Reflections

We had our last class for the module today and I find myself wondering how time has passed me by. It seems to me that it was just yesterday that I was seated outside the classroom on the first day of class, waiting for the lecturer to arrive.

After taking this course, I find that I now have a better understanding of the intricacies of communication. Communication is a crucial part of our lives, be it spoken, written or typed, serving many functions including providing knowledge, expressing feelings, socializing, etc. I found it really interesting when we learned about the norms and rules of communication which we use subconsciously, conditioned by our interactions in society.

I really enjoyed reading the lecture on Face and Politeness since I have been using all the maxims and politeness strategies all along, and learning the theories allowed me to understand the human psyche better, particularly my own. It would have been interesting to discuss the topics in class, but it was just too bad that the lecture fell during e-learning week. Another interesting lecture I felt I had missed out on was the lecture on Gender Interactions. The section on how the English language is sexist particular interests me because I have thought it was all along and to have a detailed analysis of the ways it is just enthralls me.

I also enjoyed the other lectures on cultural differences. Living in a globalised world today, I think it is essential that we learn more about how different people from different cultures communicate. This can help to prevent misunderstandings from taking place and faciliate greater tolerance and understanding.

I thought that the use of tutorials in class to practise the concepts taught in class is a good idea. And while I had intially thought that the weekly online entries are a hassle, I find that I have learnt much more because of it. Writing weekly entries meant I had to take the effort to read through the notes, revise the topics taught, before reflecting upon the topics taught. I have also enjoyed reading the thoughts and opinions of my classmates since many have them laboured to share new insights into the topic or post relevant links/pictures/videos.

Finally I have to say working on my individual research paper has been interesting as well, even though it is a laborious process. Reading the different reseach articles have allowed me to learn more about gender differences in speech acts as well as other variables that affect the apology exchanges. When noting down my data for research, it occured to me that I probably would not have realised how the same speech act can vary so greatly depending on the context. Since my research was based on Singaporean apologies, I was really excited when I was able to make my own conclusions based on my own research finding and apply it to the theoretical concepts. This meant that I was able to add value to the research topic rather than just solely proving/disproving the theories.

Hopefully my final report on the topic would be a piece of work I can be really proud of, despite the fact that my conclusions are greatly limited due to my sample size.

The presentations given by my classmates during the last 2 lessons have also allowed me to gain greater insight on the different variables that could affect communication in many ways.

It has been a wonderful semester. I thank you Dr Deng and my fellow classmates for sharing this learning journey with me. :)

Business & Professional Interactions

When the time comes for me to graduate, I have no doubt I would be drafting many letters of application to various companies in order to try to secure a job. After studying Week 10's notes, I have learnt more about the structural moves of the application letter, and I believe the knowledge would be useful to me when I write my letters of application in time to come.

I attempted the tutorial on my own and below is how I answered Activity 2, which required me to identify the moves in the letter of application given.


Dear Sir, [Opening]

I wish to make application for a lectureship in the Department of English at this University. [Offering Candidature]

I have a Ph.D. in English from the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, where I studied under such distinguished scholars as Professors K.R. Sisson and P. Hogg. I also have an M.A. in English from Napoli University. [Promoting the Candidate]

I have taught English at a number of American and Canadian educational institutions, including Purdue and Oklahoma universities. I have also taught at Lohis College in Tehran, Iran, where I had experience teaching English as a second language. Currently I am on the staff of Riyadh University in Saudi Arabia. [Promoting the Candidate]

I have written about ten research articles in the last seven years, all of which have been published in scholarly journals. I have also written two books, one on Shakespeare and the other on the teaching of writing, which are being published by Guelph University and will be out in a few months. [Promoting the Candidate]

My speciality is Shakespeare and Renaissance drama in general, but I am also qualified to teach a wide variety of other courses, including the Novel, Poetry, Composition, writing and teaching of writing and ESL. [Promoting the Candidate]

I hope this letter of ‘application’ will clarify some of the information on the enclosed C.V., which outlines my qualifications, experience and research interests. [Enclosing documents]

I am required to give notice to Riyadh in early April and therefore look forward to hearing form you soon. Since I do not have a telephone, I will be happy to call you should a telephone discussion become appropriate. [Polite Ending]

Sincerely yours

XYZ [Signing off]

The 5 moves used by the letter writer in the tutorial are the main structural moves of writing such letters as Henry & Roseberry(2001) have found them to be present in all of 40 letters they collected. Therefore when writing such letters in the future, I would make sure I at least cover these 5 moves as well.

Cross-Gender Interaction

Since I had to miss last week's lesson because I had an interview, I had to study the lesson's discussion topics by looking through the lecture notes on my own. And it seems like I have missed an interesting lesson!

As an female English user, I have always found the language to be somewhat 'sexist'. When writing reports, I used to construct sentences like, "The employee can do what he/she wishes." But when there is a need for the repeat use of a pronoun, the constant use of terms like 'he or she' and 'he/she' seems redundant. So in the end I find myself just using the pronoun 'he' as a general pronoun.

As the lecture notes have stated, many English words place more prominence on men. Despite the positive changes that have been made, the language is far from favoring both gender equally. An IQ question once told to me by a friend illustrates this point.

Question: An attractive young lady got into a lift with a doctor, a lawyer and a monk. The lift broke down midway and the lights went out. The group was plunged into total darkness. The woman felt someone grope her behind during this time. When the light came back on, she immediately turned to the monk, gave him a slap and accused him of molesting her. How did she know he was the culprit?

Answer: The lawyer and the doctor are both females!

Despite the simple logic behind the question, when my friend posed the question to me and a few other friends, we were unable to guess the reason immediately. I am embarrassed to say that even as an emancipated female in this modern society, my initial assumptions were that the doctor and the lawyer were both males.

Hopefully there will come a day when the use of the English language becomes sexism-free. But I think that this will take a long time to come true...if it becomes true at all!

Computer Mediated Communication

When new accquaintances find out that I do not use the online chat platform, MSN Messenger, they are always surprised. "Why?", they would ask. Afterall, almost everyone our age are using it to communicate and interact with people.

While I agree with them that the availability of such chatting devices has made communication much easier and faster, I still dislike using them because I feel that it is impersonal. I much prefer to meet up with my friends and talk to them face-to-face, so I can see their faces light up as they tell me excitedly about their new crush or observe their sympathtic nod to my complaints of a bad week.

Because I don't chat online, when I do come across acronymns while surfing the Internet, I am always left puzzled and have to google for the exact meaning of the few random letters grouped together. Some of the slang I came across which I found perplexing includes DEGT (Don't Even Go There), TAFN (That's All For Now), IMHO (In My Humble Opinion) and the last which applies to me, PCMCIA (People Can't Master Computer Industry Acronyms). I am truly amazed by people's abilities to shrink their words.

But I guess acronyms and slang are necessary when you want to type fast and chat rapidly. Still, I am never going to understand all of them as I am not regularly exposed to them like my peers are.

Face and Politeness

Since it was e-learning week last Friday, we had to learn about the week's topics on our own. Reading through the lecture materials, I was relieved to discover that the teachings were relatively easier to understand due to the examples given. Since we have all been raised in an environment which also highlights the importance of face-saving along with politeness, I find that I have applied the different maxims listed as well as have had them used on me.

I thought it was interesting that words like "just" and "a bit of" were considered 'minimizers' to reduce the implied cost to the hearer. I actually use these 'minimizers' quite a bit in my conversations with other people, so now I understand that in doing so, I am actually applying the Tact Maxim.

As for doing FTAs on record, I almost never do it baldly. If it is someone I am not really close to, I would make sure to use negative politeness so the person has the option to reject me if he or she wishes since I am imposing. One example would be, "I'm sorry to trouble you, but can you please help me get a drink from the canteen since you're going there now? If it's too much of a hassle, then nevermind."

If I am making a similar request to a close friend or a family member, I will employ postive politeness instead such as, "Please be a dear and help me get a drink! Love you!"

And my requests for people's help in buying a drink for me are always met. I guess I can credit the success then to the politeness strategies that I did not even I was employing until I read the notes. :)

Components & Representation

A large part of successful intercultural communication is in understanding that different national groups have different cultural traits which affect the way they communicate. In this globalised world where there is an unprecedented movement of labour across country borders, it is increasingly important for people to grasp the nuances of intercultural communication in order to perform optimally in business settings. The knowledge will help to prevent misunderstandings and facilitate matters amongst employees in organizations with a diverse multi-national workforce.

Take the example of an female American manager being posted to a new job position overseas in Japan. Having come from a low power distance culture where her subordinates speak freely to her as en equal, she may not be able to comprehend why her new colleagues rarely voice out their opinions if she did not understand it was because Japan has a high power distance culture. Subordinates generally do what their superiors order and seldom ask questions even if they have doubts as a form of respect. High power distance is a feature of Japan as a collectivist society while low power distance is common in the USA which is an individualist country.

The same manager would also experience a shift from a low uncertainty avoidance culture to a high uncertainty one. Therefore it is likely that her team members may be unused to her informal style of leadership and also be resistent to any changes/new ideas she propose.

Having come from a country which strives for gender equality within the workplace, the US female manager may encounter difficulties in Japan which is a highly masculine country. Males are typically accorded higher status then females. If the company that the manager is working in still holds on strong to traditional values, she may find herself having to serve tea to her male colleagues in meetings, even to her subordinates.

Having come from a low context culture, the new manager may also need to adjust to the ways of a high context culture in Japan. She is likely to find it hard to bond with her new colleagues simply due the fact that she is viewed as an outsider. She would also need to understand the concept of "face-saving" that is required in high context cultures like Japan and avoid offending her Japanese counterparts by dealing with any conflict subtly and discreetly.

As shown in the above example, there are many cultural traits to consider when one is operating in a new business environement in order to ensure successful intercultural commnication and achieve a good enviroment for business.

Written Discourse

Chinese Culture（中华文化） was a compulsary course in my secondary school, hence I have had some experience with Chinese literature text. I still remember how I completely failed to grasp some of the analogies back then, sometimes even after my teacher has explained them. The Zhou Dun Yi prose was one which we were taught. The original prose （原文）was a total mystery to me with its ancient sentence structures. Even after we were shown the 译文, I thought he was just simply talking about flowers, until my teacher explained to us what he truly meant.

One of my favourite piece of Chinese writing encountered during the class then was a simple poem by 曹植 (Cao Zhi) who composed the poem under duress in 7 steps when his brother threatened to kill him if he failed to do so, hence it's known as 《七步诗》(Seven Steps Poem).

煮豆燃豆萁，
豆在釜中泣。
本是同根生，
相煎何太急。

To translate the poem, it simply means :
When cooking beans, one would burn the beanstalks. The beans are wailing in the pot. Since they grow from the same roots, why is it that they are so eager to kill each other?

I love this poem because of the simple analogy it used to convey the deeper message that as brothers, they should not be out to kill each other. And it worked brilliantly, because his ruthless brother actually spared his life, moved upon hearing the poem.

If I'm not mistaken, this piece of writing follows the qi-cheng-zhuan-he structure talked about during the lesson.

曹植 was indeed a brilliant man of his time.

Spoken Discourse

Last week in class, one aspect of spoken discourse we discussed was phone closings. As it is considered rude to hang up the phone abruptly, telephone users often use pre-closing devices to lead the converastion to terminal exchanges.

Upon reflection, I realise that I often use warrants and summing up the reason for the call to signal that I was ready to hang up. However, it is a different case when my friends sometimes call for the purpose of random chitchat. Such calls often last more than an hour and when the use of warrants fail to steer the conversation to an end, I find that it usually takes an overt announcement on my part before I feel it's alright for me to hang up. They range from "It's getting late. I'm feeling sleepy." to "My mum is nagging at me to stop hogging the phone." Often after I've made my excuses, the conversation would come to an end.

However, there were a couple of times when I was involved in phone conversations in which the other party did not seem to get my hints that I was ready to close our phone conversation. It is frustrating when this happens. But I have since devised a method to end such "never-ending" phone conversations.

First, I will use another phone to call the number I'm currently using to chat.

Me: Sorry, I got another call coming in. Please hold.

(clicks to the other line and count for 10 seconds before switching back to first caller)

Me: Hey. Someone's calling for my mother/sister/etc. on the other line. I'll talk to you another time alright? Sorry. Bye.

It's kind of sneaky but it works. And at the very least I didn't put the person on hold indefinitely, which actually happened to me once. -_- (My friend swore she forgot I was on the other line.)

Speech Events

In last week's lesson, the example of a Japanese Marriage Proposal was given to highlight how people have different norms of intepretation for the same speech event.

To indicate her consent to the marriage, the woman has to hang her head, lower her gaze and remain silent. Personally as a girl, if I behave in the same exact manner, it would be because I am furiously trying to think of a way to reject the guy! By avoiding eye contact and keeping deadly quiet, I hope the guy proposing would understand I'm trying to reject him and so I would not have to utter the cruel word - No.

I really cannot help but wonder though. If this is how a Japanese woman accept a marriage proposal, then what is her course of action if she wishes to turn down her suitor? Look right into his eyes and make non-committal noises like "え...え...え..."?

When it came to time for the group activity, my group actually selected my interview experience to analyse using the analytic system given to us. The activity made me reflect on how I behaved during the interview, that I was trying my best to adhere to the rules of such an interaction, so I could ace the interview. Having analysed the situation so throughly, I left the class worrying whether I said/did the right things during my interview. Not a good feeling. Ha.

Speech Acts

During last Friday's lesson on speech acts, I learnt that there are differences between American speakers and Chinese speakers in the way they responded to compliments which was attributed to differences in social values.

What I found interesting was when the class had to classify own responses for the activity worksheet according to Chen Rong's categorisation systems, we actually had a high proportion of Accepting rather than Rejecting. While we joked that this meant we're not that humble, I think it proves that our generation is more influenced by western culture and thus some of us adopt the linguisitic politeness strategies used by Americans when communicating with others. This is not surprising considering the fact that we are highly exposed to American movies, music, TV shows.

Perhaps because we Singaporeans live in a multi-cultural society and each of us know at least two languages, I think most of us do okay at intercultural communication. In fact during the lesson, it was taught that intercultural miscommunication is a result of the lack of knowledge of cultural diversity. Hence, it is my opinion that since we are all living in a globalised world today, it is essential that we all make the effort to familarise ourselves with as many cultures as we can in order to better communicate and interact with people from different backgrounds and cultures.