Issues in Applied Linguistics

How do native and nonnative English-speaking participants understand one another in front desk service encounters? Specifically, what are the resources that enable them to transact their business at the desk? In this paper, I use the notion of "shared background" to show how participants at the front desk of a university-sponsored English language program rely on the sequential and institutional contexts in which their talk is produced to accomplish their service activities. In particular, I show how receptionists' orientations to the institutional requirements of students' actions in the "request slot" are evident in the design of their responses to students, especially in how they manage both the discourse and institutional relevancies that students' actions pose. Then, I show how participants' opening moves prepare the way for, and render accountable, students' service-seeking activities by constraining the kinds of actions that students can relevantly produce next. I propose that such constraints provide an important resource for participants to understand and respond to one another in institutionally relevant ways, in spite of their (at times) limited shared linguistic resources.