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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton April 9, 2014

Co-construction of ``doctorable'' conditions in multilingual medical encounters: Cases from urban Japan

  • Junko Mori

    Junko Mori is professor of Japanese language and second language acquisition at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her publications have investigated grammar and interaction, classroom discourse and intercultural communication by using the sociological methodology of conversation analysis. Her most recent project studies the impact of globalization of higher education upon world language education.

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    and Chiharu Shima

    Chiharu Shima received her graduate training at Monash University (MA) and University of Wisconsin-Madison (Ph.D.). Her areas of interest include multilingualism, medical interaction, and intercultural communication at workplace. Her dissertation examines the language socialization processes of Indonesian and Filipino nurses who relocated to Japan under a program based on an economic partnership agreement.

Abstract

This paper, as part of a growing body of studies that investigate translingual communicative practices, introduces a microanalysis of doctor-patient interactions that took place in urban Japan, a country that has been identified as belong to the expanding circle of world Englishes (Kachru 1986). Through the examination of two cases of primary care visits, one conducted in lingua franca English and another in a hybrid of Japanese and English, the study demonstrates how a Japanese doctor and two migrant patients from Ghana skillfully deploy a variety of semiotic resources to achieve the problem presentation stage of their encounters. More specifically, it investigates how concerns expressed by the patients become constructed into ``doctorable'' (Heritage and Robinson 2006) medical conditions through their subsequent interaction. The turn-by-turn examination of interactions reveals how the doctor's biomedical knowledge, embodied in his interactional practices, together with his cooperative disposition (Canagarajah 2013) to the interactional uncertainty inherent in multilingual and multicultural encounters, serve as a critical vehicle for making both the doctor's and the patients' seemingly ``truncated multilingual repertoires'' (Blommaert 2010) work in this particular institutional context.

About the authors

Junko Mori

Junko Mori is professor of Japanese language and second language acquisition at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her publications have investigated grammar and interaction, classroom discourse and intercultural communication by using the sociological methodology of conversation analysis. Her most recent project studies the impact of globalization of higher education upon world language education.

Chiharu Shima

Chiharu Shima received her graduate training at Monash University (MA) and University of Wisconsin-Madison (Ph.D.). Her areas of interest include multilingualism, medical interaction, and intercultural communication at workplace. Her dissertation examines the language socialization processes of Indonesian and Filipino nurses who relocated to Japan under a program based on an economic partnership agreement.

Published Online: 2014-4-9
Published in Print: 2014-4-1

©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston

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