Hmmm....

Between the rising pile of work I am facing and the festive joy of Chinese New Year that I wish I could linger in, I think it is time for me to get some not-so-torturous items off my to-do list!

Friday’s class on spoken discourse (with special attention directed to telephone conversations, narratives and listener responses) was particularly interesting to me because I found out that:

1) I lack substantial experience in dealing with phone conversations (i.e. I don’t make/receive phone calls much)
2) I am really bad in narratives (aka lousy storyteller) and
3) I am very proficient in giving out listener responses!

This leads me to wonder if there could be a causal relationship in the abovementioned points I noted about myself. Maybe by being a bad storyteller, it subconsciously reduced my confidence in carrying out phone conversations with others which in turn increased my usage of listener responses in lieu of proper value-adding responses. The reliance on listener responses could have then been perceived by the other parties as being “pre-closing devices” in my phone conversations. Sufficient recurrence of these events might have discouraged people from calling me and thus significantly reducing the exposure I have in dealing with phone conversations!

Of course this is just speculation on my part, there could be many valid reasons as to why I do not receive many phone calls (such as a limited social circle dominated by people who have other communication preferences).

Regardless, before I end off, I would like to address a point made by Dr Deng in class: “The first ‘hello’ in a phone conversation is a response to the phone ringing.” To a large extent, I agree with this point but I would also like to suggest that that particular ‘hello’ also serves as a signal for the other party that the phone connection has been made.

Thank you for listening to my rambles and a happy rest-of-the-recess-week to all!

GTFSKPMARN - The Ten Elements of a Speech Act

I am frustrated! After ruminating on the topic for so many days, I still find myself unable to identify when a speech event has taken place. Breaking it down logically, the components of a speech event are straightforward - you need an activity with rules, norms and a generic structure where the predominant mode of communication is speech. Why then am I unable to discern when a speech event has occurred?

Disregarding that inability, however, what fascinates me the most about speech events is how we are able to pick up on the different yet numerous rules and norms that are involved in a specific context/culture. I personally think that this could be largely attributed to the ability of potential participants to consciously or subconsciously imitate the behaviours of others who were in similar situations. Of course, this depends on whether the speech event can be directly observed. In cases where we cannot, then we rely on experienced individuals or the “experts” to relay the expectations to us (as in the case of interviews). This standpoint is obviously open to debate and I welcome any opposing view!

With that, a happy CNY to all!:)

A dash of compliment perhaps?

Last Friday’s class was on speech acts, a concept that I had honestly never considered in my life and would probably not have if I had not attended the class. The idea of using speech to do things is so ingrained in most of us (or at least in me), that it feels almost counterintuitive when we look at speech acts in such a broken-down, analytical perspective. (For example, during the class, we looked at compliments in terms of what was being complimented to the varying strategies employed in responding to compliments and even to the methods academics use to collect data on the subject of compliments!)

The underlying purpose of such analysis, however, is important. As mentioned by Nicole, our world is getting smaller and unless we are tucked away on an island unknown to the rest of mankind, it is highly likely that we would have to interact with someone of a different background at some point in our lives. Thus, it becomes paramount that we learn to communicate better with people who are different from us. Of course, it is not possible to anticipate each communication move that may go wrong since we are all unique but learning about how people from different cultural backgrounds may take offense to certain things we say or do is a good first step in reducing potential conflicts. With that said, we should always be careful of overgeneralisation as well.

Given that speech acts occur in all forms and in all types of situations and in my opinion, most of them happen without sufficient time for us to react deliberately (that is, they occur instinctively), one of the most critical issues that comes to my mind is: how then are we to effectively incorporate the knowledge that is available in the literature? I do not have an answer to this yet but I hope that future academic studies would be able to shine a light on this much needed area.

Laying the ground rules

To start things off, I have a little BIG disclaimer to make: I am actually not a person to write journals, diaries, blogs, etcetera so if you find it tedious to read my entries, all I can say is: “I’m trying!” (Not penning down my thoughts doesn’t exactly mean that I don’t care or think about what’s happening in life, I just do it in my head. Spontaneously:))

Also, for the benefit of those who happened to stumble onto this page, this blog is dedicated to my after-class thoughts for the module GEK1036: Cross-cultural Communication and Discourse.