Strengthening the Intercultural Communication Competence: Language Users’ Perspectives to Cooperative Principles and Politeness Strategies

Author: Nguyen Minh Tri (Cleverlearn Language Center, Vietnam)
Speaker: Nguyen Minh Tri
Topic: Language Socialization
The (SCOPUS / ISI) SOAS GLOCAL CALA 2020 General Session

Abstract

The current era has witnessed the increase in popularity of globalization in a variety of business and social aspects. Thus, English is considered as a key means of communication to connect people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds. Accordingly, the demand for intercultural communication competence (ICC) is also becoming higher due to the differences in languages users’ cultural and social characteristics. However, language users frequently deal with ambiguous utterances and behaviors when exchange ideas with other communication participants. Importantly, the ultimate purpose of communication is supposed to achieve the communication goals of expressions in an appropriate way.

This paper aims to analyze the perspectives of English speakers on cooperative principles and politeness strategies in authentic interaction with people from a variety of cultures. Data are collected via surveys, interviews of English speakers who speakers other languages as their mother tongues.

The findings revealed that speakers regularly used language actively with little regard to the appropriateness of their speech in other cultures, which might results in impoliteness in communication and caused misunderstandings among speakers. Furthermore, owing to communicative effectiveness, I found it is often assumed that the communication process is always completed in an easy way, consequent to the absence of cooperative principles. In a number of cases, it is necessary to sacrifice either cooperative principles or politeness strategies to reach the target of communication.

This study proposes a number of techniques to maximize the effectiveness of cooperative principles and politeness strategies in practical communication.

References

Brown, G. & Levinson, S. 1987. Politeness. Some Universal in Language Usage. Cambridge University Press

Brown, G. & Yule, G. (1983). Discourse analysis. Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press.
Ide, S., Hill, B., Carnes, Y. C., Ogino, T., & Kawasaki, A. (1992). The concept of politeness: An empirical study of American English and Japanese. In: R. Watts, S. Ide, & K. Ehlich (Eds.). Politeness in language: Studies in its history, theory and practice. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 281-297.
Grice, H. P. Logic and Conversation. Reprinted in S. Davis, 1991, Pragmatics: A reader. New York: Oxford University Press
 

Keywords: ICC, cooperative principles, politeness strategies