Incongruous Short Answers

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Wed Jun 14, 2006 11:07 am

I'm not sure that waiting 6 minutes at 4.30 in the morning GMT is exactly an application of 1c

To be fair, 4.30 GMT is 13.30 in Tokyo. Juan, I ope you were simply raising another issue of turn taking on web forums, which is what happens when you have a discussion with people in different time zones.

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Wed Jun 14, 2006 11:16 am

Just so, which is why I mentioned GMT. I sometimes wonder whether when real-time conversations start if we are really thinking about the time differences: one person with a hangover chatting to another who's had a few beers.

Emoticons also represent a way of overcoming the limitations of technologically glorified note-passing. A good writer ought to be able to manage without them, I always think

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Wed Jun 14, 2006 3:51 pm

Sorry JTT, I thought you were implying that abu stays up all night watching the forum....

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Thu Jun 15, 2006 1:31 am

The point I wanted to make before (but didn't make very clear) is that the sort of stuff abu has mentioned can be found in general textbooks on discourse and/or CA - that is, I knew the names he mentioned; in fact, just the other week I was reading about the very rules for turntaking that he has alluded to.

Now the thing is, those findings will not be that earth-shattering to an experienced, thoughtful and reflective teacher (who will have likely been formulating rough sequences for conversations, and functional labels for the various turns or whatever etc), and might not appear that useful even to relatively inexperienced ones (but they could conceivably bring up to speed those who have not given or aren't prepared to give the "language", communication etc much thought): there's so much to teach beyond discourse markers (much less "silent" rules) and the like that if we focus on just them, we might not be adding enough meat to the bones of a conversation (and I have to say, I am not sure if I can or should expect e.g. educated Japanese speakers of English to always follow my and similar native-speaker norms exactly; indeed, there have been times when other native teachers have queried my interest in CA etc - 'Do you really think we need to teach adults how talk proceeds, how to talk? They can do that already in Japanese'. Perhaps those colleagues were right...maybe what matters more is e.g. choice of topic, expressing opinions too openly etc. What seems more valuable is e.g. (abu's) work on (re)categorizing learner "errors" (I'm a bit hazy on what it was exactly, but it sounded interesting)).

woodcutter · Post by **woodcutter** » Thu Jun 15, 2006 4:32 am

Fluffy - there is a large section of my MA course which deals with the fact that "talk" proceeds differently in different cultures, and Japanese is the most commonly cited example of a language which is somewhat different from English. There is a huge literature out there, which you seemingly haven't touched upon, and less bookwormish ESL teachers have also usually not read any of and never will. However, of course I think that this does not matter very much. If ESL teachers could simply do the basics of their job in a reasonable way and let interested students pursue the trimmings for themselves it will suffice, because teaching intercultural communication, conversation analysis etc for more than the five minutes it takes to point out some basic facts will represent a waste of time.

And one of the seemingly unknown basics of our job is to avoid wasting time. (Making a sterling effort to learn Urdu or something in two years flat would be a better way for every poster here to use their time than reading these forums every day, by the way, as I have mentioned before! It'd teach you so much more)

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Thu Jun 15, 2006 9:43 am

I was aware as I was typing my previous post that somebody might mention cross-cultural pragmatics or whatever you want to call it etc, but as you also seem to have realized, woody, it can sometimes seem like icing on the cake (icing does help cake go down a lot more smoothly, though), and there are often times when to start banging on about it would either be redundant (several very capable, intelligent and fluent Japanese "students" of English spring to mind) or pointless (several somewhat wierd and/or "slow" students, coincidentally also Japanese, as that's where I've been for a while now, also spring to mind); that being said, I don't think these sorts of things shold be trimmings for students to pursue themselves, but integrated into, an integral part of a course (or a teacher should indeed consider them part of the basics and implement changes or add supplementary matter where linguistic insight and sophistication is lacking in whatever course materials). Yup, if teachers take a serious interest in language, have a decent dictionary and corpus-informed grammar, study some basics of DA or CA, keep up with at least whatever findings from Corpus Linguistics etc, I'm sure they'll be able to effect some improvements themselves (and what course is ever perfect or 100% appropriate for every learner or group or mix of learners etc).

These forums, sometimes I refer back to posts that I can remember that dealt with a specific grammar point, but sure, there's sometimes more hot air and heat than light (not sure if I've hit upon the right phrase(s) there)...but wishful thinking, where idealistic, isn't so bad really if it inspires at least the writer to keep on plugging.

Hmm, now that you mention it, woody, how goes the Urdu?

EDIT: Hey, you're doing ANOTHER course?! ('There's a large section on my MA course which deals with hamsterbaiting'). I thought your experience with Leicester had scarred (scared?) you for life!

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Thu Jun 15, 2006 10:26 am

Teaching intercultural communication, conversation analysis etc for more than the five minutes it takes to point out some basic facts will represent a waste of time.

I would have thought that CA would be absolutely vital to a great many courses. I don't know how many people on this forum teach Business English, but it's a context where knowing the "rules" so as not to alienate a potential client (and lose an important contract) is probably more important than using the right tense.

It might be the icing on the cake for your common or garden FCE or TOEIC preparation course, but not if you teach in companies.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Fri Jun 16, 2006 5:39 am

Yes, Business English is one obvious context where intercultural stuff can be profitably (LOL) flogged.

I still think though that with some types/cultures of students, there is little risk of them causing of offence (then again, there is also often the risk of them saying nothing at all!), and it's hardly like (the contents of most) textbooks are that 'in your face' to begin with; if anything, perhaps quite a few of us English teachers would sometimes like to be teaching our students how to CAUSE offence or become wits (or at least to recognize that that was the possible intent of another's words. See the 'Teaching Bad Language' thread on the Business English forum, or the following, which discusses irony etc: http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... php?t=1735 ).