Search

This paper investigates interactional challenges experienced in calls to emergency services with native English speaking (NS) call takers and non-native speaking (NNS) callers. Case studies of three problematic NNS/NS calls from a collection of emergency service calls were conducted using a conversation analytic approach. These calls were selected from publicly available recordings which were made by callers who were hearably NNS of English. The analysis shows how accents, grammatical and other linguistic choices led to related challenges in the pragmatics of communication (including procedures for sequential organization such as adjacency pairs, repair initiation, confirmation requests, presequences and story solicits). Routine procedures for repair or confirmation can produce hidden disjunctures and/or inaccurate or missing information as a result of the NNS/NS issues in the interaction. These challenges may contribute to failures of intersubjective understanding in the calls, affect the accuracy of information obtained, and extend the length of the call, which may impact the successful provision of emergency services to NNS callers. • Emergency phone calls from non-native speakers may have misunderstandings. • Call takers struggled with non-native speakers' accents, grammar, and word choice. • Non-native speakers' performance of pragmatics challenged by language limitations. • Call takers repair moves may be stymied by caller's language limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a single case analysis of an emergency service call in which the caller failed to convince the call taker that the request for service was urgent in what turned out to be a tragic event. The analysis of this call using the techniques and findings of conversation analysis reveals that the actions of both the call taker and the caller created an interactional context in which the “big picture” (the potential for danger), became repeatedly submerged in “small picture” details (such as the identity and location of the caller and her role in the situation). This paper builds on previous research on how callers can fail to construct convincing descriptions of the problem and extends this line of work by exploring how participants make or fail to make inferences in order to construct a gestalt or big picture of the event being reported, how participants manage events that unfold during the call, and how callers convey their identity and role in the situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]