Telephone conversation openings in English and Vietnamese (from a language - cultural perspective)

Telephone conversation openings in English and Vietnamese from a language - cultural perspective Trần Thị Thanh Hương Trường Đại học Ngoại ngữ Luận văn Thạc sĩ ngành: English Linguist

Telephone conversation openings in English and

Vietnamese (from a language - cultural

perspective)

Trần Thị Thanh Hương

Trường Đại học Ngoại ngữ Luận văn Thạc sĩ ngành: English Linguistics; Mã số: 60 22 15

Người hướng dẫn: Assoc Prof Dr Nguyễn Văn Độ

Năm bảo vệ: 2009

Abstract The paper presents the results of a comparative study on how English and

Vietnamese speakers of different languages manage the opening of business and private telephone calls The communicative strategies speakers use in each language are analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively, allowing a systematic comparison across cultures and languages The frame for comparative analysis is based on four fundamental moves that may be performed

in a telephone call opening: summons-answer, identification-recognition, greeting, how-are-you sequence, (Schegloff, 1972, 1979, 1986; Hopper, 1992; Hatch, 1992) Implications are drawn for cross-cultural research on interaction and for teaching English as a second language so that Vietnamese learners of English would be able to open a phone call in an appropriate way

Keywords Kỹ năng nghe nói; Tiếng Anh; Hội thoại; Giao văn hóa; Tiếng Việt

Content

The beginning of conversations has received much attention in the fields of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and conversation analysis Conversation analysis of telephone conversations is a fairly well established area of investigation, beginning in the late 1960s with Schegloff dissertation on conversational openings Since that time, a numerous researchers have advanced the study on telephone conversations (Godard, 1977; Schegloff, 1979; Schegloff, 1986; Sifianou, 1989; Lindström, 1994; Houtkoop-Steenstra, 1991; Hopper, 1992) The study of conversation openings, particularly on the telephone, has become prominent for the following particular reasons:

a) Openings are interactionally compact and brief (Schegloff, 1986:112)

b) Generally, at the beginning of a conversation, participants may utilize conversational strategies or “routines” to negotiate interpersonal relationships (Gumperz, 1982:142; Schegloff, 1986:113) This also counts for the beginnings of conversations on the telephone, as co-participants have resources available to them to manage identification and recognition of one another

c) Schegloff (1972, 1979, and 1986) describes telephone conversation openings in American English in terms of an ordered set of four core opening sequences: (1) the summons-answer sequence; (2) the identification-recognition sequence; (3) the exchange of greeting tokens

(Hi/Hi), and (4) the how-are-you sequence Accomplishing these tasks or “routines” is the focus

of the first utterances in telephone conversation openings

d) Another important feature of telephone conversation openings is that they have a

"perfunctory" character (Schegloff, 1986:113) In other words, in opening a telephone conversation, participants go through these routines in a rather automated manner

However, in all the studies I have examined Vietnamese is absent in the literature Gumperz (1982:166) notes that while speech activities exist in all cultures, there might be differences in the ways particular activities are carried out and signaled Using Conversation Analysis (CA) as the methodology, this study illustrates the cultural characteristics of the format and interactional routines of opening conversations on the telephone in Vietnamese and English languages to determine to what extent this data fits within Schegloff‟s theoretical model of sequencing in telephone openings At the same time it will illustrate how the cultural differences within telephone conversation openings may interfere with speaker‟s intentions and expectations when talking on the phone Finally, the relevance of my investigation for second language teaching and learning will be highlighted

1 Rationale

The telephone is the primary electronic medium for interpersonal communication and telephone communication has an indispensable element of everyday life Due to the lack of visual communication, at least in the normal use of this medium, linguistic information is foreground Thus, telephone conversation is a challenge to anybody learning a foreign language and remains

a sensitive area in intercultural encounters, even for those who have mastered the basics of a foreign language and culture

Inexperience in dealing with live interactive telephone conversations in the target language can also be a serious problem for some second language learners They need opportunity to listen to, interpret and sum up what they hear in a series of authentic recorded phone conversations Their listening can be greatly facilitated if they are exposed to authentic telephone conversations and also taught the conversational structures and options as well as formulaic expressions

Telephone call openings represent an ideal object of study for cross-cultural pragmatics research Since these social encounters are very specific and strongly constrained by technology, the range

of actions that can be performed in them is limited so that one can thus observe how different cultures and languages vary in their realization of the same interactional routine That is why this paper chooses telephone conversation openings for the study

2 Aims of the study

The study aims:

1) To find out standard formulas used in beginning telephone conversations among English and Vietnamese speakers as suggested by Schegloff

2) To discover how culture affects the ways English and Vietnamese start their telephone conversations

3) To draw an implication in English teaching for Vietnamese students

3 Scope of the study

I restrict my study on formal business telephone conversation openings and informal personal ones which are used by people doing different jobs and at different ages

4 Theoretical / practical significance of the study

In general, telephone conversation openings in both English and Vietnamese follow the same routine as Schegloff suggested However, there is slight difference between English and Vietnamese In English telephone openings there is higher formality, but Vietnamese language has more variants which depend on age, power and relationship between speakers and people from different backgrounds have different ways to start a telephone conversation

5 Methodology

The research presented in this paper is based on data in English textbooks and 50 questionnaires

on telephone conversation openings All questionnaires were made by 20 English and 30 Vietnamese speakers, ranging in age between 18 to over 60 years old The telephone calls include conversations between acquaintances, colleagues, relatives and friends In doing so, the participants were asked to fill in the questionnaires sent to them by e-mail and given in person I also did interview some of them

The first descriptive stage of analysis led to the identification of recurrent patterns in the data and the recognition of the most evident cross-cultural differences

In a subsequent phase, systematic comparison across languages was carried out by a quantitative analysis based on the core sequences framework presented above It is through such cross-cultural comparisons that the great relevance to second language learning will be realized

Statistics is also used for this study to find out the differences between English and Vietnamese languages using in telephone conversation openings

For a better understanding of how the ritual “how are you” sequence in English and Vietnamese telephone conversation openings, Conversation Analysis (CA) is used as the appropriate method for investigation of foreign language interaction The English translation is provided next

to the original talk

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