Nick Wilson

This chapter analyses the linguistic practices of two coaches of a rugby team in New Zealand, specifically examining how they employ personal pronouns, familiar address terms, and personal names to navigate the dynamics of player-directed communication. Building upon existing research, the study contrasts coach-talk during training sessions with match days, highlighting the strategic use of language in different contexts and with different addressees. Adopting an interactional sociolinguistics framework and drawing upon linguistic ethnography and corpus linguistics, the analysis reveals that the choice of personal pronouns, particularly the pseudo-inclusive first-person plural we, serves to foster an illusion of inclusivity while mitigating potential face threats associated with directives. Moreover, familiar address terms, such as mate and bro, are shown to enhance relational solidarity, while personal names specify addressees in multi-party interaction and provide a direct means of engagement but are rarely used in dyadic interaction. The findings illustrate that coaches’ referential choices play a crucial role in constructing team identity, managing power dynamics, and enhancing communication efficacy within a sporting context, and that the specification of addressee and person reference plays a central role in the discourse strategies they adopt to enact leadership.

For more than two decades there have been claims of a shift in the way various linguistic taboos (i.e. swearwords and slurs) are used and perceived by members of the broader community. This supposed shift, which is believed to reflect the current values maintained by society on the whole, has prompted social commentators and researchers alike to suggest that the most taboo words no longer relate to sex, religion, or bodily effluvia, but derive from a domain of language classified as "-IST language" (i.e. disparaging or pejorative language targeting people sharing similar characteristics). To test this claim in an Australian context, the authors of this paper asked 60 Australian-born university students to complete an online survey assessing not only each participant's personal perception of swearing, (potentially) offensive, and taboo language, but also their thoughts concerning the way the Australian population at large view various taboo terms. The results of this survey indicate that language which was once deemed to be the most offensive and taboo, has been overtaken in terms of taboo by -IST language.

Considering the need for pedagogically effective learning activities and materials to support language learning, particularly within teacher-led instruction, it is curious that at present there is no overarching, research-based framework available to educators to draw from when designing and implementing such activities and materials. To address this gap, the authors of this paper have drawn from a host of relevant research pertaining to cognitive neuroscience, educational psychology, and second language acquisition to establish a framework for designing and implementing activities and learning materials capable of facilitating enhanced language learning outcomes within an inclusive classroom. Incorporating ten key considerations – attention and focus, desirable difficulty, depth of processing, deliberate practice, novelty and surprise, wakeful rest, visible learning, meaningful feedback, affective engagement, and strategic choice and use – this versatile framework not only provides teachers with necessary knowledge for designing language learning activities and materials in an engaging and efficacious manner but may also embolden them to do so.

Although swearing is often perceived as intrinsically offensive language, it is how swearing use is indexed against a person’s understanding of local social norms that constructs swearing as offensive. This paper presents an analysis of swearing within a social context where high frequency swearing is a norm: a male rugby team in New Zealand. Drawing upon a dataset collected from ethnographically collected authentic interactions, an analysis of the frequency of swear words and a comparison with other English corpora is presented, followed by an interactional sociolinguistic analysis of how swearing is used in interactions. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate not only how swearing can be used to engender solidarity, but that a range of socio-pragmatic functions of swearing such as intensifying and indexing a vernacular identity, can be used in performing leadership.

This chapter uses qualitative and quantitative analysis of interactions collected in a New Zealand rugby team to analyse the way in which pronominal choice impacts upon the social dynamics of leadership discourse. In particular, the pseudo-inclusive first person plural pronoun is examined in terms of its solidarity enhancing effect and mitigation of leadership-focused speech acts. Pronominal use is analysed with reference to the sociolinguistic concept of stance alignment and how this can mitigate potential face-threat. The discussion considers that by including themselves with the addressees of an interaction, leaders can attenuate the illocutionary force of speech acts such as directives and criticism, whilst maximising the directness of their expression, and goes on to question the social function of pseudo-inclusive compliments.

This article uses an ethnographically based sociolinguistic approach to analyse ritual interactions that took place in a New Zealand male rugby team, paying particular attention to the way in which space and place are used as part of the construction of team identity. In following the development of spatial practice, the discourses of territoriality in pre-match communication are explored, and it is shown how the team uses spatial and linguistic practice to reconstruct an unfamiliar space as "home," thus allowing them to create a familiar space through ritual wherever they might be. In analysing the discourses and communicative practices present in the locker room, the construction of hegemonic masculinity is also discussed and it is found that while rugby is still inextricably bound up with hegemonic masculine ideology, these are found to a much lesser degree than elsewhere.

This chapter discusses how we might identify workplace research as Linguistic Ethnography (LE) by pinning down a set of criteria that define LE, namely: aims, method and impact. Broadly speaking any research using ethnographic methodology, focusing on authentic data pertaining to language in use, and giving something back to participants, can be considered as LE. Whether it is explicitly styled as such is another matter. Examples of research that can be categorized in this way are discussed and used to highlight the flexibility of LE as an approach to workplace research.

Using the concept of distributed leadership, this paper demonstrates not only that having multiple leaders in an organisation is an effective way of structuring leadership, but that it allows for a range of Leadership styleto be performed, each of which meets the immediate needs of a Community of practice within an organisation. Leadership is shown to be a skill that is acquired through situated learning, and it is through the analysis of Leadership discourse that we can see how different leadership styles are developed and negotiated at a local level. Thus, by analysing leadership Discourse in a rugby team, this paper challenges the Stereotypeof the ‘born leader’ and adds further weight to the idea that multiple leaders in an organisation is not only a useful strategy, it is also one that can support leadership emergence and development from within an organisation.