ABSTRACT
This chapter presents and discusses different types of sense-making resources available to the Native English-speaking teachers (NETs) and local English teachers (LETs), and their students, and how they sometimes differ in their possession, mastery, and employment of these resources as sense-making strategies. It deals with examples showing socioculturally significant features of successful sense-making practices. The chapter shows how the teachers and the students made sense by employing a variety of sense-making resources. It presents representative instances showing how the two parties succeeded or did not succeed in mutual communication, and explores the reasons why different degrees of success or failure of communication took place. Unsuccessful use of sense-making resources of a linguistic nature resulting in interaction breakdown arose from lexical misinterpretations, lexical deficiencies, syntactic and pronunciation inaccuracies. Culture-based breakdowns in sense-making practices are often more complex and intriguing than purely linguistic based.
