Spatial Engagement in Persian Ethnic Shops in Sydney

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Service encounters are a fundamental activity in everyday life whereby commodities and/or information are exchanged between a service provider and a customer. A service encounter is by nature a goal-oriented speech event. However, goals at service encounters are not simply limited to achieving business transactions; on the contrary, they incorporate a range of social and discursive practices. The current study focuses on the intersection of social action, practices and discourses produced and reproduced by the shop owners (husband–wife teams) and the customers within a site of engagement in Persian ethnic shops in Sydney and the way they are interactionally realized. Unlike prior studies, which have tended to focus on verbal exchanges as units of analysis without paying much attention to the site of engagement, research on service encounters has recently shifted its focus toward an understanding of the social processes that underpin such verbal exchanges. The present study is situated within the framework of Mediated Discourse Analysis (</jats:p>

Religious Identity Representation of Arab Diaspora in the Linguistic Landscape of Shop Signs in Sydney, Australia

“…However, linguistic landscape research that examine the aspects of linguistic landscape in revealing linguistic identity and religiosity in the economic domain has never been carried out, especially in relation to the Arab diaspora in Australia. This research is specifically different from what related studies that have previously done, such as that of Izadi (2016), who examined the Persian ethnic shop in Sydney. Izadi's research employed the Mediated Discourse Analysis and Nexus Analysis instead of a linguistic landscape approach.…”

Material scaffolding: Supporting the comprehension of migrant cleaners at work

“…In research on language use at work, e.g. de Saint-Georges (2004), Filliettaz (2013), and Izadi (2015) have also taken material and spatial elements into account. However, these angleslanguage learning and materiality at workhave not hitherto been combined in empirical research.…”

J. César Félix-Brasdefer, The language of service encounters: A pragmatic-discursive approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xvii, 276. Hb. $99, €65.

“…In order to understand the complexity of face-to-face interactions between participants and to work out what they do with language, as the author has repeatedly stressed throughout this book, they have to be positioned socially, situated in the moment, and we need to seek to engage with an inside account of what is going on in a particular situation. From this perspective, interactions between service providers and clients can be viewed as a very relevant domain of investigation for MDA in that it focuses on how the social practices imbricated in service encounters are always mediated by a range of means, of which wording and text is only one (see also Izadi 2015). Facework and changes of frame, footing, and pragmatic variation with a focus on region and gender that the author has presented throughout the book emerge out of a nexus of practice.…”