A discourse analysis of English-Arabic cross-culture interactions between Arabic speaking mother and an English-speaking daughter: An interactional sociolinguistics approach to ESL teaching

Abstract

This study focuses on conversations between a Middle Eastern mother and her daughter who live in the United States. They travelled to the United States when the daughter was 3 years old and both have lived there for twelve years. Discourse analysis of conversations between the mother and her daughter, in addition to other speakers at the mosque, reveals the challenges the daughter faces when speaking Arabic due to her insufficient knowledge of Middle Eastern culture despite her comprehension of the linguistic structure of utterances both at the semantic and grammatical level. The findings reinforce Grice’s (1989) term conversational cooperation that requires mutual comprehension of speakers’ intentions which underlie the linguistic level of utterances. By applying these findings on an ESL setting, it follows that ESL learning requires using the usage-based approach to reinforce communicative competence in addition to learning the grammar of the language.