Developed Discourse Project

My situated discourse project involved a “natural” recorded conversation between my two subjects, TD and ND, and me. The purpose of this experiment was to not only apply the skills that were learned in class in the real world, such as the Ethnography of Speaking, participant observation, and transcription, but also to see whether people communicate the way they believe they do, and compare their perceptions to reality. The following is derived from my data and observations. In order to understand their language ideologies, I, as the researcher, needed to interview my subjects prior to our discursive event. I asked many questions regarding their language habits and ideologies, and not only recorded their answers, but how they communicated …show more content…
She is a native Japanese speaker with a strong background in English, which she spoke with a noticeable, but still mild Japanese accent. She mentions that she wanted to “be a foreigner” during her youth, and her answer reflected that; the fact that she mentions English and Japanese as her only languages shows that she never felt the need to know another language, nor does she have any interest in doing so. In addition, as someone who has known her for a long time, I noticed that she failed to mention her basic understanding of Vietnamese from living in Vietnam for more than ten years. It may have not crossed her mind as something worth mentioning, and this acts as further evidence for the popular ideology, one that happens to be prominent overseas, that labels English as “the best and only language”. However, the subjects shared similar views when it came to answering the questions that involved body language and the importance of nonverbal communication; both believed that silence was just as important in conversations as spoken words, and preferred face-to-face communication while acknowledging texting and calling as something helpful in their daily