Face-threatening talk on the factory floor: using authentic workplace interactions in language teaching

In this paper I examine a small set of authentic workplace interactions and explore the value of such material for ESOL/communication training for the workplace. The interactions consist of three episodes of face-threatening talk by members of a factory-floor team. The paper discusses the way this team constructed and managed politeness and solidarity in face-to-face interaction. In the team, politeness norms are ‘honoured in the breech’. Ostensibly facethreatening talk conveys core in-group membership and appears to mitigate rather than boost the severity of face-threatening speech acts, thus reflecting the ways in which forms of talk are constructed within particular workplace contexts to produce diverse and localised communicative practices. In order to assist learners to acquire a broader repertoire of communication strategies with which to manage this kind of localised practice, a pedagogic response is presented involving three types of tasks: awareness-raising tasks, interpretation tasks and communication practice tasks.