An american and vietnamese cross-cultural study on teachers’ criticisms to students’ presentations

The two above reasons has encouraged us to conduct the study which aims to make a comparison in the ways of criticizing students’ presentations between American and Vietnamese teachers..

presentations

Vũ Thùy Linh

Trường Đại học Ngoại Ngữ Luận văn ThS Chuyên ngành:English Linguistics; Mã số: 60 22 15

Người hướng dẫn: Assoc Prof Võ Đại Quang(PhD)

Năm bảo vệ: 2009

Abstract: Criticizing is considered one of the face-damaging acts and the speech act of

criticism remains to be an area less explored by scholars at home and abroad The fact that criticism plays a very important in teaching and learning is undeniable This is because students may learn from mistakes of one another as well as from the comments that they receive The two above reasons has encouraged us to conduct the study which aims to make a comparison in the ways of criticizing students’ presentations between American and Vietnamese teachers The present study was conducted the participants of the two groups: 30 American teachers (11 males and 19 females) and 38 Vietnamese teachers (17 males and 21 females) In the research, two main findings were discussed Firstly, for politeness strategies are employed by American and Vietnamese teachers, both of them employed variety of direct and indirect strategies Secondly, in terms of directness and indirectness degree, Vietnamese people are inclined to be less direct than American in theory but when criticizing their students’ presentation, they appeared to be more direct than their counterparts in some situations such as when their students strayed from the topic and their presentations were not well-organized In other situation, American teachers used more direct strategies than Vietnamese ones However, it should be noted that these findings are just tentative, not conclusive affirmation of the directness and indirectness used by American and Vietnamese teachers

Keywords: Tiếng Anh; Giao văn hóa; Thuyết trình

Content:

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DECLARATION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABSTRACT

i

ii iii

Chapter 1: Literature Review 4

1.3.1 Directness and Indirectness in Language 8 1.3.2 Directness and Indirectness in Culture 10

1.4.2 Class Presentation Assessment Criteria 12

2.1 Comments on Participants and Questionnaires 15

Chapter 3: Results and Discussion 20 3.1 Criticizing strategies used by American and Vietnamese teachers 20

d Consequences 23

3.2 Similarities and differences in using direct and indirect strategies 29

PART I: INTRODUCTION

1 RATIONALE

The past decade has witnessed the rapid development of pragmatics and growing attention on speech acts such as apology, request, and compliment However, the speech act of criticism remains to be an area less explored by scholars at home and abroad

According to Brown and Levinson (1987: 62), criticism is a face-threatening act that threatens the hearer’s positive face, which is “the want of every individual that his wants be desirable to at least some others” Therefore, the speaker tends to adopt various strategies to save face for the one being criticized However, cultural differences could result in variance in criticism strategy preferences and an interlocutor may inappropriately choose some criticism strategies according to his own culture with another interlocutor from different culture, thus leading misunderstanding in the cross-cultural communication

The fact that criticism plays a very important in teaching and learning is undeniable This is because students may learn from mistakes of one another as well as from the comments that they receive Teachers, however, form different cultures have different ways of giving criticisms to their students’ presentations Some may be open and direct in their criticisms while others may resort to indirect strategies Thus, misusing this may have counter-productive effects on the relationships between the interlocutors

All the aforementioned reasons have encouraged us to carry out a study entitled

“An American and Vietnamese Cross – Cultural Study on Teachers’ Criticisms to

Students’ Presentations” We do this study with the hope of raising the awareness of

cross-cultural differences in American and Vietnamese ways of criticizing in general and criticizing students’ presentations in particular

2 AIMS OF THE STUDY

The study aims to make a comparison in the ways of criticizing students’ presentations between American and Vietnamese teachers

To reach this aim, two objectives need to be achieved First, the study examines what

politeness strategies are employed by American and Vietnamese teachers when they

give criticisms to their students’ presentations Second, the study also analyzes the

similarities and differences between two groups of teachers in the use of politeness

strategies in their criticism to students’ presentations

3 SCOPE OF THE STUDY

The main focus of this study is the teachers’ politeness strategies in giving criticisms to students’ presentation Not everything to criticism is studied but merely negative criticisms about presentations in classroom

To serve the purpose of the research, the target population is identified as American and Vietnamese college teachers who teach third-year students This selection ensures that the students of these teachers are required to make frequent oral presentations during their terms and the teachers have experience in giving comments on students’ presentations

4 METHODOLOGY

Since the main purpose of the study is to compare the ways of criticizing students’ presentations between American and Vietnamese teachers; therefore, describing, comparing and contrastive analysis prove be the best candidates of all Thus, the thesis will

be oriented in the following steps:

- do the questionnaire

- identify strategies of criticism of both English and Vietnamese teachers in the source of questionnaire result

- classify the criticisms into sub-strategies

- describe the criticisms in each language to find out the typical features of each sub-strategies

- analyze, compare, and contrast criticizing strategies based on the cultural features

in the two languages to point out the basic similarities and differences in this aspect

- reach the comments and conclusions on the subject under research

5 DESIGN OF THE STUDY

The study is composed of three parts:

Part I: INTRODUCTION

Introduction describes the study’s rationale, aims, objectives, scope and methodology

Part II: DEVELOPMENT

There are three chapters in this part

Chapter 1: Literature Review lays the theoretical foundation for the research by

discussing (1) theory of speech act, (2) speech act of criticizing, (3) directness and indirectness in language and culture, and (4) an overview of presentation and criteria for a good presentation

Chapter 2: Study details the methods that have been used and the procedures that

have been followed by the researcher

Chapter 3: Results and Discussion presents the findings from the survey and

discuss them in detail

Part III: CONCLUSION

This part ends the study by summarizing its main points as well as points out the limitations and suggestions for further studies

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