Blog 14

Christopher Caruso

Blog #13

For as long as mankind has been around, one of the most crucial aspects of human beings that has set themselves apart from all other species is the sheer intricacy and complex development of language.  Language can be defined as the creation and articulation of audible sounds and words in order to communicate between other human beings.  Through the use of language, mankind as a species has been able to express itself in ways that seemingly no other creatures can, successfully building whole civilizations, philosophies, and social groups on the use of language alone.  There are many ways for individuals to express certain types of language, whether they are trying to tell jokes to appear witty, trying to persuade others to conform to a certain belief, or trying to gather data for the sake of knowledge.  Out of all of all of the ways that humans utilize language, there is no usage that is more crucial and more intimate than interpersonal communication, which can be defined as casual talk between at least two individuals.  One can learn so much about a certain group, subject matter, way of life, individual life, etc. just by communicating with another person in a respectable fashion.  This notion is more apparent through the art of interviewing than anything else.  By studying not only the information that an individual relays through an interview, but also the way that the language is presented and expressed, an interviewer can extract crucial hidden information hidden within the language use itself.  Whenever one is ever giving an interview, it is completely crucial that one must be able to listen in between words and pay attention to details such as the speaker’s discourse, pattern in words, use of tense, tone of voice and level of confidence on the subject matter just to name a few.  To prove how studying such things can reveal crucial hidden information, I shall be doing an analysis of the interviews from Data Set 5.

The interview Data Set 5 that I focused the most of my analysis on was the Adult Learner and New Literacies interview.  This interview was primarily about an individual who relates his or her experiences with computers in school, and their initial rejection of computers.  During the first excerpt of this interview, one of the first things that immediately caught my eye was the fact that every single one of the interviewee’s responses were presented in the past tense.  This little observation could be crucial, as it implies that whatever conflicts or fears that the interviewee experienced has since been resolved and are in the past, meaning that he or she does not feel this way about computers now.  Another important aspect to point out is not only the tense of the interviewee’s speech, but also the repetition of certain phrases such as “I guess” and “maybe”.  Normally, when someone that is being asked a question begins their answer with a phrase like “I guess”, it can be safely assumed that they do generally know the answer, yet choose not to answer the question in the form of a declaration as a way to promote humility.  An interesting note is that throughout the chat, the interviewee kept responding to the interviewer in the form of “I”, which strongly indicates that even though he keeps saying “I guess”, he is at least confident enough in his own answers that he is willing to directly take responsibility for his words and past actions.

When the interview reaches its second excerpt, a big thing to point out is the fact that the interviewee no longer speaks in a singular “I”, but instead uses more inclusive words such as “us” and “we”.  During this excerpt, the interviewee is no longer referring to his or her own experiences, but rather the collective experiences of the classroom as a whole.  Since the main focus of this excerpt is describing how the interviewee eventually learned how to overcome the fear of using computers in the classroom, one could make the argument that the reason the interviewee takes the effort to include the rest of his class is to alleviate his own insecurities about not feeling comfortable using the computer.  In other words, by mentioning to the interviewer that the classroom that he or she was in was a class specifically for learning how to work with computers, the focus is indirectly shifted off of the interviewee’s individual lack of comfort in using computers, as there are now a whole classroom of students learning how to use the computer not just the interviewee.   It is also within this excerpt that the interviewee’s speech begins to add a little more filler.  Unlike the first excerpt, in which the majority of the interviewee’s answers were very terse and straight forward, the interviewee in the second excerpt appears to develop speech with more “ahs”, “likes”, and “ums”.  Because of the fact that the interviewee is focusing more on the class as a whole, as opposed to the just his own self”, it is possible that the interviewee is attempting to choose his or her words more carefully, since he is representing a general group instead of his individual self.