Increasing media attention to cross-cultural issues in legal contexts
My research projects are mostly in the field of discourse analysis. I am interested in what people do with language to negotiate relationships and social roles in various contexts of institutional encounters. The language of the discourse I analyse is either Japanese or English.
One of the aspects of discourse in which I have been particularly interested is negotiation of silence and talk. In a project on silence in intercultural communication, I have been exploring the stereotype of 'silent' Japanese students in Australian university seminars using a combination of ethnography and microanalysis of interaction.
More recently, I have been working on cross-linguistic and cross-cultural issues in legal discourse. In this project, I analyse tape-recorded police interviews mediated by Japanese-English interpreters which took place in Australia. This work focuses on specific properties of interpreter-mediated discourse, rather than the comparison of the source and target utterances. I am planning to extend this project to investigate issues relating to cross-cultural communication in legal contexts in Japan.
I have also been working on another research project, which examines email discourse in Japanese. In this collaborative project, email exchanges between learners of Japanese in Australia and their composition tutors from Japan have been analysed in order to investigate how language is used by both parties in the negotiation of their role relationships. We are also interested in how the learners acquire sociolinguistic norms in the genre of email discourse over a period of time.
These interests put my research in the following fields: Discourse analysis, Ethnography of communication, Intercultural communication, Language and law, Legal interpreting; Computer-mediated communication (CMC), Computer assisted language learning (CALL).