Crisis management training prepares military and civilian staff for work in crisis areas around the world. English is a common working language and lingua franca (ELF) in multinational missions, and thus also in training. This study uses conversation analysis (Sidnell & Stivers 2013) and ethnography to examine ordinary situations in crisis management training, focusing on the linguistic and multimodal practices participants use to overcome language related troubles during their tasks in the training. The research data consist of video-recordings and ethnographic field notes from two UN military observer courses and VIKING 18, the world's largest computer-aided crisis management exercise. In this talk, we illustrate how troubles regarding language use are indicated and recognised in the moment-by-moment unfolding of interaction. Preliminary findings show that these difficulties typically relate to not being able to produce the next item in the ongoing turn (i.e., searching for words or formulations; see Svennevig, 2018), which the speaker makes relevant by employing different strategies. While some of these are vocal, such as typical repair-initiation techniques (e.g., cut-offs, rising intonation, explicit expressions; cf. Hosoda, 2006) or direct requests for assistance, the trouble can also be implicitly flagged via other-repair initiating nonverbal resources (e.g., gaze, head-tilts). Although these moments present foremost a practical problem for the current speaker, our paper shows how they become collaboratively solved via both the speaker and interlocutors' verbal and embodied conduct. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of multimodal and recipient-designed ways to initiate and solve problems in multilingual work settings (Wagner, 2018).
References
Hosoda, Y. (2006). Repair and relevance of differential language expertise in second language conversations. Applied Linguistics, 27(1), 25-50.
Sidnell, J. & Stivers, T. (2013). The Handbook of Conversation Analysis. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Svennevig, J. (2018). "What is it called in Norwegian?" Acquiring L2 vocabulary items in the workplace. Journal of Pragmatics, 126, 68-77.
Wagner, J. (2018). Multilingual and multimodal interactions. Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 99-107.
