Monday, February 6, 2012

Little Things Matter in Communication


People do same things or express same in different ways in different cultures. In American culture, privacy is important. Therefore, before you enter someone’s room people ask permission. When people come home they say “I’m home or I’m back” rest of the family does not have to reply or say something. 
In Hong Kong culture, people leave their door open to accept people without permission. When husband the father comes, he needs to say “I’ve come back” then children suppose to say “Daddy!” or other people suppose to stop doing whatever pay attention to him. One who comes becomes the center of the attention. 
Mongolian people announce that you are coming. People need to notice the person is at the present. The person becomes the center of the attention and people. The wife and children offer tea and food to their father or the visitor.
Moreover, Chinese and British people usually keep their door closed due they do not want to allow people to come without permission. On the other hand, American people keep office door open but does not mean that people can come in without permission (Hinkel, 2009). Looking at those cultures we can see the variety kinds of greetings when people arrive. 
Different culture has different “framework of assumptions, ideas, and beliefs that are used to interpret other people’s actions, words and patterns of thinking” (Cortazzi & Jin, 2009, p. 163). Therefore, to send appropriate message to the message receiver we need to know how people communicate in a special way within the society. Therefore, teaching culture in EFL/ESL classroom is important to prepare students to survive in different culture. 
References: 

Hinkel, E. (1996). When in Rome: Evaluation of L2 pragmatics behaviors. Journal of  
Pragmatics, 26, 51-92. 
Hinkel, I. (2009). Culture in second language teaching and learning. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University. (chapter 10 & 11)

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