The poster presentation highlights a sub-area of my ongoing doctoral project, which is dedicated to the negotiation of cultural identities in conversations between German native speakers and Russian native speakers learning German as a foreign language. 30 hours of oral, face-to-face communication with different focal points (first contacts, conversations among friends, random conversations among flatmates, online meetings etc.) were audio-recorded, transcribed according to cGAT conventions, and interpreted using sequence analysis. Results indicate that participants have established linguistic and conversational routines for negotiating cultural belongings. It is illustrated how interactants reconstruct experiences by means of small interactionally constructed stories, mark them as critical, authenticate morally sensitive content, and how they exploit such stories to differentiate or "connect" with each other. The study is the first to describe critical incidents and their role in producing cultural belonging from an interactionalist perspective. It also indicates that the CIs can be described as a communicative genre.

Authors:
Lea Wölk, University of Erfurt, Germany

About the Presenter(s)
Lea Wölk is a PhD candidate at the University of Erfurt. Her project focuses on the construction of cultural belonging in student conversations (native German and Russian speakers). Ms. Wölk is doctoral fellow of Friedrich-Ebert Foundation.

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