Slot: 29D–6 Dec.
29, 3:45 p.m. – 5:45 p.m.
Panel: L2 Competencies and Cross-Cultural
Communication
Chair: Jeffrey D. Holdeman, Indiana University
Title: Cultural Conflicts in American-Russian
Business Communication: An Example from the Civil Aircraft Industry
Author: Elena Denisova-Schmidt, Humboldt
University, Berlin
After
the fall of the Iron Curtain the representatives of the
US-American aerospace
industry were looking for new suppliers and focused on Russian suppliers of
metallic raw materials. In the past, these companies produced just for the
military industrial complex of the former Soviet Union. The companies of both
competitive sides and past enemies have become useful partners.
Their business relationships entail many aspects –
political, judicial, economic, as well as human ones. In this presentation, the
author focuses attention only on the human aspect. This
investigation is based on open narrative interviews with US-American experts, who are working closely with
their Russian colleagues in the civil aircraft industry. These people are
metallurgists. The actions take place only in Russia. Based on these interviews
the author wrote critical incidents and analysed them according to the lacuna
model. All
critical incidents and their analysis were submitted and discussed with the
US-American partners (communicative validation) and with experts in intercultural communication with
emphasis in Russia (argumentative validation).
What are some of the impressions of differences from
US-Americans when they visit their Russian colleagues? How do US-Americans
evaluate such behaviour? What consequences does it have to the business?
References:
Denisova-Schmidt,
E. (forthcoming). Using the Lacuna Model to Detect Cultural
Problems in
American-Russian Business Communication. An Example from the Civil Aircraft
Industry.
Ertelt-Vieth,
A. 2003. How to Analyze
and to Handle Cultural Gaps in German
Everyday Life. In The Perspective of
Exchange Students. Interculture-Online, 4.
http://www.interculture-online.info
Ertelt-Vieth, A. 2005. Interkulturelle
Kommunikation und kultureller Wandel - Eine empirische Studie zum russisch-deutschen
Schüleraustausch.
Tübingen.
Grodzki, E. 2003.
Using
Lacuna Theory to Detect Cultural Differences in American and German Automotive
Advertising. Kulturwissenschaftliche
Werbeforschung, 3. Frankfurt
a. M.
Panasiuk, I. & Schröder, H. (Eds.).
2005. Die Lakunen-Theorie: Ethnopsycho-linguistische Aspekte der Sprach- und
Kulturforschung. Münster:Lit Verlag.
Title: Acquiring L2 Pragmatic Competence: How is
Input Not Enough?
Author: Jane Hacking, University of Utah
Since Schmidt (1993) posited a crucial
relationship between “attention to input” and “learning” (35), it has generally
been accepted that input alone is not sufficient for the successful acquisition
of pragmatic competence in an L2. This study explores the pragmatic
competence of adult learners of Russian who have had significant in country
experience. Working with these students suggests that some aspects of
socio-pragmatic competence are particularly difficult to acquire. In other
words, exposure or unstructured input has not been sufficient for them to
acquire reliable socio-pragmatic competence. The aim of this study was to
fine-tune this general observation. What types of situations were more or less
difficult? Did performance vary according to speech act, status of the
participants or both? Were there any personal attributes of the participants
that correlated with performance?
All participants
completed a background questionnaire (questions on age, sex, etc.), and a
written test in a Discourse Completion Task format. The written test consisted
of 12 scenarios representing three different speech acts (request, refusal apology). Scenarios
manipulated the variables of status and familiarity. Two native speakers of
Russian rated responses on tests using an instrument that had four questions
designed to measure both the pragmatic appropriateness of the responses and
elicit commentary on what aspects of the participants’ performance were more or
less successful.
Overall, the findings are consistent with
the general notion that input alone does not result in reliable levels of
pragmatic competence. More importantly, however, they indicate that certain
aspects of pragmatic competence are more elusive than others. For example,
participants had more difficulty with requests than either apologies or
refusals. The paper will present a detailed review of the quantitative and
qualitative results.
Schmidt, Richard.
(1993). Consciousness, Learning and Interlanguage Pragmatics. In Gabriele
Kasper (Ed.), Interlanguage Pragmatics. Cary, NC, USA: Oxford University Press,
pp. 21-42.
Title: Rethinking the "Communicative"
in Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Competence
Author: Lynne
deBenedette, Brown University
Published FL teaching materials routinely
advertise themselves as “communicative” or including “communicative activities”
(CAs) However, the status of “communicative” as all-purpose buzzword has led to
blurring or erosion of its meaning. It is not difficult to find described as
CAs nearly any exercise wherein it is stipulated that students work in pairs or
groups. Exceptions notwithstanding, instances of this phenomenon abound in FL
beginning and intermediate textbooks. Example: given a three-column list of 1)
people; 2) the verbs eat and
drink; 3) common
foods/dishes, students must tell one another what their loved ones do (not)
consume. As described the task may be completed by someone who does not know
what all listed dishes are--to say nothing of how their appearance, ingredients
or role played in the second culture (C2) may differ from what first culture
(C1) students expect; nor, unless the instructor provides appropriate
follow-up, is it incumbent upon any participant to attend to or demonstrate
comprehension of what is said by others. Furthermore, these exercises, which
tend to exist under the content umbrella “talking about oneself,” rarely extend
to any interculturally oriented considerations, except perhaps on the level of
crudest comparison: We do it this way; they do something else. Content topics
not readily adaptable to the “o sebe” level still most often lead a peripheral
existence in “culture capsules”. Finally, we still have difficulty integrating
CAs with work on language forms (grammar) in ways that enable form-meaning
mappings.
The presentation will
consider traditional (but perhaps not usually fully exploited or realized)
features of Communicative Language Teaching such problem-solving activities and
range of authentic input (text) types. It will assess several typical CAs for
intermediate Russian in terms of the above-listed difficulties and will refer
to accounts of intercultural approaches (Kramsch, Schulz, Chavez, Byram) as
well as Structured Input (VanPatten) in offering differently focused
alternatives to them.
Title: Russian Request Speech Acts and the Art
of Persuasion
Author: Jeanette Owen, Arizona State University
While considerable research in cross-cultural speech act theory has been conducted across a number of languages since the 1980s, most notably the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project, or CCSARP (Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper 1989), studies involving Russian language data had been curiously few and far between with the exception of Mills (1991, 1992, 1993). In recent years, however, interest has been growing, resulting in a handful of Russian-related cross-cultural speech act studies such as those presented by Belyaeva (1996, 2001, 2004), among others, and investigations of the development of pragmatic competence among learners of a second language (Owen 2001, Frank 2002, Shardakova 2004).
The proposed paper will present the results of a cross-cultural comparison of over 100 native and non-native Russian speakers' approach to the request speech act based on data gathered from a discourse completion task survey. The presentation will draw on previous research in cross-cultural speech act theory for the purposes of categorizing various components of the request, specifically the linguistic means employed by the speaker to persuade the hearer to comply with the request. Such measures, generally referred to as supportive moves, may include everything from a promise of a reward to a threat or an effort to invoke guilt. While previous investigations generally outline variation across cultures in the approach to the request based on the age, status, gender, and degree of familiarity of the interlocutors, as well as the degree of imposition of the request, the proposed presentation will further the range of inquiry to include differences based on the transparency of the request context (i.e., the extent to which the request can be surmised based on the location and prescribed roles of the participants). In particular, the researcher will present data demonstrating similarities and differences between NS and NNS regarding the persuasive measures employed in the articulation of the request speech act, as well as similarities and differences within NS and NNS groups that can be attributed to the context of the request speech act.
References
Belyaeva, E. I. 1996. Advice and Soviet: A Cross-Cultural Perspective on Speech Acts. Proceedings of the 22nd Conference of Berkeley Linguistics Society. 16-23
Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., Kasper, G. 1989. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Frank, V.M. 2002. “Ponimaesh′, k tebe kakoe delo:” The Interlanguage Pragmatic Competence of Classroom-based Learners of Russian. Michigan: UMI Dissertation Services.
Mills, M. 1993. On Russian and English
Pragmalinguistic Requestive Strategies. Journal of Slavic Linguistics 1 (1), 92-115.