Gendered Acts of Face Negotiations in Teacher-Student Interaction: A Linguistic Ethnographic Investigation of Salutation

Abstract

This article examined salutation as a valued and nuanced socio-cultural practice that serves the purpose of socially positioning interactants and impacting on face negotiations in interaction in Nigeria. This was done with the aim of demonstrating its significance in the shaping and ordering of naturally occurring interaction. The data for the study comprise naturally occurring interaction of 30 participants whose interactions were collected using linguistic ethnographic tools of recording, note taking, and observation while micro discourse analysis, with emphasis on notions of face negotiations as interaction strategies was used for the analysis of the data. The study revealed that students who failed to salute the teachers were offered varying face negotiations based on their gender differences. The study also found that both the office context and the power position of the teachers impacted variously on face negotiations. From the Nigerian sociolinguistic context and interpersonal pragmatics, salutation is viewed as a social solidarity and social positioning strategy especially in contexts where age, gender, and power are sensitive components of the context as such its observation or failure to observe it could easily affect the outcome of the entire interaction.