Artspeak : articulating artistic process across cultural boundaries through digital theatre

In early 2009, researchers in the English Department of the University of Amsterdam collaborated with researchers in the Drama Department, Deakin University, Australia on a project which brought English as a Second Language students from The Netherlands into the rehearsal studio of Australian students engaged in play-building on Australian themes. The project aims were multiple and interconnected. We extended a language acquisition framework established by the Dutch investigators in previous collaborations with the Universities of Venice and Southampton, and combined this with an investigation of ways to harness technology in order to teach Australian students to communicate with and about their art. The Dutch language students were prompted to develop art-related language literacy (description, interpretation, criticism), through live, video-streamed interaction with drama students in Australia at critical points in the development of a group-devised performance (conception, rehearsal, performance). The Australian student improved their capacity to articulate the aims and processes which drove their art-making by illuminating the art-making process for the Dutch students, and providing them with a real-life context for the use of extended vocabulary whilst making them partners in the process of shaping the work. All participants engaged in the common task of assessing the capacity of the art work produced to communicate meaning to a non-Australian audience.<br /

Topicalizing psychosocial distress in cancer follow-up consultations: An exploration of the interactional effects of discussion tools

This paper reports on a case study into the effects on doctor–patient interaction of the use of the Distress Thermometer and Problem List (DT+PL) as a tool to further the discussion of psychosocial distress in the follow-up head-and-neck cancer consultation. The follow-up head-and-neck cancer consultation is a well-defined, goal-oriented, institutional speech event. Its aims include checking patients for recurrence and monitoring patients for after-effects of the malignity and its treatment, and psychosocial distress. The discussion of psychosocial issues, however, is not as well-integrated in the follow-up consultation as is deemed desirable. To remedy this, instruments have been developed to facilitate the discussion of patients’ quality of life. This paper uses the conceptual framework of the Ethnography of Communication and insights from Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics to analyse the impact of one of these instruments on doctor–patient interaction. Fine-grained analysis of the contextual parameters of the follow-up cancer consultation and of interactional data and meta-data suggests that, although the tool is successful in creating affordances for the discussion of psychosocial problems, it may simultaneously—and paradoxically—also put constraints on the range of topics that is discussed during the consultation. Doctors show awareness of this and deploy a variety of strategies to preserve their “normal” anamnesis while strategically integrating the discussion of the DT+PL into their consultations