Exploring the characteristics of different types of workplace conversations, including decision-making, training, briefing or making arrangements, this enthralling account pays particular attention to interactions with a more social focus, such as small talk or office gossip.
Presenting a range of approaches to analyzing such workplace discourse, Almut Koester argues for a combination of quantitative corpus-based methods, to compare specific linguistic features in different genres and qualitative methods involving a close analysis of individual conversations, to explore such issues as politeness, power, conflict and consensus-building. A corpus of conversations recorded in a variety of office environments both in the UK and the USA is used throughout to demonstrate the interplay between speakers accomplishing tasks and maintaining relationships in the workplace.
The linguistic study of workplace language is a new and exciting area of research. This book explores the expression of power in a New Zealand workplace through examination of 52 everyday interactions between four women and their colleagues. The main focus of this research is the expression of three types of "control acts", i.e., directives, requests and advice. The women include two managers who demonstrate an interactive participative style of management. They tend to minimise rather than exert power, although their status is still evident in their speech.
VOCABULARY IN CONTEXT was written especially for you. The program was designed to enrich your personal “word bank” with many hundreds of high-frequency and challenging words. There are six thematic books in the series—Everyday Living Words, Workplace and Career Words, Science and Technology Words, Media and Marketplace Words, History and Geography Words, and Music, Art, and Literature Words. Each worktext presents topic-related readings with key terms in context. Follow-up exercises provide a wide variety of practice activities to help you unlock the meanings of unfamiliar words. These strategies include the study of synonyms and antonyms; grammatical word forms; word roots, prefixes, and suffixes; connotations; and the efficient use of a dictionary and thesaurus. Thinking skills, such as drawing conclusions and completing analogies, are included as reinforcement.
Reading Work: Literacies in the New Workplace explores changing understandings of literacy and its place in contemporary workplace settings. It points to new questions and dilemmas to consider in planning and teaching workplace education. By taking a social perspective on literacies in the workplace, this book challenges traditional thinking about workplace literacy as functional skills, and enables readers to see the complexity of literacy practices and their embeddedness in culture, knowledge, and action. A mixture of ethnographic studies, analysis, and personal reflections makes these ideas accessible and relevant to a wide range of readers in the fields of adult literacy and language education and helps to bridge the divide between theory and practice in the field of workplace education.
Julius Fast, who changed the way we look at the world with his breakthrough bestseller Body Language, now updates and expands upon those principles to show us how to go beyond the obvious in the workplace and understand the real motives and hidden agendas of our co-workers.
