Co-construction of ``doctorable'' conditions in multilingual medical encounters: Cases from urban Japan

Abstract

This paper, as part of a growing body of studies that investigate translingual communicative practices, introduces a microanalysis of doctor-patient interactions that took place in urban Japan, a country that has been identified as belong to the expanding circle of world Englishes (Kachru 1986). Through the examination of two cases of primary care visits, one conducted in lingua franca English and another in a hybrid of Japanese and English, the study demonstrates how a Japanese doctor and two migrant patients from Ghana skillfully deploy a variety of semiotic resources to achieve the problem presentation stage of their encounters. More specifically, it investigates how concerns expressed by the patients become constructed into "doctorable" (Heritage and Robinson 2006) medical conditions through their subsequent interaction. The turn-by-turn examination of interactions reveals how the doctor's biomedical knowledge, embodied in his interactional practices, together with his cooperative disposition (Canagarajah 2013) to the interactional uncertainty inherent in multilingual and multicultural encounters, serve as a critical vehicle for making both the doctor's and the patients' seemingly "truncated multilingual repertoires" (Blommaert 2010) work in this particular institutional context.

People withweight‐related long‐termconditions want support fromGPs: A qualitative interview study

“…Patients decide which of the health issues they face may be amenable to treatment by their GP–those issues that are considered appropriate to discuss have been described as “doctorable.” 26 In many of the accounts, participants mentioned that GPs rarely discussed weight‐management despite its connection with the long‐term conditions that they were experiencing. Many participants struggled to make sense of this absence.…”

Epistemological Reorientations and L2 Interactional Settings: A Postscript to the Special Issue

“…As Anna and friends are laying the table in a domestic setting and enjoying a car trip, and Peony and Keiko are chatting over tea and cake at a café (Kasper & Burch, ), their extended focus on L2 grammar and other matters of language form shows the participants’ orientations to what these settings afford or tolerate. These orientations are quite different from those on display in various institutional settings, such as interactions between L1 Norwegian‐speaking social workers and L2 Norwegian‐speaking clients in social welfare offices in Norway (Svennevig, ), L1 Finnish‐speaking secretaries and L2 Finnish‐speaking clients in university offices in Finland (Kurhila, , ), or L1 Japanese‐speaking physicians and Ghanaian patients in medical consultations conducted in English and Japanese (Mori & Shima, ). In these goal‐oriented encounters participants engage the entire repair apparatus to secure understanding, but without shifting the activity to learning.…”

Translanguaging in Translation: Evidence from Japanese Mimetics

“…13 It is understood to be found in daily communications in multilingual families, classrooms and community institutions (Li, 2011;Li and Zhu, 2013;Mori and Shima, 2014;He, 2016, etc. ).…”

“…Translanguaging basically refers to a deployment of an individual's linguistic repertoire disregarding the boundary between socially named languages (Baker, 2003;Makoni and Pennycook, 2007;García, 2007García, , 2009Blackledge and Creese, 2010;Creese and Blackledge, 2010;Canagarajah, 2011;Li, 2011;Lewis et al, 2012;García and Li, 2014;Otheguy et al, 2015 among others). Most translanguaging research has focused onspontaneous interactive communicativepracticesobservable in classrooms, households and institutions in current multilingual societies (Li, 2011;Li and Zhu, 2013;Mori and Shima, 2014;He, 2016, Zhu andLi, 2016, etc.). AlthoughGarcía and Li (2014)extensively discuss the implications of translanguaging on education, their conceptualization of translanguaging is extremely inclusive.…”