Protecting face

The ultimate aim of negotiating frames and footings in conversation is to protect one’s own and other participants’ face at all times. Face is a person’s social need to both belong to a group and be independent of that group.

Members of a cultural group need to feel respected and not impinged upon in their autonomy, pride, and self-sufficiency (negative face). They also need to be reinforced in their view of themselves as polite, considerate, respectful members of their culture (positive face). These two contradictory needs require delicate facework, since it is the interest of all participants in a verbal exchange that everyone maintain both their negative and positive face, so that the exchange can continue.

The negotiation of frames and footings and the facework accomplished in verbal encounters among members of a given social group gives rise to group-specific discourse styles. What distinguish people from different cultures are the different ways they use orate and literate discourse styles in various speech genres for various social purposes.

Conversational style

Conversational style is a person’s way of talking in the management of conversations. In face-to-face verbal exchanges, the choice of orate features of speech can give the participants a feeling of joint interpersonal involvement rather than the sense of detachment or objectivity that comes with the mere transmission of factual information. Different contexts of situation and different contexts of culture call for different conversational styles.

Compare, for example an interview, in which the purpose is to elicit information, and a conversation among friends, where the purpose is to share past experiences.

Interview between a journalist and a young apprentice in Germany:

A: and where do you work?

B: I work in the metal industry

A: uhuh… why did you choose that particular job? In the metal industry?

B: well… it was… so to speak… the job of my dreams. I wanted to work, but not particularly an intellectual job, but a more physical one

A: so… you can say that you chose that job yourself?

B: I chose that job myself

From the controlled, non-overlapping sequence of turns, the interviewer’s attempt at professional, detached objectivity, the cautious responses of the young apprentice desirous to be forthcoming with the required information, we recognize the typical style of a speech event called “interview” This literate journalistic style is quite different from the orate style one may find in a conversation among friends:

A: What I’ve been doing is cutting on my sleep

B: Oy!

A: And I’ve bee.. and I…

B: I do that too but it’s painful.

A: Yeah, 5-6 hours a night, and

B: Oh God how can you do it. You survive?

Here we can see personal involvement (paralinguistic signals like sighs and interjections, use of personal pronouns), empathy, frequent interruptions, overlaps – high degree of conversational cooperation.

The orate-literate continuum gets realized differently in different cultural genres, but also in different cultural traditions within one genre, such as classroom talk. For example, Indian children from the Warm Springs reservation in Oregon, who are used to learning by silently listening to and watching adults in their family, and by participating in social events within the community as a whole, have a notably different interactional behavior in the classroom than their Anglo-American peers and the teacher, even though all speak English. They mostly remain silent, do not respond to direct solicitations to display their knowledge in public, do not vie for the attention of the teacher, and seem more interested in working together with their peers.

People are able to display a variety of conversational styles in various situations, and one should avoid equating one person or one culture with one discourse style. However, by temperament and upbringing, people tend to prefer one or the other style in a given situation. This styl, in turn, forms part of their cultural identity and sense of self.

The problem in education, in particular, is how to combine different sets of values, different discourse and learning styles so as not to suppress anyone’s sense of worth, yet give everyone access to a dominant conversational style imposed by forces outside the local communities’ control.