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READING: SPENCER-OATEY & FRANKLIN 2009 - Achieving understanding in…

- - - - Contextualisation Cues: Grumperz
        Contextualisation refers to - speakers' and listeners' use of verbal and nonverbal signs to relate what is said at any one time and in any one place to knowledge acquired through past experience, in order to retrieve the presuppositions they must rely on to maintain conversational involvement and assess what is intended.
        Can people who participate in intercultural interactions be helped to notice and produce contextualisation cues that were originally unfamiliar to them?
        
        If people are being trained for a very specific context, context, Gumperz’s (1982) research suggests that they can be.
        
        However, it is obviously impossible for people to become familiar with all the contextualisation cues of all cultural groups in all communicative contexts, and so the generic MC competency of attuning is of the utmost importance.
        
        WorldWork’s coaching manual makes a number of suggestions for increasing people’s ability to be attuned, including: (1) Identify and become mindful of the key components of non-verbal communication such as stance, gesture, eye movement and voice quality. (2) Find examples of each of the above components that are used by any of your international partners, and that you perceive to be less common in your own culture.
        
        It is of course important for people to be mindful of the fact that the meaning given to a particular non-verbal behaviour may be different from culture to culture,
- - - - FACE:
        It is concerned with people’s sense of worth, dignity and identity, and is associated with issues such as respect, honour, status, reputation and competence. Face threat, face loss, face maintenance and face gain can apply both to individuals and to groups
        
        As the popular phrase ‘lose face’ conveys, we do not always receive the respect from others that we would like. People may criticise us or boss us around, insult us and call us names; and when they do, we typically feel embarrassed or uncomfortable.
        
        Brown and Levinson (1987), in their model of politeness, propose the notion of face-threatening acts to explain this phenomenon. They claim that certain communicative acts (e.g., criticism, disagreement, apologies, requests) inherently threaten the face needs of the hearer, and they label these face-threatening acts (FTAs).
        
        Others maintain that almost any behaviour has the potential to be face-threatening, if the hearer interprets it as impacting on a sensitive attribute.- Face can be threatened or lost, but it can also be maintained or enhanced. It is extremely valuable to remember this, because it can often be very important to ‘give people face’ by publicly drawing attention to their positive qualities.
        
        The attributes that people are face-sensitive about can apply not only to the person as an individual but also to the group or community that the person belongs to and/or identifies with.
      - BEHAVIOURAL EXPECTATIONS:
        
        People can form behavioural expectations based on norms, conventions, principles, legal agreements and protocols that are associated within that particular context.
        
        They may then develop a sense that others should or should not perform that behaviour, and prescriptive and proscriptive overtones become associated with that behaviour. As a result, people start perceiving sociality rights and obligations in relation to them, and may feel annoyed if the expected behaviour does not occur.
        
        Fundamental principles underlying interaction:
        
        Equity - related to fairness and reciprocity (often linked with 'individualism')
        
        Association - related to social involvement (often linked with 'collectivism'
        
        The influence of conventions/standards:
        
        Normative conventions are flexible, and although if these conventions are breached people may be confused or surprised, they do not usually feel to offended by the breach,
        
        Prescriptive conventions however are compulsory and breaching these conventions can offend and anger people.
      - INTERACTIONAL GOALS:
        
        People often (although not always) have specific goals when they interact with others. These can be interpersonal (i.e. relational) as well as transactional (i.e. task-focused) in nature, or most commonly both.
        
        These ‘wants’ can significantly affect people’s perceptions of rapport because any failure to achieve them can cause frustration and annoyance.
        
        It is widely claimed in the international business literature (e.g., Adler 2001; Schneider and Barsoux 2003) that some social groups are more task-oriented in their interaction whilst others are more relationship-oriented. It may be that this is partly a question of timing – that some social groups move more quickly to task-oriented issues than others.