Unit 3 Verbaland Non-verbal Communication
Unit overview
Both Units 1 and 2 mention a key word “communication”.As Thomas Payne points out in Text B of Unit 2, most of us, linguists or non-linguists, have the common-sense notion that “the main purpose of human language is communication”. Thus to develop a deeper understanding of the nature and function of language, we need to take a close at human communication. This unit examines this topic from a cross-cultural perspective, illustrating the similarities and differences in verbal and non-verbal communication between different cultures, which lays a foundation for further exploration into the interface between language and culture in the following units. Text A
People in different communities demonstrate different perceptions and rules of both verbal and non-verbal communication. The way they interact is culturally relative in almost every aspect, including when to talk, what to say, pacing and pausing, listenership, intonation and prosody, formulaicity, indirectness, and coherence and cohesion. Text B
Some non-verbal behaviors are practically universal and have the same meaning wherever you are (e.g., smiling and facial expressions of anger, surprise, fear, sadness, and so on). But for cultural and historical reasons, there have also developed great differences and variations in such aspects as eye contact, touch, gestures, and territorial space, etc. Without an awareness of respect and accommodation for people from a different background, these differences are likely to cause misunderstandings in cross-cultural communication.
The two texts supplement each other in that Text A illustrates cross-cultural differences in both verbal and non-verbal communication while Text B focuses on non-verbal behaviors and addressesboth differences and similarities.
Teaching objectives
This unit is designed to help students develop their reading skills, communicative competence, critical thinking, intercultural reflection and abilities of autonomous
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learning in the following aspects.
Reading skills:
Use context to understand a new word Identify cohesive devices
Predict the content of an upcoming sentence/paragraph
Communicative competence:
Develop a coherent and cohesive oral/written discourse
Use topic sentences, supporting sentences and concluding sentences in presentations/essays
Communicate constructively in team work
Critical thinking:
Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of personal experience as evidence in argumentation
Organize the arguments using an outline
Note and reflect on the differences between academic writing and everyday writing
Intercultural reflection
Identify similarities and differences in non-verbal communication across cultures Be aware of multiple levels of differences on which cross-cultural communication can falter
Interpret communication behaviors from cultural and historical perspectives
Teaching strategies
Non-verbal communication and cross-cultural communication are both interesting topics in linguistics. The teacher can introduce the two texts by quoting anecdotes or relating to students’own experiences (question 5 in Preparatory work, p. 59). For students who lack experience of cross-cultural communication, the topic can be led in by discussions about inter-subcultural communication.
Text A is a research articlefrom an academic journaland its structure and writing style are quite clear. It is recommended to draw students’ attention to the author’s logic (i.e., ways of arguing) and use of evidence in class. If well-planned, all the questions in Preparatory Work and Critical reading can be dealt with in some detail in class. The teacher can follow all the questions in Understanding the text to check students’ comprehension of the text, while the tasks in Evaluation and exploration can be
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divided and assigned to groups. For example, in Making an outline (p. 62), the teacher can divide the students into three groups, each responsible for one topic.
For classical works in intercultural communication, please refer to:
Hall, Edward T. (1955). The Anthropology of Manners.Scientific American,192: 85-89.
Hall, Edward T. (1959). The Silent Language. New York: Doubleday. For more updated information, please find the following journals:
Cross-Cultural Communication published by Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture (CAOOC)
Across Languages and Cultures published byAkadémiaiKiadó
Language and Intercultural Communication published byRoutledge Journals, Taylor & Francis Ltd.
Preparatory work
(1) Academic interests: gender and language, interactional sociolinguistics, conversational interaction, cross-cultural communication, frames theory, conversational vs. literary discourse, and new media discourse. Main publications:
You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York: Morrow, 1990.
That's Not What I Meant!: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships. NY: William Morrow, 1986. Gender and Discourse. NY & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Note: Outside the academic world Deborah Tannen is best known as the author of a number of books on the New York Times best seller and she is also a frequent guest on television and radio news and information shows.
(2) Edward Sapir (1884–1939): an American anthropologist who is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the early development of modern linguistics. His main interests are in the ways in which language and culture influence each other, the relation between linguistic differences, and differences in cultural world views. His most important contribution is what is known as the principle of linguistic relativity or the \
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John Joseph Gumperz(1922 –2013): an American linguist. His research interests include the languages of India, code-switching, and conversational interaction. Well-known for his contribution in interactional sociolinguistics and the \of communication\Gumperz’s research has benefitted such fields as sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and linguistic anthropology.
E. M. Forster (1879 –1970): an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 13 different years.
Robert Kaplan:An American applied linguist. His research area covers applied linguistics, discourse analysis, language policy, language planning, and ESL/EFL Teaching. He is most famous for his contribution in Contrastive Rhetoric, a term he first coined in 1966. Kaplan has authored or edited 32 books, more than 130 articles in scholarly journals and chapters in books, and more than 85 book reviews and other ephemeral pieces in various newsletters, as well as 9 special reports to the U.S. government and to governments elsewhere.
http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/usia/E-USIA/education/engteaching/kap0299.htm (3) Pragmatics is the systematic study of meaning dependent on language in use. Unlike semantics, which examines conventional meaning \pragmatics studies how the transmission of meaning depends not only on structural and linguistic knowledge (e.g., grammar, lexicon, etc.) of the speaker and the hearer, but also on the context of the utterance, any pre-existing knowledge about those participants involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, and other factors. Central topics of pragmatics include a speaker’s communicative intentions, the use of language that requires such intentions, context of use, the relation between the user of a linguistic form and the act of using the form, and the strategies an addressee employs to work out what the intentions and acts are.
(4) Cohesion refers to the use of various phonological, grammatical, and/or lexical means to link sentences or utterances into a well-connected, larger linguistic unit such as a paragraph or a chapter. In other words, cohesion achieves well-connectedness by means of linguistic forms.
Example: Mary is a secretary. She works in a law firm. Yan (2012)
Coherence refers to the logical well-connectedness between different parts of a piece
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