Evaluating Competence in the Course of Everyday Interaction
State University of New York at Buffalo
University of Texas at Austin
University of Rhode Island
1. Mr. H: … I’ll take along a camera. Speech-Language Pathologist: Very good, Walter.
2. Pediatrician: Have you heard the term “cerebral palsy” before? Father: Cerebral … Pediatrician: Cerebral palsy. Father: Yeah. Mother: That’s what he has. Father: Oh, I know that—
3. My tall and graceful cypress. …
The boldfaced elements in the snippets of talk just presented can be interpreted as evaluative. The first example (from Kovarsky, Kimbarow, & Kastner, chap. 13, this volume) is an explicit evaluation of a client’s previous response. The issuer, a speech-language pathologist, intends the recipient, Mr. H., to interpret her expression as an evaluation of his response. The second example (from Barton, chap. 12, this volume) is a less direct one in which a pediatrician is revealing an evaluation by underestimating the knowledge of a family as she explains to them what they already know. The third evaluation is even less transparent. It was interpreted by the recipient as a validation of her competence in speaking Albanian—competence that had been previously placed in question (Trix, chap. 7, this volume). This is a book about ways that evaluations, such as the three just cited, are achieved. It is also about how evaluations can impact on one’s notions of competence (and incompetence) 1 and ultimately how they affect an individual’s notions of self-identity.
This idea that one’s identity is tied directly to evaluative contexts experienced in everyday life differs from the more traditional view of identity as a single, fixed, encapsulated entity. The ideas and findings of the authors in this text support the conceptualization of identity as a flexible system that can include a multiplicity of selves, that can be brought to bear on the moment, and that can be influenced by what happens in the moment. Our view follows that of Kenneth Gergen (1994) in psychology and Donal Carbaugh (1988, 1994, 1996) in speech communication. Carbaugh (1996) commented: “Identities [are] something created and subjected to particular conversational dynamics. … From this vantage point the question ‘who am I?’ depends partly on ‘where I am,’ ‘with whom I am,’ and [material and symbolic] resources that are available to the people there” (pp. 213–214).
Support for the construction of a flexible, situated identity is provided by Trix (chap. 7, this volume) in her description of how her identity as a learner of Albanian was altered when native speakers of that language began to tease her about a language mistake she made. On one occasion a group of women laughed when Trix used the Albanian term long to refer to her height, rather than using the more appropriate term tall. It was the women’s reaction to that occasion that engendered in Trix feelings about her limitations as a speaker of Albanian. These feelings of incompetence increased throughout the day when the women continued to laugh among themselves at her “mistake.” Trix’s view of herself as incompetent was reversed later when her mentor referred to her as a tall and graceful cypress. Trix may well have experienced the different evaluations, one from the women and the other from her mentor, as both being valid views of her competence as a speaker of Albanian.
There are instances described in this volume in which acts of evaluation are closely tied to feelings of belongingness. Judgments of incompetence, in their most severe form, can lead to threats of expulsion from a social community. The subjects in Maxwell, Poeppelmeyer, and Polich’s study (chap. 6, this volume), who are deaf, commonly experience alienation in interactions with hearing peers. Similarly, the subjects in Higginbotham and Wilkins’ study (chap. 3, this volume), who use augmentative communicative systems, experience ostracism by partners because they are unable to meet the temporal or social demands expected by oral communicators. In these cases, the interactants who are ignored may view themselves as disabled (incompetent) communicators. Alternatively, those same interactants may view themselves as different, but competent, communicators and their partners as rude or ignorant about their differences. The choice is similar to that of a person from a different social or ethnic community who is treated as gauche or ignorant (see Maxwell et al., chap. 6, this volume, for a clear statement of how those who are deaf are faced with a choice of identity as disabled or as culturally different).
Even though the contributors to this volume hold various views of competence, they come to the same conclusion: Competence judgments pervade, influence, and grow out of ordinary social interactions. The studies presented here can be described together within a single multicomponential framework. The framework depicts evaluations of competence taking place as participants assume a particular, situated view of the interaction. Participants take a position, one of a situated self, from which they interpret what is going on and gauge how they and others are doing (see Carbaugh, 1988, 1993, 1994, 1996, for a detailed view of this position).
The research in this volume on the construction of competence builds on the findings of other researchers who have been working within a variety of theoretical frameworks and using a variety of methodologies. Ethnomethodologists have, for example, studied ways authors design their talk for their audiences (see discussions of “recipient design” in Maynard, 1992; Sacks & Schegloff, 1979; Schegloff, 1979). Cognitive scientists have investigated how one’s theory of another’s mind pervades social interaction (Astington, Harris, & Olson, 1988; Frye & Moore, 1991; Wellman, 1990), and systemic linguists have examined the communication resources available to language users to convey an “attitude” (Halliday, 1961, 1967–1968; Halliday, McIntosh, & Strevens, 1964) or “appraisal” (Eggins & Slade, 1997; Martin, 1992).
The situated viewpoint expressed in this book has perhaps the strongest affinity with that of Dell Hymes (1974) in his depiction of communicative competence. In Hymes’ view, a speaker draws on a variety of resources in deciding “when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom, when, where, [and] in what manner” (p. 177). A speaker, as depicted by Hymes, is thereby seen as being situated and as drawing on a variety of resources in the course of communicating. Although Hymes did not focus directly on evaluation, his view of communication is easily extended to one laid out here—individuals, when evaluating others, use evaluative resources available in the language and cultural practices of their community.
These various scholarly approaches all lead to the view that participants in interactions are continually tracking what is going on. Those engaged in interactions convey their attitudes about their own and their partners’ contributions in a variety of ways—a raise of an eyebrow, a change in intonation or timing, an evaluative statement, even a nonresponse in contexts in which a response is required. In this situated view, competence judgments are continually being constructed and negotiated.
Evidence that tracking is ongoing and pervasive comes from studies and observations of people aligning with or making accommodations to one another as they interact (Coupland & Coupland, 1991; Giles & Coupland, 1991; Kendon, 1985). Communicators of all ages and abilities can be observed initiating activities to fit their view of their interactants. They may suggest activities through nonverbal means, or they may verbally raise different topics with different partners. Their initiations depend on judgments they make about their interactants’ knowledge and interests. Speakers’ initiations are responded to differently, depending on the recipients’ construal of their partners’ experiences, language background, or overall capability. When recipients show signs of incomprehension, speakers repeat themselves, simplify the original message, slow it down, and provide additional background, basing their repairs on judgments about what is causing their partners’ confusion. All of these activities are based on the results of tracking one another’s competence in the course of face-to-face interaction.
Competence judgments also occur in non-face-to-face contexts, such as when someone writes a report about a third party. The author of the report also takes on the perspective of a situated self, assuming a particular point of view, drawing from particular background knowledge, and constructing a view that becomes situated in the discourse of the report (Duchan, chap. 10, this volume; Ward & Duchan, 1996).
Many of the evaluations described in this book are part and parcel of the institutionalized practices between partners. Clinicians are socialized to evaluate the competence of their clients. Teachers assume the role of evaluator when they engage in teaching students. The evaluations of clinicians and teachers, whether positive or negative, can be empowering, resulting in a sense of self as competent; or evaluations, even if they are positive, can lead to the creation and maintenance of disabled identities—feelings of being sickly, deficient, incapable, powerless, incompetent.
This book, in sum, is designed to make a case that competence is created and evaluated in the course of situated interactions and that the evaluations are important in the construction of social identities. This chapter outlines a framework for examining how competence is socially constructed from everyday experiences. This framework also provides a way for us to present what the different authors in this book have to say about the effects of evaluations on the individuals’ emerging judgments of their own competence.
CONSTRUCTING COMPETENCE IN INTERACTION
Because social interactions are rich and complex, a framework for studying and thinking about how competence is constructed in the course of social interactions must be rich and complex. We offer the following multicomponential rendition of competence construction:
A situated self draws from a variety of communication resources to evaluate competence from some position, occasioned by something, about something, in comparison with a set of expectations, and with potentially long-lasting and profound effects.
The framework as just described contains six dynamic and highly interactive constructs:
1. Communication resources.
2. Evaluating competence from some position.
3. Occasioned by something.
4. About something.
5. In comparison with something.
6. With potentially long-lasting and profound effects.
Each contributes to our understanding of how competence gets constructed, and each is discussed in various ways by this volume’s authors.
Communication Resources for Expressing Evaluation
Evaluations in their most explicit form are conveyed in a statement such as that found in employee performance evaluations, in school lessons, or in therapy sessions: “You are doing a good job.” But evaluations do not always occur as overt speech acts; they may also be covert, as when someone arches an eyebrow or when someone passes up an obligatory turn at talk: “How do you like my new car?” (no response) (Pomerantz, 1988). Even when individuals are not part of an ongoing interaction, they can interpret their position as one in which they have been excluded or ostracized—and thus as a very strong negative evaluation (Higginbotham & Wilkins, chap. 3, this volume; Maxwell, Poeppelmeyer, & Polich, chap. 6, this volume).
One way to discover how evaluations get constructed is by looking at the evaluative tools available in the linguistic or semiotic system being used by the participants. These tools are the communication resources that comprise a person’s potential communication repertoire. Hymes used the term repertoire to describe resources that are used by members of a particular community and those that are used by particular speakers who participate in one or more “ways of speaking” (Hymes, 1974, p. 199). We examine some of the linguistic and nonlinguistic resources that are available to Americans communicating evaluations in English (see also Eggins & Slade, 1997).
Linguistic Elements Associated With Evaluation
Lexical Choices. One obvious way to convey evaluations is through the use of evaluative terms such as good–bad, lousy–fantastic, sloppy–careful, stellar–plebeian, a keeper–a loser, and so on. These lexical items may appear syntactically as nominals (nouns, noun phrases) or as modifiers (adjectives and adverbs). Epithets (nouns such as “brat” or “shithead”) are also primary candidates for evaluating others’ performances, along with interjections (“abso-fucking-lutely,” “run like shit”). Some less obvious lexical elements used for evaluations are general terms that serve to undercut straightforward descriptions and thereby show value-laden equivocation (“sort of responsive”; “pretty bright”), and nonliteral, metaphoric language used to understand and translate the effects of high-impact evaluative contexts (Mastergeorge, chap. 11, this volume).
One of the characteristics of evaluative terms is their implied dichotomous structure. Thus one can interpret assertions containing evaluative terms as implicatures (Grice, 1975). Calling one thing good may be heard as implying that another thing is bad. A compliment issued today may be heard as an indicator that criticism was withheld in bygone days.
Preposed adverbials not only take on meaning by virtue of the lexical interpretation, but also by their placement and pronunciation in a contrastive context (Biber & Finegan, 1988). The following phrase containing a preposed adverbial, “essentially,” can be read as a deprecating statement because of its placement at the beginning of a sentence, and even more so if there is extra stress placed on the second syllable: “Essentially it’s a review of old literature.” This is in contrast with the phrase: “It’s essentially a review of old literature,” which may be interpreted as describing a happy discovery after having looked for old literature. Other preposed adverbials such as “well,” “but,” and “actually” also can be interpreted as a signal for a negative evaluation when placed at the beginning of a conversational turn.
Evaluation can also be encoded through strategic use of verbs. “His proposal thrilled her” is rightfully interpretable as a positive evaluation since it is encoded in the verb as a positively valued emotional reaction.
Grammatical and Discourse Resources. Consider the parent who regards his or her child’s coloring and says: “Staying within the lines is really hard, isn’t it?” or “Try harder to stay inside the lines” or “You’re not supposed to color outside the lines” or “It looks messy when you go outside the lines” or even “I think it’s boring to stay within the lines.” All these are interpretable by the parent and child as evaluations. The interpretations will depend on the history of the partners and the context in which the comments are issued. The comments may also be treated at face value—as meaning what they say—or they may be seen as ironic, and intended or interpreted in ways that are exactly opposite from their literal meaning.
The opposition between surface and intended meanings is signaled by the occurrence of unexpected grammatical and discourse devices. Grammatical formality can be evaluative, if one is not expecting it; and displays of familiarity or deference can be evaluative if the footing fosters another expectation (see Goffman, 1981, chap. 3). The use of passive voice or other forms of indirectness is also interpretable as evaluative and as resulting from someone’s reluctance to make direct, evaluative threats (Scollon & Scollon, 1995). Consider, for example, the parent who turns from the phone conversation with a friend to ask the children to stop what they are doing. Such an insertion sequence, if issued as a direct command, is abrasive unless it is an emergency. Parents often substitute a mitigated request form using conditional modals (“would you”) or presequences (“Honey, Mama’s on the phone. Be quiet.”) to soften the force of the directly issued request and thereby convey respect (Ventola, 1987).
Paralinguistic Signals and Movements Associated With Evaluation
Timing, Repetition, Intonation, and Movement. Participants in communicative interactions carry out their activities within a carefully organized temporal system. They move and talk in synchrony, matching or contrasting their contributions along dimensions such as rhythm, tempo, and rate (Clark, 1996; Higginbotham & Wilkins, chap. 3, this volume). Clark has labeled these temporal patterns as leading to a temporal imperative. Successful communication requires the participants to display their meanings and understandings to one another in a timely way. Violations of such temporal dictates can be and often are interpreted as evaluative. A temporal delay in responding can be seen as reticence or incompetence. Movement asynchrony can be interpreted as a negative judgment about the previous content or as a signal of nonalignment (Scheflen, 1964), as can a comment made too late (Robillard, cited in Higginbotham & Wilkins, chap. 3, this volume).
The expressions of attitudes are often conveyed through manipulations of repetition, loudness, and pitch, in addition to timing. Using such devices can serve to highlight particular content, thereby placing extra value on it (Labov, 1972; Tannen, 1989; Tench, 1996).
Movement of the body also offers key resources in the evaluation process. Physical distance and orientation of the body, the use of gestures and eye gaze, and moving in or out of synchrony with another’s temporal beat can all be interpreted as evaluative. For example, an extra few inches of distance between members of a dyad can be seen as a signal that the partner is annoyed. An especially powerful evaluative signal is conveyed by mutual eye gaze. Avoiding eye gaze or meeting eye gaze can express a disapproval (see Stillman et al., chap. 2, this volume). Neck rolls (Wyatt, chap. 9, this volume), eye rolls (Maxwell & Kovarsky, 1993), and other such movements have been shown to have powerful evaluative effects.
Employment of Resources Evaluating Communication
How does it come about that a communicator uses certain resources to convey evaluative content or to interpret others’ evaluations? It would be a fruitless enterprise to try to discover which particular resources are associated with which particular evaluations. This would be a problem for the following four reasons:
1. Evaluative resources do not occur singly, but often are used in combination with one another. Lexical selection, repetition, and increase in pitch, intensity, and rate may show evaluative outrage: DON’T YOU EVER EVER DO THAT AGAIN!
2. Resources are not isolable from their context, but take on meanings beyond that offered by the evaluative indicator itself. A nod can show approval in one context and reluctant acknowledgment or disapproval in another. Particular personal histories and expectations may lead interpreters to different renditions of the same evaluation
3. Interpreting evaluative elements involves the use of a hidden and fluctuating evaluative standard. For instance, the selection and interpretation of the evaluation elements will depend on one’s knowledge of the other interlocutor. I may think you are shouting unless I know that you characteristically speak with greater intensity than most of the other people I know. If I know you to be “bossy” then I may evaluate your actions as benign—a manifestation of your “personality”—rather than negatively, as a violation of protocol or a sign of disrespect. A college student said that his brother could “demolish” him with a grunt that the rest of the class heard as an acknowledgment or clarification request. The intimate knowledge that interlocuters have may be unrecoverable by others (Kreckel, 1981)
4. Evaluations can be issued and interpreted in linguistic contexts that have no overt evaluative indicators. Some evaluations are delivered in such a way that partners can focus directly on the activity at hand without having to shift out of the activity frame to comment on how things are going. The interactions between the preschool children in the study by Saenz, Gilligan, and Pelligrini (chap. 5, this volume) exemplify how tacit evaluations might be taking place. The two children in their study are vying for play space and use of toy train tracks. The interaction may engender different evaluative reactions, depending on the evaluator’s construal of the event. The child who was there first may be seen negatively, as selfish, or positively as standing up for his or her rights. The outcome is also likely to yield different evaluative responses, depending on its interpretation: The victor may see it as a positive evaluation of his or her actions, the vanquished as a negative evaluation of the victor’s and of his or her own actions.
… From Some Position. … The Stance of the Interactants
The authors in this book show how evaluations are issued and interpreted by interactants from particular positions. Participants in evaluations position themselves in relation to one another and in relation to what is going on. This notion of the positioned nature of talk is elegantly forwarded by Erving Goffman (1981) in his discussion of the role of footing in talk exchanges. Goffman described participants as positioning themselves interpersonally in different ways. They can have official status in the main encounter, as when a speaker and listener talk to one another—”a ratified position,” in Goffman’s terminology. Or participants may assume the position of unofficial bystanders or eavesdroppers. Goffman also illuminated, through examples, how participants in interactions are positioned relative to the situation. They organize their talk around the task at hand, shifting from social talk to work-related talk, to no talk at all. Goffman further discussed how talk is affected by one’s position in the discourse event, differing if one is at the beginning, middle, or end of a talk encounter. Finally, Goffman spoke of varieties of authoring in which speakers can speak directly, introspectively, reportatively, or from the position of someone else.
Goffman’s revelations about footing are easily translatable to the data on evaluative talk described in this volume. The issuers and recipients of evaluations are described within these pages as having assumed identifiable positions in relation to one another and in relation to what is going on. A number of chapters (e.g., those by Barton; Ferrara; Kovarsky et al; Maynard & Marlaire; Simmons-Mackie & Damico) involve studies of interactants who hold ratified participatory positions in the interactions being analyzed. They involve talk between therapists or teachers and their clients or students, with all parties recognizably positioned.
From within their ratified positions, participants in studies reported within these pages gear their exchanges to be in keeping with the presumed background information of their partners. Evaluators engage in what ethnomethodologists have called recipient design (e.g., Maynard, 1992; Sacks & Schegloff, 1979; Schegloff, 1979).2 Of particular interest are those occasions in which the communication is incorrectly designed, resulting in an unintended negative evaluation (Simmons-Mackie & Damico).
A few authors in this volume describe evaluations that are expressed remotely rather than in the course of a face-to-face evaluation encounter (Duchan; Ferrara; Higginbotham & Wilkins; Mastergeorge; Maxwell et al.). The remote position for issuing or experiencing evaluations in these cases includes instances in which evaluations are made in writing or reading an evaluation report (Duchan), instances in which individuals feel ostracized from speech communities (Higginbotham & Wilkins; Maxwell et al.), instances in which family members are reflecting on the devastating impact of a previous evaluation (Mastergeorge), instances in which psychotherapists evaluate their clients’ reports of previous events (Ferrara), and instances in which researchers comment on the potential impact of their subjects’ talk (Ferrara).
Evaluations, like other communications described in Goffman (1981), are designed to achieve particular goals. For example, the authors of the diagnostic reports cited by Duchan (chap. 10, this volume) cast their descriptions of client’s competence differently depending on what they are attempting to achieve. When authors write diagnostic reports, they are aiming to show the need for client services. To do so, they emphasize the negative side of their clients’ performance. When writing progress reports to show a client’s successes, the authors emphasize the positive aspects of their client’s performance.
For many interactions described in these chapters, the evaluations are positioned in relation to a specifiable social role. Participants cast in the role of a clinician or teacher, for example, may feel compelled to evaluate someone’s performance so as to keep track of how well the person is doing (“He got that one right,” “That’s better than yesterday”) or to provide corrective feedback (“You need to work on that one”). Clinicians and teachers may also overtly or covertly evaluate their own adequacy (“I shouldn’t have raised that issue”).
The clinician and teacher, in keeping with their defined roles, engage in evaluations of clients or students. A client may take a clinician’s evaluation as an indicator of competence in handling a particular item or task (“I said that wrong”) or as a more general indicator about overall competence for tasks of this type (e.g., “I’m inarticulate”; see Ferrara, chap. 15, this volume). Less often, the student may respond to a teacher’s evaluation by interpreting it as an unfair correction or as inauthentic (“I really did OK even though she thinks I didn’t”; see Higginbotham & Wilkins, chap. 3, this volume).
There are a few significant examples in this volume in which those evaluated do not conform to role expectations (Higginbotham & Wilkins; Simmons-Mackie & Damico). An augmentative system user, reported in Higginbotham and Wilkins, negatively evaluates his nurses. A client, described in Simmons-Mackie and Damico, criticizes her speech-language pathologist for failing to provide meaningful therapy.
An interesting third example of a role violation is described by Stillman et al. (chap. 2, this volume), who interviewed students in a speech-language pathology curriculum. The students revealed their feelings of incompetence in working with children who, because of their severe communication and social problems, did not interact according to the students’ role expectations. In this case, the professionals in training did not blame the lack of interaction on their clients as would more experienced professionals (see Goode, 1994; Higginbotham & Wilkins, chap. 3, this volume; and Maynard & Marlaire, chap. 8, this volume, for a discussion of how professionals blame clients for interaction difficulties). Rather, these clinicians in training saw themselves as lacking in skill and as the source of the problematic social interactions.
An alternative to evaluations made from a single role-positioned view, particularly from the view of the expert, is one described by Ferrara (chap. 15, this volume). She cites a movement in psychotherapy under the influence of postmodernism that allows clients to take a much stronger role in the therapy discourse. Ferrara’s alternative is one that empowers the client. Danforth (1997) provided an even broader possibility, advocating a postmodern approach to those labeled mentally retarded: “Professionals can ally themselves with labeled persons, their families, and loved ones in efforts to transform social constructions of deficiency and incompetence into relationship-based and self-based understandings of personal power and efficacy” (p. 101).
Goffman’s notion of footing also allows for variability in evaluative stance. For example, he discussed alterations in footing based on whether the speaker is speaking directly (“Shut the window”), reflectively (“I said shut the window”), as an actor (Macbeth: “Shut the window”), or for someone else (“He said ‘shut the window’”; Goffman, 1981, pp. 148–151).
Evaluations, as depicted in our situated framework, are emergent and variable, being made from highly fluid stances. Participants in interactions often create stances in their communication that relate to gender, age, musical taste, and religious feeling. Their relative positions and consequent evaluations based on such constructs can be manifested directly or indirectly. Mockeries are direct. Evidentials, forms that are used to cast information as doubtful, suspicious, or hearsay, are less direct.
Adverbs, when used as evidentials, can serve to soften or strengthen the stance toward information presented in an evaluation. The very presence of the adverb may signal the audience to treat the upcoming information from a particular stance and to evaluate it accordingly. The detached stance required of media newscasters provides them with the occasion to use adverbs such as “allegedly” to avoid prejudging a person as guilty. A reporter saying that “Andrew Cunanan allegedly killed Gianni Versace” may actually believe that Cunanan committed the act but wants the audience to evaluate the report (and reporter) and not to prejudge the case. The adverb “allegedly” in this instance creates an interesting complex evaluative situation in which the newscaster, in an effort to show that he or she is not being evaluative, is inviting the audience to evaluate the report as fair.
… Occasioned by Something. … How Evaluations Are Locally Determined
Evaluations grow out of the situations in which they occur. A telling example of this is offered by Robillard (Higginbotham & Wilkins, chap. 3, this volume), who described others saying “Not now” in response to his attempts to tell them something. Robillard uses a communication device to create messages, and thus takes a long time to get his ideas out. The result is that he and his partners cannot meet the ordinary time requirements of typical speech communication. When his interactants refuse to accept his efforts to communicate with them, they are levying the ultimate negative evaluation—telling him that his ideas are not worth waiting for.
There are chapters in this volume that contain evaluations issued in the course of clinical “lessons” (Kovarsky, Kimbarow, & Kastner; Simmons-Mackie & Damico). Lessons are events that are structured around evaluation exchanges. They contain three-part turns involving (a) a prompt or question from the teacher—a clinician in this case, (b) a response from the student, and (c) the teacher’s evaluation of the student’s response.
These explicit evaluations delivered as a third component of the exchange are also present in the testing situation as described by Maynard and Marlaire (chap. 8, this volume). They show that even when testers try not to evaluate a student’s responses as a third slot in a prompt–response–evaluation exchange, they can succumb inadvertently to the evaluation imperative. These authors found that the test giver inadvertently altered what she said and did depending on the accuracy of the student’s response. After correct responses the test giver said “Good” or proceeded to the next item, with no comment. After incorrect responses, the tester said “Okay” rather than “Good” and sometimes slowed down the tempo of the exchange.
Psychotherapists who follow traditional practices also evaluate throughout the therapy sessions. Ferrara (chap. 15, this volume) identified a variety of negative evaluations issued by the therapist. Her clinician complained about the ambiguity in his client’s language (Therapist: “You use a lot of pronouns that I don’t know what you mean.…”); asked the client to say things in a different way, as if not accepting her own renditions (Therapist: “Are there any other words that you could put on that piece … ?”); and focused on deficits through negative summary statements—what Ferrara calls “recycling communicative failure” (Therapist: “Poor communication. Heaps of blaming. Not recognizing what you could do.…”).
It can be shown in data presented in this volume that all evaluations are influenced by what is happening in the here and now—even those evaluations that are made of people who are not present. The evaluations of clients in the diagnostic reports analyzed by Duchan (chap. 10, this volume) and the metaphoric descriptions of parents’ responses to previous evaluations reported in Mastergeorge (chap. 11, this volume) are constructed in light of what is happening at the moment. Report writers design reports for an audience to achieve a particular agenda; parents use metaphoric language to translate a catastrophic experience for their naive audience.
Kovarsky and his coauthors (chap. 13, this volume) add another set of dimensions for understanding how evaluations are tied to the occasion in which they are issued. For example, they describe how theoretical models subscribed to by clinicians lead the clinicians to focus on client deficits. They also see the lack of shared knowledge between clinician and client and the institutional requirement that a client’s progress be tracked as leading to gamelike activities in which performance is continually evaluated.
These examples, taken from everyday life contexts described in this volume, allow us to make the point that all evaluations are locally occasioned. Even for the evaluations that are of remote occurrences, the evaluator must be sensitive to the particular institutional, discourse, and pragmatic demands that occasion the issuance of the specific evaluation.
… About Something. … The Scope and Domain of Constructed Evaluations
The situated interaction framework exemplified by the studies in this book focuses primarily on how and where ideas of competence are generated. The authors look at what is happening during naturally occurring social interactions. Evaluations of specific performances during an event (“Great throw!”) can be used by participants to build to more generalized ideas about how well individuals are doing across several occasions (“You’re outdoing yourself so far in this game”), and from there to summary impressions about how well individuals did overall (“You played a great game”). Evaluations also can have an even more general scope, such as those describing performance for types of activities (“You’re a great ballplayer”) or those describing the overall competence of individuals (“You’re a great athlete”).
A particular occasion can serve to elicit evaluations at a variety of levels of generality. For example, the speech-language pathologist in Kovarsky, Kimbarow, and Kastner (chap. 13, this volume) evaluated her patients’ particular performances (such as putting their “heads down on the table”) as well as their general abilities (difficulties with “problem solving, thought organization, the ability to generate lists and … to organize to complete a task”).
Furthermore, a particular evaluation may be issued as having a particular scope or focus and be interpreted by the recipient more or less broadly. For example, Jorgensen Winkler describes watershed experiences of her Taiwanese subjects (chap. 4, this volume) based on a particular comment by an evaluator.
Evaluations not only vary in scope, they also vary in what it is that is being evaluated—what we call the domain of the evaluation. The domains of evaluation described between the covers of this book vary widely. They include such diverse areas as sound blending (Maynard & Marlaire), attention (Kovarsky et al.), and speaking Standard English (Jorgensen Winkler; Maxwell et al.; Wyatt).
… In Comparison With an Expectation. … The Standard for Making Competence Comparisons
The studies in this book are of competence evaluations made about people who are in one way or another being judged as incompetent. Some of the studies are of normal people who are gaining competence in a selected domain. Trix, for example, describes her experiences under tutelage in Islam; Jorgensen Winkler describes the English-speaking competencies of Taiwanese immigrants; Stillman et al. describe the self-judgments made by college students in training to be speech-language pathologists; and Mastergeorge and Barton describe how adults respond to their children’s disabilities.
The juxtaposition of studies of normal and abnormal learners in this volume provides a view of how standards and expectations influence evaluations. The subjects with diagnoses are cast in the subordinate role of patients, and the expectations and standards for evaluating performance are lowered. While interacting in such subordinating roles, subjects may be evaluated as performing well, but this notion of positively evaluated performance is highly constrained by virtue of their classification as people with problems. Their judged competence is couched in implicit conditionals. It is as if someone were saying: “You did very well, considering your limitations.” The standard against which their performance is being judged is qualitatively different from that used for their counterparts who are seen as normal.
Besides leading to lesser expectations by professionals, judgments about the competence of those who have been diagnosed with a disability have an added feature. Those affected are also judged by professionals as more or less competent depending on the degree to which they follow the agenda of the professional and the degree to which they conform to the institutional practices that are prescribed for improving their competence. Barton (chap. 12, this volume) contrasts two members of different families whose children have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; the first is treated by the professional as being competent, the second as incompetent. The difference between the two is based on the degree to which the family member buys into and complies with the view and agenda of the professional doing the evaluating.
… With Potentially Long-Lasting and Profound Effects. … The Possible Consequences of Situated Evaluations
Situated evaluations are shown by authors of these chapters to have differing effects. Some evaluations may have high impact effects, such as those that have diagnostic significance (Duchan; Maynard & Marlaire; Wyatt), or those that create a watershed change in people’s views of their own or a family member’s competence (Jorgensen Winkler; Mastergeorge). Other evaluations may have minimal impact, such as an “OK” following a correct response to an easy question in a domain of strength or an evaluation made outside the recipient’s focus of attention (e.g., Simmons-Mackie & Damico’s subject, who was evaluated during her efforts to change the topic).
Several authors in this volume make the case that it is not a single evaluation but the accumulated impact of multiple evaluations that can create long-lasting effects. The evaluations by the psychotherapist in the study by Ferrara, when viewed cumulatively, can create feelings of powerlessness. The evaluations implicitly conveyed when people are ostracized or ignored can be highly debilitating, such as those of hearing subjects in the presence of their deaf peers (Maxwell et al.), those issued by medical personnel in the presence of augmentative communication users (Higginbotham & Wilkins), and those made by children with autism when they failed to look at their student clinicians (Stillman et al.).
There is a healthy body of existing research showing the possible cumulative effect of evaluations on a person’s notions of self-identity and on the person’s performance in particular areas being evaluated. The research has been carried out within five different, yet related, frameworks: attribution theory (e.g., Weiner, 1974), expectancy theory (e.g., Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1992), labeling theory (e.g., Mercer, 1973), mindlessness/mindfulness theory (Langer 1975, 1979), and learned-helplessness theory (Seligman, 1975). Together, researchers working in these frameworks have shown that the classification of an individual can lead others to treat the individual negatively or positively depending on expectancies derived from the label. When the classification entails a lack of ability (a disability) or lesser competence, those classified eventually develop a lowered sense of self-esteem, a sense of helplessness, and a sense that they are not able to control what is going on. The expectancies thereby become self-fulfilling prophecies. Individuals who are labeled with a diagnosis feel more competent prior to their diagnosis than they did after being diagnosed. Interestingly, the reverse is also true. When labeled as having high potential, subjects (from mice to men) improve in their measured performance. They exhibit what has come to be called the “Pygmalion effect” (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1992). In an interpersonal context, someone who is expected to lose his or her temper may be more likely to do so, someone expected to be brave may be more likely to be so. The situated interaction view would explain such changes as resulting from accumulations of evaluations and interpretations made on various occasions.
The data and interpretations of the authors of this volume, along with data from other paradigms, are taken as support of the situated interaction view. The authors show repeatedly and in various ways that judgments or displays of competence rely heavily on the conditions that prevail in particular occasions. They show that their subjects appear more or less competent depending on the objectives and worldview of the evaluators, on whether the person being evaluated shows compliance with professionals and institutional performance requirements, and on whether the evaluated person can meet the specific task requirements under which the judgments are being made.
These contextual factors are often ignored by professionals and scholars who are assessing, studying, or working to alter competence in others. The prevailing paradigm portrays competence as contained and circumscribed. In the “containment view” contextual factors are depicted as variables affecting competence rather than as central to the process of competence construction.
COMPETENCE AS CONTAINMENT
A prevailing view of competence, one that is countered in this volume, is that it can be located and measured in an individual in much the same way one would measure liquid in a container. People are described as “having” varying amounts competence. One’s overall competence can range from minimal (incompetent) to considerable (expert, genius). Descriptors such as “high level” or “low level,” “high functioning” or “low functioning,” can be used to describe overall competence in the same way one would describe the level of material in a container. (See Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, for more detailed discussions of how the container metaphor has been used to depict aspects of the human mind.)
Social scientists, since Binet, have been hard at work creating standardized and reliable measures for judging amounts of overall competence. The measures add legitimacy to the container metaphor because they provide a way to quantify amounts of competence. Researchers and clinicians can now classify people in low-, normal-, or high-level competence groups, depending on the scores they obtain on a standardized test.
Competence testing, as traditionally carried out, has been aimed at discovering people’s overall competence as well as their competence in particular domains. An individual can be found to have varying amounts of language knowledge, gross or fine motor skill, or social abilities. One very active area of competence research has been to discover how overall competence or components of competence might be increased. Another area of study is to determine how components of competence interact with one another. Researchers have made efforts to discover, for example, how language competence changes with different types of language intervention (see Howard & Hatfield, 1987; Weismer, 1991) and how language competence relates, say, to social competence (Fujiki & Brinton, 1994).
Many studies have been designed to control or manipulate components of competence, treating them as experimental variables. Sometimes components serve as control variables, others times as independent or dependent variables. The effects of mental age or language level on performance might, for example, be controlled by selecting subjects who fall within a restricted range of scores on an intelligence or language test. Or changes in a competence level might be measured before and after receiving training designed to enhance competence in a selected area. Effects of changes in one component (the independent variable) on another (the dependent variable) allow researchers to examine the relationships between components.
Competence tests have also come to be used as diagnostic measures to identify whether particular individuals need support to enhance competence of one type or another (see Maynard & Marlaire, chap. 8, this volume). Results from diagnostic evaluations have led to altered educational placement and programming for those who obtain scores significantly below what would be expected. For example, children found to have normal intelligence but below average reading, mathematical, or other academic ability, qualify for the diagnosis of learning disability.
Diagnosis is often the gateway to educational or therapeutic programs designed to increase competence in areas of identified deficiency. Some programs are loosely matched to general deficits. For example, individuals with traumatic brain injury or aphasia may be enrolled in a therapy program to enhance memory or attention, or to improve problem-solving abilities (see Kovarsky et al., chap. 13, this volume). Other programs have a more individualized focus, such as the psychotherapy approach described by Ferrara (chap. 15, this volume) that is closely tied to what the client chooses to talk about. Whatever the degree of individualization, many programs designed to enhance competence are grounded in the container view of competence, with the goal of the program being to increase or enhance a person’s competence level.
The container metaphor fails to consider how competence is constructed by situated selves, in situated contexts. The data provided in this volume are intended to lend support to the situated interaction view—a view that allows us to see and understand how competence gets constructed, evaluated, and revised in the course of everyone’s everyday life experience.
THE ORGANIZATION OF THIS VOLUME
This book is divided into three sections: the first related to nonobvious contextual factors that play a role in how competence is constructed; the second about the impact of diagnoses on judgments about competence; and the third on various sorts of competence evaluations that are made during therapy interactions.
Hidden Factors Influencing Judgments of Competence
The six chapters in the first section point to nonobvious and powerful factors affecting judgments of competence. They show (a) how violations of eye gaze (Stillman et al.) and temporality (Higginbotham & Wilkins) lead to negative judgments of competence; (b) the way different audiences can lead to different senses of ability (Jorgensen Winkler); (c) how the application of social rules can affect the way behavior is interpreted and evaluated (Saenz et al.); (d) how identity affiliations plays a role in self- and other evaluations (Maxwell et al.); and (e) how cultural practices can avoid embarrassment and save face (Trix).
Stillman, Snow, and Warren (chap. 2) start us off by discussing how violations of communicative expectancies for such things as eye gaze can affect competence judgments. Student clinicians summarizing their experiences with children who did not look at them showed how lack of eye gaze can have a devastating effect on judgments of competency. As one student put it: “I used to be good with kids. I expect to be good with kids. I assume children will be social and want to interact with me and be responsive to me. When it didn’t happen, I felt like a failure” (p. 35).
Higginbotham and Wilkins (chap. 3) provide data to show similar devastating effects of violations of time expectations. Those interacting with communicators who used very slow technology to communicate sometimes refused to engage in communication with the device users or judged the communicators not the devices to be inappropriate or unworthy. One communicator described his nurse’s attitudes as: “‘I am the nurse from hell and do not try any of that communication shit with me’” (Robillard, 1994, p. 388, cited in Higginbotham & Wilkins. p. 63).
The critical role that different audiences play in the construction of competence is revealed in the chapter by Jorgensen Winkler (chap. 4). Her study chronicles the experiences of two Taiwanese women learning English as a second language during graduate school in the United States. Both women’s views of their abilities in English varied with different audiences. These subjects’ sense of their own competence was not found to be immutable, but changed over time as they experienced different evaluative situations. Jorgensen Winkler also points to the lasting role of particular evaluations, leading to dramatic alterations in a person’s sense of competence.
In chapter 5, Saenz, Gilligan, and Pelligrini turn our attention to the importance of social rules and roles that are used to interpret ongoing events. They examine how two preschool children negotiate space and their rights to toys during a dispute. If the event is interpreted within the rule that children should share, the child who wants the toy is evaluated positively and the child who has the toy is evaluated negatively (refusing to share). However, if the event is interpreted as an example of protecting territorial rights, the child who refuses to share is seen as doing the right thing.
The relationship between self-identity and judged competence is dramatically displayed by the subjects with hearing impairment in chapter 6 by Maxwell, Poeppelmeyer, and Polich. These subjects describe being separated and alienated due to their being caught between hearing and deaf communities. As one person related, when describing adults who become deaf after they have developed language: “They lack both expertise in ASL and the experiences of growing up deaf. Many feel like outsiders in hearing and deaf communities” (Maxwell et al., p. 133).
In stark contrast to the rest of the chapters in this section, Trix (chap. 7) presents a situation in which the person in power works to avoid embarrassment and the lowering of self-confidence in his religious initiates. The spiritual leader of a Bektashi Muslim community in the United States responded to Trix’s “mistakes” indirectly and much later, allowing her to save face and engendering in her strong feelings of competence.
Diagnosis as Situated Practice
The second section of this book examines contexts in which formal diagnoses of competence are rendered. Included are considerations of: (a) how the diagnostic test is a negotiated interaction, coconstructed by both tester and test taker (Maynard & Marlaire); (b) the importance of examining the ecological validity of the evaluation situation (Wyatt); (c) how agendas of the professional affect the way competence of the client is viewed (Duchan); (d) the emotional significance of a diagnosis for the family members and the person being diagnosed (Mastergeorge); and the impact of the family members’ view of the “problem” on subsequent management of the problem (Barton).
The first of the five chapters in this section shows the misrepresentation of assessments based on a container view of competence. That is to say, tests that are designed to eliminate outside influences on the performance of the test taker fail to appreciate how futile it is to assume that the test taker can maintain a neutral stance. Maynard and Marlaire (chap. 8) show how responses on tests are actually negotiated achievements between examiners and test takers. Both partners evaluate and interpret the performance of the other through the test:
we saw “mistakes” on the part of the clinician as well as the child, many of which appear not to stem from the inabilities or incompetencies of the clinician or the child, but precisely from the interactional competence they both exhibit. That competence resides in a set of skills through which they bring off official testing activities, such as providing a “stimulus” and a “response.” (Maynard & Marlaire, p. 193)
The situated character of diagnosis becomes even more apparent in Wyatt’s consideration in chapter 9 of evaluative procedures used to distinguish language differences from language disorders among speakers of African-American English. She begins with a review of previously reported biases in the assessment of children and a summary discussion of verbal-art forms in the African-American community. Wyatt then provides data regarding the language abilities of a 3-year-old boy during peer interaction, including one segment of spontaneous rapping. Based on these data, she argues that professional judgments of language disorders must involve the sampling of communicative abilities across “a wider range of culturally relevant discourse contexts” (Wyatt, p. 212).
Duchan (chap. 10) presents us with a picture of how the practices that are involved in describing a client’s competencies have a strong effect on how those competencies get portrayed. She found that the competence statements in diagnostic and progress reports are influenced by the agenda of the report writer. In contexts in which report writers are making a case that the client needs intervention, clients are described negatively. In contexts in which report writers are emphasizing progress made by the client, the clients are described in positive ways.
The emotional impact of diagnosis on clients and their families is revealed in the chapter written by Mastergeorge (chap. 11). She describes the memories that caregivers and clients have of their reactions to first being diagnosed. The unusual prevalence of metaphors in their descriptions of their receipt of diagnostic news provides a view of their current understanding of the disability. The metaphors convey to the listener the powerful impact of that initial news. The descriptions of these reactions indicate how those involved in diagnoses must manage their conceptions of their own or their family members’ abilities in light of the news.
In chapter 12, Barton shows the impact of not only the actual diagnosis but the understandings that are associated with that diagnosis. She shows that the parent who understands (and talks about) her child’s disability, using the terminology and framework of the pediatrician, is seen by the doctor as more competent than the parent who did not. The judgments of the parents’ competence strongly affected the degree to which the pediatrician and parents were able to collaborate when planning for the children’s needs.
Intervention as Situated Practice
The final section of this book examines interactions in contexts of therapy—a speech event designed to improve the competence of those individuals receiving help. All three of the chapters in this section reveal interactional asymmetries between clinicians and clients and how the asymmetries affect the judgments being made of client competence.
In chapter 13, Kovarsky, Kimbarow, and Kastner examine group language therapy practices involving a speech-language pathologist and adults with traumatic brain injury. Analysis revealed how the institutional context for intervention, the agenda of the clinician, and the therapeutic activities all provide resources for the construction of client incompetence.
Simmons-Mackie and Damico (chap. 14) describe conflict talk between a woman with aphasia and a speech-language pathologist during a therapy session. The evaluative stance of the clinician, evidenced in part by her singular pursuit of responses she judged to be appropriate to her requests, leads her to overlook her client’s requests to stop the activity.
Finally, in chapter 15, Ferrara examines how clients are disempowered during psychotherapy through the creation of an expert stance by the therapist, a commentary by the therapist on the proper use of language, and a recycling by the therapist of the client’s communicative failure.
When taken together, the chapters in this volume should be considered as an initial exploration of how competence is socially constructed during the course of everyday interactions. It is hoped that this book will stimulate future inquiry into how competence manifests itself and how identities get altered as a consequence. The ultimate hope is to design ways to convert institutional and clinical practices that result in negative evaluations and interactive dependencies to practices that are positive and more empowering.
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1Competence is used in this chapter to refer to the overall domain ranging from least (incompetent) to most competent.
2Schegloff (1979): “When social behavior is differentiated by reference to its recipient or target, investigators can hardly escape the importance that attaches to the processes by which identification of recipients is made. … (p. 25). We are just beginning to appreciate the degree of detail to which such differentiation—by ‘recipient design’ is applicable, but a sense of its range may be gleaned from considering that on the one hand the very occurrence or not of interaction may be contingent on it, and on the other hand, should conversation be entered into, the selection of words in the talk will be sensitive to it.…” (p. 26).