Colloquium: Charles Quinn

Date(s) - 03/04/2016
2:00 pm - 3:30 pm



Charles Quinn, a Japanese professor at the Ohio State University, will present for the Humanities Center’s Weekly Colloquium on Friday, March 4th at 2:00 PM.

His presentation is titled: Situating language and learners for communication: the indexical dimension

Catering by BYU Food to Go


If skilled communication in a foreign language is a program’s goal, that program will comprise a regimen in language socialization. Whatever this might involve, at the least, it puts considerably more in play than pronunciations, words and grammar. In a pedagogy of language socialization, one way to bundle all that needs attending to is to make particular, situated interactions—conversation performances—an elemental unit for mimicking, understanding, and improvising.

Insofar as a conversation is situated, it involves dimensions of meaning that are variously indexed, or pointed to, from the speaker’s “anchoring” here-and-now. In addition to the familiar indexing of time (“now,” “tomorrow”, tense distinctions), spatial location (“here,” “over there”) and person (“I,” “you”), such variables as regional affiliation, relative position in social space, affect (feelings), and knowledge (epistemic quality) are also routinely indexed. The indexing and reciprocal uptake of such meanings constitute an elemental, essential dimension of human communication and socialization, and they are a fundamental reason why a situated performance is an effective organizing unit for foreign language pedagogy.

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