nghiên cứu giao văn hoá về việc sử dụng “sandwich feedback” của giáo viên người mỹ và người việt trong việc đưa ra lời phê bình và tác động của nó đối với sự tiếp thu của sinh viên

LẠI HOÀI CHÂU A CROSS – CULTURAL STUDY OF USING THE SANDWICH FEEDBACK BY VIETNAMESE AND AMERICAN TEACHERS AND ITS EFFECTS ON STUDENT’S UPTAKE NGHIÊN CỨU GIAO VĂN HOÁ VỀ VIỆC SỬ DỤNG CH

LẠI HOÀI CHÂU

A CROSS – CULTURAL STUDY OF USING THE SANDWICH FEEDBACK BY VIETNAMESE AND AMERICAN TEACHERS

AND ITS EFFECTS ON STUDENT’S UPTAKE

(NGHIÊN CỨU GIAO VĂN HOÁ VỀ VIỆC SỬ DỤNG CHIẾN LƯỢC

“SANDWICH FEEDBACK” ĐỂ PHÊ BÌNH CỦA CÁC GIÁO VIÊN NGƯỜI VIỆT VÀ NGƯỜI MỸ

VÀ TÁC ĐỘNG CỦA NÓ ĐỐI VỚI SỰ TIẾP THU CỦA SINH VIÊN)

M.A Minor Thesis

Field: English Linguistics Code: 60.22.15

Hanoi - 2012

LẠI HOÀI CHÂU

A CROSS – CULTURAL STUDY OF USING THE SANDWICH FEEDBACK BY VIETNAMESE AND AMERICAN TEACHERS

AND ITS EFFECTS ON STUDENT’S UPTAKE

(NGHIÊN CỨU GIAO VĂN HOÁ VỀ VIỆC SỬ DỤNG CHIẾN LƯỢC

“SANDWICH FEEDBACK” ĐỂ PHÊ BÌNH CỦA CÁC GIÁO VIÊN NGƯỜI VIỆT VÀ NGƯỜI MỸ

VÀ TÁC ĐỘNG CỦA NÓ ĐỐI VỚI SỰ TIẾP THU CỦA SINH VIÊN)

M.A Minor Thesis

Field: English Linguistics Code: 60.22.15

Supervisor: Dr Ngô Hữu Hoàng

Hanoi - 2012

2.4.4 Relation of sandwich feedback and politeness 20

CHAPTER 3: DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS 24

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale

In the world where globalization has connected everyone closer, it is so common when people mention every aspects of it day after day The expression of globalization has shown everywhere from the food to clothes, from house decoration to the choice of car, especially in the way people communicate The need of exchange information becomes greater, leading to the born and development of cross-cultural communication In this type of communicating, besides the content of information, culture understanding played a crucial role for the message to be understood fully and politely

Without awareness of culture, communication can negatively impact to the relationship and on the contrary, the relationship between interlocutors will be motivated with a deep understanding of culture For example, in America, after the presentation, people are often got good comments like: “You did an excellent presentation” In fact, it is just

a polite signal in their culture and possibly the performance is not as good as that praise, the presenter will recognize the necessity of improving their behaviors then It would not be a big problem if those styles of comment were not applied in Vietnam where people trust all the words in the feedback they get and think of their performance

as vivid as those words‟ description After all, the problem of cross cultural communication, sooner or later, will be shown out The above example can be found anywhere in international companies and schools in Vietnam, inspiring the author to have a careful scan of this matter – giving feedback Though it is not new, there is type that has not been widely known: sandwich feedback This topic caught the author‟s great attention, leading to the decision of researching about it

So far, no one could deny the role that English has empowered in aspects of life and became the international language, being learnt and taught widely in all countries However, in process of teaching this language to students, teachers from different countries have their own way of monitoring classroom in each part of a lesson In my opinion, among parts of teaching, presenting, eliciting, the skill of giving feedback is one of the most noticeable matters This act follows other activities as a review part for both teacher and students to have a reflection on what they have done before It not only greatly benefits students in correcting or editing their products but also be a challenge for teachers The instructors may find it a difficult part for the fact that giving comment on others‟ work is inherently a sensitive case, requiring them to think and talk carefully in accordance with culture Hence, it is a good reason for the choice

of this act to be the focus of research

In Vietnam, the teaching and studying of English have a long time been imposed to the curriculum, but it is clear that cultural factors were not paid enough attention It is required from the fact that teachers must have an orientation for their teaching strategies, basing on solid knowledge of cross culture and politeness strategies, bringing good effects to their teaching In position of a teacher, the author of these papers (researcher) has a motivation to carry out the research to raise her own understanding of giving sandwich feedback, benefiting her in the way of giving assessment for students Moreover, not only is this politeness limited to the use in classroom but also it can be applied in daily life among wise communicators which helps them a lot in work and other fields

1.2 Previous studies

There are hundreds of papers writing about cross cultural communication and politeness strategies like: “Politeness strategies in Oprah Winfrey show” by Jantima (2009), or “The use of politeness strategies as a factor in peer-editing in foreign

language classroom” by Amores, etc In Vietnam, there are previous researches about Vietnamese-American cross culture but none of them has mentioned about the use of sandwich feedback Communication strategies are also gets the concerns of many learners (study of boasting by Nhung, 2010, about economicality and redundancy in requesting by My, 2010, about expressing sympathy by Hien, 2010, about disparaging

by Van, 2010) Giving comment strategies are paid notice as well by Huong (2011) with dissertation about corrective feedback, by Hang (2010) with application of feedback in writing, etc However, “sandwich feedback” (see definition in 2.2) is still a new term in Vietnam Hence, these papers not only revise the way that teachers in Vietnam use feedback but also introduce a new type of feedback

In short, under the push of finding something new, interesting and useful, the topic of sandwich feedback in cross cultural communication had been chosen to be the main discussion of these papers According to this study, teachers could have a deeper look

at their teaching manners, see clearly the advantages and drawbacks of the new method

of comment and consider applying it in their teaching

The second aim of these papers is to find out the similarities and differences in the use

of sandwich feedback among Vietnamese and American teachers Giving comments is

an art that can affect hearers‟ attitudes and feelings Due to the distinction in background culture, teachers in different countries give their students feedback in various ways Thus, the dissertation heads to search out a worthy comparison between the two cultures Hopefully some useful pedagogical implications could be implied from those findings, contributing to the teaching procedure of the author in particular and of other teachers in general

Those main aims orient the papers to set up some detailed goals For the first target to build up a trustful background, the definitions and relating aspects would be retrieved from rare materials of previous studies and sources on the Internet The searching would provide the author and readers a theory part on which other following parts of collecting data could be based on The searching will focus mostly on the metaphor images of sandwich, comparing it with a politeness strategy of giving comments to students Besides, the types, methods and field of application would also be paid attention

On the other hand, to narrow the view on Vietnam circumstances, the author would carry out a survey and observations to calculate the data and make the necessary implications In this main part, the frequency, the method that teachers used would be focused most It is great if the author could find out some common structures and sentences that teachers often use In addition, the questions in the survey would be around the attitude of students towards feedbacks and sandwich feedbacks Their uptakes should be let evaluated from their general results and their self-evaluation

1.4 Research questions

- In what way that criticisms are often given to students by Vietnamese and American teachers?

- How often do the teachers use the sandwich feedback in their assessment to students‟ work?

- What may be the effects of sandwich feedbacks on students‟ uptake?

- What are the suggestions for teachers in teaching English for Vietnamese students?

1.5 Significance of study

In the trend of studying about cross culture and its expression in daily life, this linguistic dissertation adds an unfilled part about strategy of giving smart feedback to learners As mentions above, in Vietnam, those there are researches of politeness strategy have been touched several years ago but the volume wrote about feedback is still limited and there is no study about sandwich feedback before

Another expected contribution of these papers is the withdrawal of similarities and differences in the use of sandwich feedback between American and Vietnamese teachers, providing more useful knowledge for teachers The result of these papers could help not only the author in reacting to students but also other teachers in finding

a wise way to communicate with students in classrooms

1.6 Scope of the study

The research is going to be carried out in 4 months, from April, 2012 to September

2012 For the limitation of time and trustful reference documents, the author has to constringe the scope of a cross cultural research in all aspects In this dissertation, the differences between American and Vietnamese cultures are taken into consideration through the comparison of English using It is necessary to emphasize that English in these papers is only considered the tool to express the thoughts and conventional habits

of people in different countries with different cultural backgrounds To be more

detailed, the focus of the study is about the way teachers giving sandwich feedbacks to students, not disparaging, ill speaking or other acts of communication

During the time of researching, the author found out that there are many types of feedback presented by the scholars: differentiated, early warning, peer grading, etc However, for her own interest, only “sandwich feedback” is chosen to be the main concern of these papers It is both new and inspiring to define, category and find out the fact about this strategy of communication

During the time of carrying out the thesis, Vietnamese and English documents of famous authors writing about the concerned matters would be involved as a background sources for the author to base on Referring to the objectives above, the author intended to observe the teaching procedure of Vietnamese teachers in some university and colleges in Hanoi and American teachers in ACET center with their students The age and gender are not the counted factors in this research

1.7 Organization of the study

Following the usual format, the study is divided into four main chapters: Introduction, Theoretical background, Data analysis and Conclusion respectively

The first chapter: Introduction It mentions the basic information about the research: reasons to choose topic, the significance, objectives and scope of the study

The second chapter: Theoretical background It covers the review of literary products for the definitions of basic concepts of the research: feedback, criticism, sandwich feedback, politeness strategy, Vietnamese-American cross cultural researches

The third chapter: Data collection and analysis There is room for methodology, data collection instruments, procedures of collecting data The discussion of data collected could be found in last sub part of this chapter

The last chapter: Pedagogical implications and conclusion It covers some pedagogical implications for teachers to use the act politely and effectively, the recognition of limitations of the research and the suggestions for further studies

In brief, this first chapter presents the readers with an overview of the research: the reasons for carrying out, the goals, limitation, organization and meaning of the study The readers would find reasonable ideas and good orientation for the following part of data collection and data analysis

CHAPTER 2 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 2.1 Definition of feedback

As defined on the website of British Council, feedback is information that teachers or other learners, give to learners on how well they are doing, helping the learner improve specific points, or supporting to plan their learning (Internet [1]) The pre-requisite to give feedback is to have something to assess which is achieved by giving the participants exercises to work on, or feedback is in response to explicit questions (Eckstein, 2004) In either case, students can see their learning progress Feedback can

be immediate, during an activity, or delayed, at the end of an activity or part of a learning program and can take various forms (Internet [1]) A group of authors summary that feedback to students can come in many forms, not just in writing, and may include oral comments, the use of audio and self- and peer-review processes(DCQE, 2010) It may include comments made online or during face - to- face contact time with individuals or groups of students

For a long time in teaching history, feedback has been known as a useful connection between teachers and students to get wrong things corrected In these papers, the author assumes that feedback is an act of giving comment to students‟ work, provides students the orientation to their study, corrects the mistakes and helps the teachers withdraw the necessary changes For its importance, teachers, especially the novice ones, invest a lot

of time and consideration to turn it into an effective communication act Providing students with constructive feedback is recognized as being critical to their development

as learners and can also enhance their self-esteem and motivation (DCQE, 2010) However, it is not always easy for a person to give out their opinion which aims at correcting the others‟ mistakes It is such a sensitive skill that the comments are always

on the verge of being ignored or worse, turning out to be counteraction The feedback should be differentiated and objective (Eckstein, 2004) There is obvious effect of these comments to students‟ attitude and study‟s results Consequently, feedback is best when it motivates students to overcome difficulties and vice versa, is worst when it makes the student feel bad about him or herself (Eckstein, 2004) In short, a communication strategy is necessary for teachers to consider, getting closer to their learners and bringing them positive changes

Feedback, under the view of communication, is a strategy that has been divided into many patterns Feedback itself is a pattern which turns out to be the large abstract root for all the following ones, setting the context for the different categories: kind of feedback, source of feedback, public feedback, grades as feedback and ways of receiving feedback from students To be more detailed, feedback has been divided into many types: sandwich feedback, differentiated feedback, etc., among which, the first one could be considered new and useful for all teachers with all kinds of tasks (Eckstein, 2004) Sandwich feedback was invented, probably, as a clever method for all teachers in particular and for all people in general

2.2 Definition of criticism

The word “criticism” may not a new term to people who have right to give feedback to others, especially the bosses or teachers In Lamtiri‟s thesis (2010), he limited the criticism with the definition of “a reasoned consideration of literary works and issues” which benefits his writing on literacy criticism However, this way of defining should

be opened more with different forms, turning to be a more general one as criticism is

an evaluative or corrective exercise can occur in any area of human life (Internet [3])

It is a judgment of a performance (Seamon, 2001) and the person who makes that criticism is called “critic”, expressing his/her sharpened and suitable opinions on any

matter especially involving a judgment of something‟s value, truth, righteousness, beauty or technique

As it is may be seen, criticism is interfering in something that has faults, defects or drawbacks and trying to bring out the correct and faultless form of it (Farahyasir, 2010) People often think of it as something unpleasant, but it need not be In classroom, the criticism happens frequently because the students‟ presentation is a typical type of work that needs criticizing to make improvement under the help of teachers or instructors Doubtlessly, there are styles, types and levels of criticism that have different effects It is a consensus among people and discussions that there are two types of criticisms: a constructive and a destructive one In a humorous report of TEMCAT (2009) after a conference, the author even assumed that with the same criticism, the people who criticize would found it constructive and those who receive the comment would see it destructive To some extent, that remark sounds psychologically logical In fact, destructive criticism, which aims at characteristics of personality, opposes a person in the presence of others, seriously threatens the face of the hearer, is a bad attack rather than criticism It turns to be an aggressive act and probably starts the continuously increasing process of a negative conflict (Farahyasir, 2010) Students who receive such kinds of comments from a bad-tempered teachers or jealous peers may be demotivated in their next presentation On the other hand, constructive criticism has a goal of improving some areas of life or work Often does the constructive criticism refer specifically to the critique of a written work, in perhaps

a teacher/student setting, which would allow that person to have further improvement

on the work or to improve their approach to future endeavors (Internet [6])

Communication is loaded with multiple intentions, thus people may not know how to actually employ a critique without evoking bad impression in the hearer‟ mind, making

a critique negative It is recommended that the criticisms can guide, support, give

moral support and inspiration by involving both positive and constructive statements With a purpose of easing the intense when criticizing students, many teachers cleverly insert that criticism in the middle of two praise or positive comments on strong points

of students This balanced strategy actually will effect tenderly on the one who get the feedback, creating a pleasant environment in class Teachers and those who concern are now quite excited to apply this new strategy of criticism which is later called Sandwich Feedback communication

2.3 Definition of sandwich feedback communication (SFC)

“Sandwich feedback” (SF), as its

name may hint, is a metaphor

implying the ways of giving

comments to students A sandwich

is a food item, typically consisting

of two or more slices of bread with

one or more fillings between them

(Internet [6])

(image retrieved from Internet)

The meat at the middle is the core of the cake, but hardly do people want to eat it separately and the breads are must-components, making a perfect meal The comparison with sandwich may give us a more clear and vivid imagination of a communication strategy

There are many kinds of sandwich, equal to which are several ways of giving comments According to the article “Feedback” in the proceedings of Department for curriculum and quality enhancement (2012), giving effective feedback, orally or in writing, may conform to the following structure:

• Start with a positive comment (or more) („the bread‟)

• Identify areas in which student could improve and explain how they might do this by making clear and specific suggestions („the meat‟)

• End with a positive comment (or more) that encourages and motivates the student and points the way towards future success („the bread‟)

To be more detailed, SFC is often called a three-step process for sharing criticism in a supportive way The first step happens when the speaker (teacher) appreciates the person, shares a statement of recognition for some quality, ability The reasons for this act is when the person‟s value is secure, he or she is less likely to be defensive The recognition must be sincere, or it will not have value The second step is describing the behavior that needs changing, stating how it is not supportive to the teacher and to the purpose of the tasks, challenging the behavior A key factor of this step is that the

teacher should not pass judgment on the person The last step is a praise again or the

questions from teachers that what they can do to give ongoing support to help this change The identification of specific behavior, word, or phrase teacher can use will be supportive Those steps are withdrawn from the image of a “traditional sandwich” This method helps to ensure that feedback is balanced and that the student is more likely to „hear‟ key messages and suggestions for improvement

Besides, there is a different “sandwich” like this: the teacher reinforces the correct points, following by stating out the points/behaviors/parts that need to be improved and finally makes a suggestion of how to improve or negotiating with the students (Jessica

T Servey) With “open face sandwich”, the road of giving feedback is shorter with just two steps of showing corrective comments on specific action and then the advices for a better performance

Some people may argue that this road is complicated and there is no need to praise the students after (and even before) the criticism However, the advocates of using

“sandwich feedback” have pointed out that the method contributes great role in a good

and fluent communication Teachers need to state out where the students' understanding is faulty and correct any misunderstanding they have, but do not want to

undermine their confidence The commenters want them to feel good about what they have done and to feel that they can do better If the feedback is negative with students they may tune the teachers out and not listen or give up all together If they are especially sensitive they may be hurt and take the criticism personally, and worse, especially arrogant student may take the comments as an attack and attack back

Therefore, when giving feedback, teachers should start and end with positive feedback, sandwiching suggestions for improvement between these reinforcing comments Even

if there are largely negative things to say, the comments can still start with the things that were well done and should be retained in the future

Even in the less positive aspects of the feedback, the instructor can take a tone that they are giving suggestions for improvement, not just condemning (Eckstein, 2004) Some suggestions like “This might be made better if you think about …,” rather than “This is bad” could be considered Another way is the teachers say they themselves don‟t understand something, or something in a presentation doesn‟t “work” for the purpose

of the task Usually in the class do the teachers ask for the opinion of other students before giving out theirs In this case, it is necessary to be sure that they know about this technique and practice it This can make the giving of feedback easier for both the giver and the receiver

2.4 Pragmatics and significance of SFC in communication

2.4.1 What is pragmatics?

Unlike in the past when language was researched separately, modern linguists views language as a social product and put it into context to analyze the layers of meaning, tracking to the born of pragmatics Austin, Abrahams, Wierzbicka, to list some names, are those who in favor of the idea that utterances could not be understood fully without the context “Pragmatics is the study of the relations between language and context that are the basic to an account of language understanding…” (Levinson, 1983:0, 21)

Another way of defining pragmatics is that it is the study of how more get

communicated than said (Yule, 1996: 3) For George Yule (1996:3), pragmatics belongs to the part of linguistics that tries to probe into those meanings over-loaded or beyond what is literally conveyed in concrete speech events and situations In a nutshell, pragmatics is the study of intended meaning, i.e meaning which is communicated but not explicitly said Speakers (writers) intend to mean more, and listeners (readers) infer more than the meaning the actual words would suggest (the invisible meaning of an utterance/sentence) How much is said or not said is tied to the notion of distance or closeness whether physical, social or conceptual, between the speaker (writer) and listener (reader) In other words, it is tied to their shared experience when carrying out speech acts

The notion of speech acts was born with those reasons, emphasizing the distinction between using of language to get thing done with other physical acts or mental acts Leech (1983:99) examined and introduced the concept of locutionary act (performing

an act of saying something), illocutionary act (performing an act in saying something), perlocutionary act (performing an act by saying something) It was Austin who first divided speech acts into direct and indirect ones in “How to do things with words” And there is a certain fact that people are well aware of the fact that some, mostly negative, information cannot or should not be expressed explicitly or directly and that indirect strategies should be applied

Indirectness nowadays plays a vital role in our communication (Justová V., 2006) To get thing done by words wisely, people should understand clearly the circumstance, the interlocutors and the rules under the utterances, especially when they are indirect speeches Indirectness is a widely applied conversational strategy, people tend to use indirect speech acts mainly in connection with politeness (Leech, 1983: 108) since they want to diminish the unpleasant message contained in requests and orders

Besides, the work of H.P Grice takes pragmatics farther than the study of speech acts His aim was to understand how "speaker's meaning" - what someone uses an utterance

to mean - arises from "sentence meaning" - the literal meaning of an utterance According to him, many aspects of "speaker's meaning" result from the assumption that the participants in a conversation expect each other to be cooperated which later he called Cooperative Principle It has four sub-parts or maxims that cooperative conversationalists assume each other to be respecting:

- maxim of quality: Speakers' contributions ought to be true

- maxim of quantity: Speakers' contributions should be as informative as required; not saying either too little or too much

- maxim of relevance: Contributions should relate to the purposes of the exchange

- maxim of manner: Contributions should be perspicuous - in particular, they should be orderly and brief, avoiding obscurity and ambiguity

The main work of the Cooperative Principle is done when particular non-literal meanings are conveyed by speakers violating in an obvious way, or "flouting" these maxims For example, with the utterance “can you pass me the salt” where the maxim

of relevance is broken, the hearer should imply it as an indirect request rather than a question The purpose of not observing the maxims was that in the specific conditions, with different hearers, if speaker does not want to be rude, he may vary smart strategies

to get things done just with words uttered These strategies changed greatly according

to culture, but they stick to a concept named “politeness strategies”

2.4.2 What is Politeness?

Politeness and the notion of Face

Politeness is a key factor in maintaining the communication and avoiding breaking down The theory of politeness was developed from early 1970 which marked the names of Lakoff, Brown and Levinson, Leech According to Lakoff, politeness is “… what we think is appropriate behaviour in particular situations in an attempt to achieve and maintain successful social relationships with others“ (Lakoff 1972: 910) Besides, politeness is the ability to please others through one's external actions (Watts (2003:39) There is a common point between these famous theories: all of them conceive of politeness as strategic conflict avoidance To simply put it, Yule (1996) considered politeness as “the means employed to show awareness of other person‟s face.“

„Face“ is the public sefl image of a person as Yule G defined and is the “emotional and social sense of that everyone has and expects everyone else to recognize“ In communication, according to Brown and Levinson, words can carry out action It can save the face of the interlocutors or damage it, which means people can protect or threat others„ face These acts are called Face Saving acts and Face Threatening Acts (FTAs) In short, Politeness is the expression of speaker‟s intention to mitigate the Face threats (Brown P & Levinson, S C., 1978) This acts are done by a series of politeness strategies

2.4.3 Politeness strategies (PSs)

As some previous researches had pointed out, Brown and Levinson outlined four main types of PSs: bald on record, negative politeness, positive politeness and off-record or indirect strategy

The bald on-record strategy does nothing to minimize threats to the hearer's “face” (I want to open the door, ie) The positive politeness strategy notices the speaker that the

hearer has a face to be respected and it also confirms that the relationship is friendly and expresses group reciprocity (For example: Is it ok for me to open the door?) The

negative politeness strategy recognizes the hearer's face but it admits that the speaker is

in some way imposing on the listeners like in the sentence: “I don't want to interrupt

you but, would it be possible for me to open the door?” Off-record indirect strategy

takes some pressure off when the speaker wants to avoid responsibility for doing so

In brief, positive politeness means being complimentary and gracious to the addressee (but if this is overdone, the speaker may alienate the other party) and negative

politeness is found in the various ways of mitigating an imposition (Leech) In the

limitation of this research, the author just wanted to focus on these two strategies as

they are used most often in daily life In Brown and Levinson‟s (1978), there are 15 positive strategies and 25 negative ones being listed The following examples are taken

to present each strategy:

Positive strategies:

- St 1: Noticing, attending to Hearer (H)

You must be in hurry Why don’t you turn to next page for a sooner finish?

- St 2: Exaggeration

I immediately impress with your beautiful slides

- St 3: Intensifying interest to H

You have already finished the exercises, don’t you?

- St 4: Using in-group identity makers

My dear students, how about writing a short paragraph together? I think our group work could be much better

- St 5: Seeking agreement

Sure, the weather is very terrible today So why don’t we stop a long presentation to change into writing part

- St.6: Avoiding disagreement

Well, I think your impromptu speaking is good to some extent

- St.7: Presupposition/ raise/ assert common ground

As you may know, this part requires a great attention to be fully grasped

- St 8: Joking

You put a stress on me when I have to give the mark for such an excellent presentation

- St 9: Asserting or presuppose S‟s knowledge of and concern for H‟s wants

I am afraid that it may make you unpleasant listening following comments

- St 10: Offering and promising

You should not take the mistakes so serious, I’m sure you can improve it easily

- St 11: Being optimistic

I guess that you don’t mind if I give some comments on your presentation

- St 12: Including both S and H in the activity

Shall we start right now?

- St 13: Giving (or ask) reasons

Why don’t you change this part into a comic? I think it would be interesting

- St 14: Assuming or asserting reciprocity

I will agree to let you change this part if you find out the mistakes in the previous part

- St 15: Giving gifts to H (goods, sympathy, understanding, cooperation)

Please don’t mind to have a piece of cake You are welcome and could you please tell me more specific about the topic you want to present today?

Negative strategies:

- St 1: Being conventionally indirect

If you have any disagreement on my comments for your presentation?

- St.2: Questioning, hedge

More or less, you have to fulfill that assignment before I come back

- St.3: Being pessimistic

I don’t suppose you can help me to move this table

- St 4: Minimizing the imposition

The only thing I do is to change a little in the content of your writing

The listening results could be better with the attention on the very beginning

- St 8: Stating the FTA as a general rule

The over-lengthy of impromptu talk is restricted

- St.9: Nominalization

It is my honesty to give you the awards for your distinctive result

- St 10: Going on record and incurring a debt, or as not indebting H

I would be grateful if you could help me to clarify this problem

Social factors affecting politeness

Three most important factors that affect the use of politeness strategies are: Relative power (P), Social distance (D), Ranking of imposition (R) Relative power refers to the power between the interlocutors There are three types of power: equal power (between friends/colleagues i.e), more power (the boss to the employees) and less power (the students to the teacher) Social distance is relationship between interlocutors, the closer people are, the lower degree of social distance is Ranking of imposition concerns with the difficulty of the situation: the more difficult the situation is, the higher ranking of imposition is put

These three factors have a close relationship: When the distance increases, the power increases and the ranking of imposition decreases and vice versa The conventional division of relative power, social distance and ranking of imposition are culture-based and many researchers agree that there are great distinctions in these concepts between Asian and Western cultures

2.4.4 Relation of sandwich feedback and politeness

Communication is a special, meaningful process which takes count most in information-achieving procedure of human It is a circle and continuous process where interlocutors exchange their ideas to create a fluent flow Feedback sustains and completes that process; it is the end-result of an idea and makes communication continuous The originator first gets the idea to be passed across and then thinks of how

to get it done via appropriate channels or medium After the coding and dissemination, one expects the decoder to give response In the case of this research, the responses here are the feedbacks from the teachers to students after they finish the tasks or performance It could happen in written forms of a writing essay or the notification of the learner‟s attitude After the comments, the learners could reflect themselves and perform better As a result, feedback appears to be a must, not only for the continuity

of class room activity but also for improvement of students Besides, the responses from teachers let students know whether their performance and behavior makes sense

or not Saying in another way, it is a basis for measuring the effectiveness of communication Those reasons emphasize the importance of using feedback smartly, praising the students and creating the relaxing environment in class

Those are indispensable roles of SFC in teaching and learning procedure All of reader will agree that giving criticism is an act of threatening the face Normally, people would feel shy when their weaknesses are shown out before many people (in this case: the class room circumstance) Encouraging the learners saves their face when being

criticized With the knowledge of politeness strategies and indirectness, teacher could break the maxims and lead the comments to the direction they want, benefiting their learners

Getting closer to some typical SFC, with the formed presented in previous part, the author assumed that SFC is a clever combination between face saving act (with the use

of hedging, praising) and the criticisms The negative politeness strategies are used appropriately to show that the teacher did not want to interfere student‟s personal privacy According to author‟s own observation, English speaking countries tend to use negative strategies for the wide gap between people while in Oriental cultures, the intimacy between interlocutors inspires them to use positive strategies to get closer to each other

2.5 Vietnamese and American cross-cultural SFC

It is the modesty and humility as well as harmonious relations with others that is appreciated among Vietnamese people (Internet [7]) Seeking to avoid conflict in relationships, they often prefer to speak about sensitive subjects indirectly The desire

to achieve harmony between the self and the non-self remains an essential preoccupation of the Vietnamese in interpersonal relations outside the family group The connections between members of wide social groups are expanded by the basic principles underlying family relationships (Te, 2012) For example, Vietnamese uses more than a score of kinship terms as personal pronouns, the choice of the appropriate word depends on the relative age, social status, gender, degree of acquaintance, respect, and affection between speakers and hearers who are not related to each other by blood

or marriage

Vietnamese culture seriously concerns with status (obtained with age and education) This is particularly evident in the attitude towards older people Respect and consideration for old age no doubt derive from the obligation of filial piety that

requires young people to respect and love their parents and parent-like members of the family Teachers, even though they are young, enjoy great respect and prestige in Vietnamese society Here does the student-teacher relationship retain much of the quality of a son's respect for his father's wisdom and of father's concern for his son's welfare The respect that students show to the teachers is also evident in linguistic behavior For example, the terms of address that students use in speaking to their teachers are the same as those they use in speaking to their parents

Displays of respect

“The respect is the corner-stone of interpersonal relationships in Vietnamese society” is the quote in many materials writing about Vietnamese culture (Internet [8]) Normally, respect is conveyed by the use of special terms of address and certain stylistic devices Yet, it is also expressed by nonverbal behavior On the contrary, in America, people put emphasis on friendliness in interpersonal relationships For example, a Vietnamese student who sits quietly and listens attentively to the teacher wants to express respect to his teacher This behavior has often been misinterpreted by the American teacher as passivity and non-responsiveness

It is also out of respect that Vietnamese students avoid eye contact with teachers when speaking By American standards, a person acting in this way would appear suspicious, unreliable, or mischievous (Internet [7]) In Vietnamese culture, however, looking into somebody's eyes usually means a challenge or an expression of deep passion Moreover, teachers never say thanks to their students for a small service, such as closing the window or passing the books around The person who gives a compliment never expects a "thank you" in return In Vietnamese culture, a verbal expression of thanks in this case refers to a lack of modesty from the person who receives the compliment If a verbal response is necessary, he or she would deny the compliment by saying that he or she does not deserve it

According to Te (2010) in “Social relationship”, respect is expressed in the form of courtesy and in the effort to spare others from the humiliation of losing face Face is extremely important for the Vietnamese The individual who loses face will have to endure public ridicule and derision in the midst of his community

Using linguistic devices is one of many ways that allows the Vietnamese speaker to save face and at the same time allows others to save face Depreciatory terms are applied to oneself and complimentary terms are used for others For example, the tendency of the Vietnamese student to say “yes” to questions asked by his teacher stem from this preoccupation with saving face Vietnamese sometimes appear to answer

"yes" (dạ) to all questions and the way of saying is quite polite "Yes, I am listening,"

"Yes, I am confused," or "Yes, I do not want to offend." American people use only

“yes” to express agreement and this word is neutral as to respect or disrespect As a result, Vietnamese people often hedge in their utterances, lengthen the utterance to lead

to the main points, avoiding the directness which they consider rudeness In the book

of basics of Vietnamese culture (Tran, 1999), the author pointed out that in the methods of communicating, Vietnamese people appreciate the tact and consider the solidarity important This tact leads to the fact that they hardly mention directly things they want to express but hedges most of the time

With those evidences and observation in daily life, the author assumes that communication in classroom is not an exception when teachers and students do not always speak out straightly what they want to express The use of sandwich feedback for that reason may appear more than that in a classroom taught by Vietnamese teachers Vietnamese teachers, in case they have to criticize students, will use a lot of complicated structures and break the maxim of quantity and relevance while American colleagues, on the opposite, would comment straightly on students‟ errors without the fear of threatening the students‟ face

CHAPTER 3 DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS

The previous chapters gave overview of the research and did the review of literature In this section, the methodology of study, data collection procedure and data presentation would be covered

3.1 Overview of the research methodology

The study is conducted with the combination of many methods, mainly quantitative and qualitative one Quantitative research has many advantages especially in helping the author to collect a huge number of data in a short time It is suitable with the task of withdrawing the relationship between the variables In this research, quantitative methodology helps the author have an objective view of the researching procedure However, for the limitation of time and informants, the information collected may not

be enough for a real-quantitative research; the conclusion, hence, turns out to be lack of persuasiveness Consequently, methods of qualitative research should be applied to make valuable comparison and results The most outstanding characteristic of this method is the open of result The responses from the participants are flexible, giving the researchers a panorama view of the situation

In addition, inductive and deductive methods are also employed in this research Deductive style is shown in the way the author supposing the hypotheses and the assumption for the research and then collecting the data to check those hypotheses After collecting and analyzing the data, some conclusions or rules could be withdrawn, making the organization of the study be in inductive way It is this flexible change that creates the close and condensation of the thesis

In order to achieve the objectives of the cross-cultural research, the main method of data collection is survey for this tool shows enough advantages to the researchers For example, it is relatively inexpensive (especially with this type of self-administered surveys), many questions can be asked about a given topic giving considerable flexibility to the analysis, how the questions will be administered is flexible as well: face-to-face interviews, telephone, etc After collecting the necessary data, the statistics would be shown on the graphs or charts which helps the author in leading a discussion and come up with the conclusion The procedure could not be fulfilled without the consultation of both Vietnamese and American teachers and the interviews with students under those teachers‟ instructions

In short, all the considerations, discussions, and withdrawals in this thesis are largely based on the following factors: reference to relevant publications, survey questionnaires, statistics, description and analysis of the collected data, personal observation, interview with students and teachers, discussion with Vietnamese and foreign teachers The combination of different methodologies would enable the author with more access to the data, more ways to get the target It is depending on the part and requirement of research that the methods are applied appropriately

3.2 Design of study

3.2.1 Selection of informant

The main involvement of the research is the American teachers in Australia Center for Education and Training (ACET) and some other famous centers in Hanoi and Vietnamese teachers in different universities and schools They are all experienced teachers in dealing with students of all level and all skills ACET is a center that has a long time in the field of academic English training It gains the fame for good and innovative methods of teaching English with all the teachers got certificate in TESOL

30 American teachers from ACET and outstanding centers that are chosen for the interview and questionnaires have been working in Vietnam at least two years, they understand Vietnamese cultures and cultural factors that can affect their Vietnamese students‟ attitude Still they keep their teaching methods and impose the knowledge due to the modern language teaching methodology They are enthusiastic and highly responsible for their job These teachers cover the classes from beginning level to IELTS preparation level (advanced)

In the circumstance that one fourth of people in the world speaks English as their first

or second language or uses this language as the tool to communicate every day and there exists many varieties of English (Asian English, Africa English, American English, etc), the author decided to choose American cultures and languages as the focus of the study for some reasons The author does not assume that this American English is standard for all, but it is used by many people and count up for a large percentage of English speakers Consequently, choosing this “common” English helps the author collecting the data easier Another reason lies in the requirement of the aims

of the study and work The author herself has to work every day with American and found out that have a look at this types of English is useful for her job The aims of the research, for that fact, are mainly to deal with American English and American culture

On the other hand, the author gets the help from over 20 Vietnamese teachers who were used to well-educated students of Hanoi University of Languages and International Studies and Hanoi University These teachers are now working in famous schools: Vietnam National University, Academy of Banking, Hanoi Teacher Training College, Equest Centre etc Beside teaching in their main offices, most of them are in charge of other classes in famous center with students at various levels As a result, they can objectively fulfill the questionnaire and assure the reliability of the research