Relating at work : facets, dialectics and face

This article examines ‘relating at work’. Recent theorising in pragmatics has drawn attention to the importance of analysing relations, and yet the pragmatic study of relations is now intertwined so closely with the concept of face (e.g. Arundale, 2010a; Holmes et al., 2011; Locher and Watts 2005, 2008) that it might seem the two are synonymous. In this paper, I review this research from a multidisciplinary perspective, and then report a study on ‘relating at work’ in which leaders and interns were interviewed about their experiences of starting work in a culturally unfamiliar setting. I focus on one dialectic, connectedness–separateness, and report the challenges they described in ‘making contact’. In the discussion section and on the basis of my findings, I argue the following points: (a) relating at work entails a complex web of interrelated facets and ‘smooth relations’ is just one of employees’ relational concerns; (b) Relational Dialectic Theory offers much potential for interpersonal pragmatics; (c) dialectic tensions can occur at the individual as well as the interpersonal/relational levels and an interactional achievement analytic perspective needs to be complemented by an individual perspective; (d) Relational Dialect Theory and Face Theory are complementary to each other and should not be conflated

Politeness and face in digitally reconfigured e-learning spaces

This paper has two starting points. The first is a theorization about the way in which “rhetorical space” is reshaped in asynchronous, online, learning environments. In particular, an asynchronous bulletin- board (ABB) discussion offers both opportunities and constraints for teaching and learning. The learning that occurs will be affected by the affordances implicit in the design of the conversational space itself and the communicative practices engaged in by both teachers and students. The second starting point is a small case study, utilizing action research and discourse analytical strategies, whose research participants were the author and students involved in “delivering” and “receiving” an online education course at post-graduate level using asynchronous discussion. The course, taught in English, had a mix of Chinese students (for whom English was an additional language) and native English speakers. The paper will report on students’ perceptions of what worked for them and what didn’t in respect of this elearning environment. It will also use concepts such as politeness, face and positioning to analyse aspects of the participants’ communicative practices and will draw conclusions from these in respect of how successful learning can occur in elearning environments with multicultural and multilingual students. It will make connections between the findings of this case study and other research on asynchronous, web-based learning and will makes some suggestions about what is needed in respect of the future research agenda

Discursive Practice and the Nigerian Identity in Personal Emails

As communication by the electronic mail spreads and becomes increasingly common, more and more people are taking the advantage of its flexibility and simplicity for communicating social identity and cultural matters. This chapter, focuses on how Nigerian users of the electronic mails, apply the medium for expressing their identity through discursive means. Data comprises 150 personal emails written and sent between 2002 and 2009 in Lagos and Ota regions of Nigeria by individual email writers, comprising youths and adults from a university community and the Nigerian civil service. Applying socio-linguistic approach and computer-mediated discourse analysis, the study shows that the most common discursive means of expressing the Nigerian identity are greeting forms and modes of address; religious discursive practices and assertions of native personal names. The data also show evidences of Nigerian English in the email messages

Sorry vs please, accept my apologies: teaching politeness explicitly to first grade high school students

Tesis (Profesor de Inglés para la Enseñanza Básica y Media y al grado académico de Licenciado en Educación)The purpose of this project is to determine how can we help students to develop a more native-like performance. Since Chile has an English Program oriented and based on the communicative approach, teaching pragmatics is something which is not considered in the educational curricula and also there is a limited provision of materials given by the Ministry of Education. For the aforementioned reason, the students of the first-grade high school in a bilingual school were subjects of an intervention that was carried out during four pragmatic lessons in order to analyze the impacts that teaching Pragmatic Competence (PC) in an explicit way has, considering also the self-perception about their skills to communicate themselves using the English language before and after the treatment. To conduct this project a mixed method approach was selected as it gave us the opportunity of combining quantitative and qualitative instruments in order to obtain better and more precise results. The aim of this project is to contribute in a field which currently is not studied deeply; despite the studies that already exist is not common to make an analysis on pragmatics. Most of the students are confident in terms of language proficiency, the majority of the participants evaluated themselves better in receptive than productive skills. In terms of sociopragmatic competence, there was not a statistically significant improvement. However, requests showed a more native-like performance. Regarding pragmalinguistic competence, strategies in the post-test were better applied than in the pre-test. In light of the results obtained in this study, there are some implications that can be recommended for different areas. Mainly, this study has a huge influence in terms of national education policies. Keywords: pragmatic, sociopragmatic, pragmalinguistic, speech acts, teaching pragmatics, pragmatic strategies.El propósito de este proyecto es determinar cómo podemos ayudar a los estudiantes a desarrollar un rendimiento más natural al hablar en inglés. Debido a que en Chile se aplica un programa de inglés orientado y basado en el enfoque comunicativo, la enseñanza de la pragmática es algo que no se considera en los programas educacionales ni tampoco en los materiales entregados por el Ministerio de Educación. Por esta razón, estudiantes de primero medio de una escuela bilingüe fueron sujetos de una intervención que se desarrolló durante cuatro lecciones con el fin de analizar los impactos que tiene enseñar una competencia en pragmática de manera explícita, considerando además la percepción propia acerca de sus habilidades para comunicarse usando el inglés, antes y después del experimento. Para llevar a cabo este proyecto se seleccionó un enfoque de método mixto, que nos dio la oportunidad de combinar instrumentos cuantitativos y cualitativos para obtener resultados mejores y más precisos. El objetivo de este proyecto es contribuir en un campo que actualmente no se estudia profundamente; a pesar de los estudios que ya existen no es común hacer un análisis de la pragmática. La mayoría de los estudiantes se sienten bastante seguros en términos de su nivel de inglés. Muchos de ellos se evaluaron mejor en las habilidades receptivas que en las productivas. En términos de competencia sociopragmática no hubo una mejora significativa. Sin embargo, en la parte de petición, los alumnos mostraron respuestas más nativas. En relación con las estrategias de pragmalingüística, en el post-test, fueron mejor utilizadas que en el pre-test. Los resultados obtenidos en este estudio tienen implicaciones que pueden ser recomendadas para diferentes áreas. Principalmente, este estudio tiene una gran influencia en términos de políticas nacionales educacionales

A critical assessment of the impact of conformity on collectivist families’ meal social interaction behaviour in Sierra Leone

© 2018 by Sheku Kakay. Published by Allied Academies. Content in the UH Research Archive is made available for personal research, educational, and non-commercial purposes only. Unless otherwise stated, all content is protected by copyright, and in the absence of an open license, permissions for further re-use should be sought from the publisher, the author, or other copyright holder.Background: Conformity is sanctioned at Sierra Leonean families’ mealtimes not only to streamline behaviour, but also to overhaul the character of individuals in order to increase their acceptance in society. These norms are reinforced to promote appropriate ethical standards at mealtimes. Consequently, moral family education at mealtimes is fundamental for knowledge transfer and for instilling appropriate discipline in children. The importance of this is that it plays a critical part in refining the thoughts of individuals within a family at mealtimes, which enables them to understand their roles and positions in the family and their relationship with others within and without the family, especially visitors and extended family members. Thus, building relationship with other members of the family is a mandatory requirement at mealtimes, as it serves to foster continuity and the long-term survival of the family. Tacitly, family cohesion is central to how families relate with each other at mealtimes and acts as a critical determinant of the degree of closeness in a family, which is vital for the families’ public image. Methods: The researcher used one-to-one semi-structured qualitative interviews to investigate families’ views and experiences of their mealtimes’ behaviours. In this research, due to the fact that the selected samples of families were unknown, the researcher used snowballing; convenience; and experiential sampling in recruiting respondents, including males and females from different cultural, ethnic, religious and professional backgrounds, across the different regions of Sierra Leone. The interviews were guided by a topic, and this procedure was followed until no new themes emerged. The interviews were recorded using an audio recorder, which were transcribed verbatim and analysed using a thematic approach. Results: A total of 20 families (comprising 20 husbands and 20 wives) with a sample size of 40 participants were used in this study. The paper highlights the influence of conformity on the behaviour of Christian and Muslim families (husband and wife) at mealtimes and draw attention to its significance as influencer of collectivism, particularly in relation to its impact on the social interaction between similar and dissimilar gender groups. The author critically assessed the extent of the influence of conformity on families’ meal social interaction behaviour and presented a comparative analytical summary of how gender affects the meal behaviours of different gender and religious groups. Conclusion: The aspect of conformity, as emphasised by a majority of the respondents, is used to not only reinforce family norms, beliefs and values, but to imbibe discipline among family members at the dinner tablePeer reviewedFinal Published versio

Cultural Aspects of Immediacy in an Asian Classroom Context

Among the various factors affecting students’ learning, immediacy is probably the one that has been most studied over the last four decades. Immediacy, a term coined by Mehrabian (1967), refers to verbal and nonverbal behaviours used by interlocutors to decrease physical and physiological distance between them, thus creating affinity, liking and affect. However, a number of questions arise as to the suitability of the various immediacy scales and their cultural significance in a non U.S. context, such as Hong Kong. Furthermore we were interested in possible differences in teachers’ perception based on students’ motivation. This paper presents the first part of an immediacy study, based on students of the Department of English of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (looking into mapping patterns of behaviours that increase immediacy). The results indicate that Hong Kong students prefer the holistic approach of the Chinese traditional teacher, a teacher who goes beyond just teaching in class, and that nonverbal actions are not high in their list of preferred behaviours in teachers, such as gestures, walking around the classroom or standing close to students (unlike what has been observed among U.S. students)

ON MONITORING LANGUAGE CHANGE WITH THE SUPPORT OF CORPUS PROCESSING

One of the fundamental characteristics of language is that it can change over time. One method to monitor the change is by observing its corpora: a structured language documentation. Recent development in technology, especially in the field of Natural Language Processing allows robust linguistic processing, which support the description of diverse historical changes of the corpora. The interference of human linguist is inevitable as it determines the gold standard, but computer assistance provides considerable support by incorporating computational approach in exploring the corpora, especially historical corpora. This paper proposes a model for corpus development, where corpus are annotated to support further computational operations such as lexicogrammatical pattern matching, automatic retrieval and extraction. The corpus processing operations are performed by local grammar based corpus processing software on a contemporary Indonesian corpus. This paper concludes that data collection and data processing in a corpus are equally crucial importance to monitor language change, and none can be set aside