Intercultural Communication Between Native and Non-Native Speakers of English

This dissertation, "Intercultural Communication Between Native and Non-native Speakers of English" by Winnie, Cheng, 鄭梁慧蓮, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract of dissertation entitled Intercultural Communication between Native and Non-native Speakers of English submitted by Winnie Cheng for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong in July 2002 This study investigates intercultural conversations with Hong Kong Chinese (HKC) and native speakers of English (NS) as the interlocutors. The study examines the way HKC and NS manage the organizational and interpersonal aspects of English conversation by focusing on five culturally-laden features of conversation, namely preference organisation (disagreement), compliment and compliment response, simultaneous talk, discourse topic management and discourse information structure. The overriding assumption was that HKC and NS would be different, on the grounds that they are different in their respective cultural make-up and value orientations which affect their conceptions of self and their conceptions of the notions of "face" and polite behaviours in interactions for social purposes. The data set examined comprises 25 intercultural conversations totalling 13 hours of recordings. The study has been very careful in monitoring as far as possible the social parameters, namely the social distance and power relationships of the participants, the goals of interaction, as well as the context of conversation. The findings have shown that, on the whole, HKC and NS exhibit conversational and pragmatic behaviours that confirm most of the stereotypical assumptions about differences between HKC and NS in the underlying cultural value orientations, conceptions, beliefs and attitudes. These findings include HKC's greater use of redressive language in disagreements and NS's greater tendency to both give a disagreement upfront followed by redressive language and give bald-on-record disagreements; HKC's compliment responses ranging from absence of a verbal response to a back-channel signal to an (implicit) agreement to an outright rejection and NS's compliment responses taking the form of accepting the compliment; HKC's greater tendency to be more oriented to the "one-at-a-time" model of turn-taking than NS; and HKC being more indirect than NS in using an inductive discourse pattern more frequently. There are, nevertheless, findings that do not support the stereotypical assumptions of the cultural groups of HKC and NS. For instance, contrary to expectations, HKC disagree more frequently than NS, HKC do not seem to be any more concerned than NS regarding whether or not consecutive topics should be propositionally related to each other, and HKC have actually used the supposedly archetypal Western deductive pattern slightly more often than NS. While the findings have largely supported the stereotypical, generalized preconceptions about culture and communication, the present study, however, argues against conceiving intercultural interactions as mainly characterized by the intercultural differences present. In fact, intercultural encounters involve a complex, interactive and collaborative process of communication, and the communicators mediating and negotiating their values, beliefs, norms and attitudes. Contextual analysis of extended talk-in-interaction has revealed a more complex scenario than what could be offered by some of the micro-level analyses of utterances. To a greater or lesser extent, H