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!