Books like Forms of talk by Erving Goffman

Erving Goffman's classic work uses the stage as a metaphor for everyday life, showing how people craft and manage impressions in social interactions to shape how they are perceived.

Discusses the differences in conversational style between cultures and between individuals and how these differences lead to misunderstandings.

To understand the role of language in public life and the social process in general, we need first a closer understanding of how linguistic knowledge and social factors interact in discourse interpretation. This volume is a major advance towards that understanding. Professor Gumperz here synthesizes fundamental research on communication from a wide variety of disciplines - linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology and non-verbal communication - and develops an original and broadly based theory of conversational inference which shows how verbal communication can serve either between individuals of different social and ethnic backgrounds. The urgent need to overcome such barriers to effective communication is also a central concern of the book. Examples of conversational exchanges as well as of longer encounters, recorded in the urban United States, village Austria, South Asia and Britain, and analyzed to illustrate all aspects of the analytical approach, and to show how subconscious cultural presuppositions can damagingly affect interpretation of intent and judgement of interspeaker attitude. -- Publisher description.

Explores how classroom language shapes teaching and learning, offering teachers and researchers analytical tools to study discourse in second‑language, primary, secondary, and higher‑education settings.