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Speech Acts Bibliography:
Letters of Application
Ebsworth, M. E., Bodman, J. W., & Carpenter, M. (1996).
Cross-cultural realization of greetings in American English. In S.
M. Gass & J. Neu (Eds.), Speech acts across cultures: Challenges
to communication in a second language (pp. 89-107). Berlin: Mouton
de Gruyter.
Reports on a study conducted by Ebsworth, Bodman,
and Carpenter to explore the way non-native speakers handle greeting
situations in U.S. American English. They began by collecting data
from naturally occurring greeting exchanges between native and non-native
speakers of U.S. American English. From this data they created an open-ended
questionnaire that described 7 greeting acts between people of varying
degrees of familiarity/formality and asked respondents to create a
dialogue in English that would be appropriate for the situation. They
were then asked to create a dialogue in their native language for the
same situation and to provide a literal translation into English. A
total of 283 dialogues were collected. The baseline data for the study
was provided by 50 native speakers of English and the second language
data came from 2 groups: one composed of 20 bilingual graduate students,
and the other was composed of 80 adult, advanced-level ESL students
from the American Language Institute at New York University. The median
age of the informants was 23 (range of 19-65) and they were predominantly
middle-class. The researchers found that native speakers made a wide
variety of linguistic and non-verbal decisions about what greeting
was appropriate to use in a given situation based on sensitivity to
many situational and psychosocial variables. As a result of this complexity,
many non-native speakers had significant difficulty producing greetings
in a way that native speakers of U.S. American English found acceptable.
Much of this pragmatic gap can be accounted for by looking at differences
in cultural assumptions about what constitutes a polite greeting. For
example, many of the native speakers considered it polite to give a
quick, but friendly "greeting on the run" or a "speedy greeting" to
a friend or acquaintance passing by when one or both greeters are in
a hurry. However, in many cases this was considered extremely rude
and impersonal by non-native speakers who came from cultures in which
it is considered important to extend more effort to greet a person
or in cultures in which concerns of time are secondary to the importance
of social interaction. Ebsworth, Bodman, and Carpenter found that greeting
competence is very much language-specific, and that pragmalinguistic
or sociopragmatic failure often occurred when non-native speakers did
not understand the assumptions made by native speakers for particular
greeting situations.
James, C., Scholfield, P. & Ypsiladis, G. (1994).
Cross-cultural correspondence: Letters of application. Occasional
Paper. Dublin: Centre for Language and Communication Studies, Trinity
College.
Discusses ten sequences in application letters
taken verbatim from 8 letters written by Greek applicants. Eight were
identified by natives as clear and distinct kinds of failure and two
as acceptable. The study had French (10), German (6), Greek (6), Polish
(9), Portuguese (5), and Syrian Arab (9) speakers (N=45) doing the
rating of each statement. They were all advanced learners of English
and had to rate each statement on a 5-point scale from very suitable
to very unsuitable. Then they were asked to rate the sequences also
if they were written in the native language. The study didn't find
that this rating was any different from the EFL rating. Greeks were
least likely to catch failures. All were guided by their first-language
pragmatics. Note that UK raters used different criteria from those
of Americans. Self-praise was rated down but Americans wouldn't necessarily
react this way.
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