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Empathy, broadly defined as the ability to experience another's emotions and perceptions, is one of the major attitudes and actions underpinning an individual's participation in dialogue across diversity. The goal of this methodological paper is to operationalize empathy as a discursive construct, manifested in children and adolescent dialogic interactions. A coding scheme is developed based on three distinct steps. First, a review of the operational definitions of empathy is carried out, to capture how its related values, skills, and dispositions have been detected thus far. Second, the definitional elements resulting from this overview are represented in the dialogical notion of other-orientedness, which can be manifested, actually and potentially, in discourse. Moves are distinguished in 8 categories based on their disposition to be potentially other-oriented (dialogicity), which becomes actually manifested depending on their relevance to the discourse they are used in. Dialogicity and relevance are captured by the coding scheme proposed in this paper, which is validated and used to illustrate how it can reveal dialogical empathy and the development of common ground in interactions. • Providing a validated coding scheme for capturing the manifestations of dialogical empathy in dialogues. • Operationalizing empathy for the purposes of discourse analysis. • Showing the relationship between dialogical empathy and other-oriented moves. • Reviewing the operational definitions of empathy in psychology, discourse studies, and rhetoric. • Providing a tool for analyzing conflicts of "common" grounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Patient education is an important part of nurses' roles; however the inconsistent quality of communication skills, including those of registered nurses (RNs) from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds, risk patient safety. Empowerment in patient education has been found to influence patients' self-efficacy and participation in decision-making. Discourse analysis of a whole interaction is used in this paper to trace the consequences of patient education where empowering discourse is displayed by an RN from a CALD background.Methods: Ethnographic techniques of participant observation and audio recordings of naturally occurring interactions between nurses from CALD backgrounds and their patients were conducted and analysed using interactional sociolinguistic (IS) and theme oriented discourse analytic approaches.Results: The interactional consequences of the nurse's empowering approach are readily observable in the data. The RN addresses the patient's education needs through a respectful encounter that illustrates the patient's active involvement.Conclusion: Examining the interactional consequences of empowering discourse demonstrates its effectiveness, and illustrates how empowering behaviour can be integrated into patient education, thus offering an alternative to traditional approaches.Practical Implications: Greater awareness of how to use empowering discourse will offer an alternative and consistent approach that enables nurses to facilitate patient-centred education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intercultural communication is quickly becoming a pivotal area of study in an increasingly expanding global village brought about by rapid telecommunications technology. As a result, the danger for misunderstandings to arise when interlocutors who belong to different speech communities enter into intercultural communication situations are many. The study of the linguistic and interpersonal dynamics that characterize such situations has been carried out in recent years, producing many interesting findings. What this line of research lacks, however, is a theoretical framework. The recent work by Klukanov, which proposes ten principles for the study of intercultural communication, can be enlisted to construct such a framework. This paper examines these principles in the light of their general implications for the systematic study of intercultural communication and for discourse theory generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interactive discourse structuring is used to guide listeners through on-going speech and has been shown to have a positive effect on lecture comprehension, particularly in L2 settings. As mobility increases in the academic world, there are more opportunities for lecture events characterized not only by linguistic/cultural diversity, but also by unfamiliarity between lecturers and audiences. In these situations, interactive discourse structuring may have an especially important role. This study compares interactive discourse structuring used by guest lecturers (both L1 and L2) versus L1 classroom lecturers. Using corpus methodology, interactive discourse structuring was found to be most frequent among L2 guest lecturers, least frequent among L1 guest lecturers, with L1 classroom lecturers falling in the middle. The results suggest that linguistic/cultural diversity has more influence on discourse structuring than participant unfamiliarity. In addition, the analysis revealed other trends, particularly the very wide range of vocabulary used in discourse structuring expressions by all speakers. The findings can be implemented towards developing more authentic academic listening materials, as well as guidelines for both native and non-native guest lecturers who interact with international audiences. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]