 2009 and 2013. She is a Ph.D. researcher, affiliated to the CECC - Research Centre for Communication and Culture, Universidade Católica Portuguesa.

Antonio Chenoll is a doctor in Didactics. His research areas focus on languages and perception, ICT in language learning and Foreign Spanish discourse of what he publishes regularly in several international journals. He is currently an active member of the Center for Communication Studies and Culture (CECC) affiliated to the Portuguese Catholic University where, since 2007, he has been teaching.

ORCID

Filomena Capucho http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0093-1430

Antonio Chenoll http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8802-5293

Notes

1 This corpus is a transcription of three hours of video-recorded authentic interactions among the participants gathered at the fifth meeting of the CINCO project that took place in Bucharest on the 5–6 September 2013. CINCO was a Leonardo – transfer of innovation project, n° 2011-1-PT1-LEO05-08609, developed during the years 2011–2013. The aim of this project was to create training materials for IC between Romance Languages for professionals working in Volunteer Associations in France, Italy, Portugal, Romania and Spain.

2 http://www.uv.es/valesco/sistema.pdf – see Appendix 2 for details.

3 Cf. Capucho (2016, 36–37) for the detailed presentation of this model.

4 For a review of the literature on this domain cf. Capucho (2012b).

5 Speaking in French.

6 Looking at F.

7 The terms ‘self’ and ‘other’ in self-repair and other-repair refer to the originator of the trouble source and the recipient, respectively.

8 Auchlin distinguishes ‘inner agreement’ between what the speaker says and what they want to say, and ‘double agreement’ between what is said and what is understood by the interlocutor.

9 Marie Hédiard reports the same issue in French vs Italian interactions in the forums and chats of Galapro (Hédiard 2009, 213–223).

10 We refer to the concept of ‘bonheur conversationnel’ (Auchlin, 1990, 1991, 1996).