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Download Luận văn An investigation on some types of verbal responses to questions in English and Vietnamese conversation
As Thomas (1998) proposes, in stead of repetitively saying “Yes”/ “No” or supply the information blatantly, a variety of reasons has been put forward for the universal use of indirectness. An utterance with indirect acts always has multiple meanings with interpretation of the indirect acts based on the direct act and the context. They require certain extent of mutual knowledge between participants. Most of the indirect acts are used purposefully, but mostly for politeness/ regard of “face”. Grice (1975) states that in direct speech act the speakers say what s/he means, while in indirect speech acts the speaker means more than s/he says, i.e. the speaker performs one illocutionary act implicitly by way performing another illocutionary act explicitly. As discussed above, in this section, we present some indirect response patterns to questions on the basis of “implcature”. When a speaker blatantly fails to observe a maxim, not with any intention of deceiving or misleading, but because the speaker wishes to prompt the hearer to look for a meaning which is different from, or in addition to, the expressed meaning. This additional meaning is “conversational implicature”. In addition, when a speaker blatantly fails to observe a maxim at the level of what is said, with the deliberate intention of generating an implicature.
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In this study, data collection instruments will include two main questionnaires. First, The Discourse Completion Task (DCT) was designed to elicit some types of question responses from the set of English Native Speakers in English. Second, the Vietnamese translated phiên bản of the DCT questionnaire was used to collect some types of question responses from the set of Vietnamese Speakers in Vietnamese.
Some issues in choosing methods to collect data
In an attempt to answer these questions, a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) was used. Arguments for the choice of this data collection will be discussed in the following section.
Several methods have been used in researching speech acts. Ethnographic methods have been used to collect naturally occurring question responses (or whatever types of speech events in being studied), which are observed or recorded, along with information about the sex, age, status, situation, culture, relationship…of the interactants. The advantage of this method is that it can reveal the linguistic strategies used in many contexts in a given language and culture. However, this method seems to be infeasible in Vietnam because Vietnamese people do not want to be recorded for any reasons. This method also wastes time and money in recording and transcription of taped interactions. Multiple choice methods, in which a series of questions is prepared with answers, subjects are asked to choose the answer they think is most appropriate. A possible advantage of this method is that it makes the job of the subjects easier and enables the researchers to get information from a large number of the subjects in a short time. However, it does not allow the subjects to provide as many possibilities as in the case of open-ended questions, as the responses given depend on the number of possibilities anticipated in the design of the questionnaire. In a study of linguistic forms of a speech act, therefore, this method would limit the variety of the information provided.
One method that seems to overcome some of the disadvantage of the methods mentioned above is the Discourse Completion Task (DCT) (Cohen. 1996 – quoted in Tam, 2005, p.55). In the DCT, which is used in this study, the discourse is structured so that part of it is left open and part closed. A space is provides for the subjects to supply the speech acts under investigation, but the response is provided in order to cue the respondent as to the appropriate nature of the speech act realization. The DCT allows to elicitation of data from a large sample of subjects relatively easily, using the same situations where contextual variables can be controlled. It is a good way to gain insight into social factors that are likely to affect speech and performance. Cohen (1995, p.25) concedes that “Discourse Completion Test are effective means of gathering a large amount of data quickly, creating an initial classification of semantic formulas and ascertaining the structures of speech acts under consideration.” However, a major difficulty in using a DCT for research of this kind is that the researcher designing the questionnaire and the subjects providing responses to the situations may perceive the social factors of the context differently. Moreover, a difficulty when using a written task for collection of spoken language is that some certain kinds of information such as, non-verbal features of oral –interaction cannot be recorded.
In brief, every method has its advantages and disadvantages. In this study, in order to collect sufficient data within the time and resource constrain available, and as discussed in the previous sections, our purpose is to understand some types of verbal responses to questions in English and Vietnamese conversations, not non-verbal responses, we will use DCT to collect data.
The content of the questionnaire
The situations in the questionnaire were designed to reflect real life situations. Additional information about the subjects’ personal backgrounds was obtained by a section at the front page of each questionnaire. The questionnaires are in English and in Vietnamese. The English Native Speakers were asked to answer the questions in English and the Vietnamese Speakers were asked to answer the questions in Vietnamese. The questionnaire was intended to elicit response forms from subjects. It consists of eight situations.
To obtain the data for the study, observation was employed in order to bolster the results from the questionnaire, as well as to clarify and test the validity of the obtained information. Observation was paid on some types of English and Vietnamese question responses in daily-life situations, books, articles, novels, stories, authentic listening materials.
3. The selection of subjects
The process of collecting data lasted for nearly five months with the Giúp of my friends who works in offices and in universities where there occur native and non native speaker interactions. Data was collected from two groups of participants: one group of the English participants who come from Australia, America, and England; another group consist of Vietnamese people. All of them are working in RMIT University and American International College (AIC), World Bank Office of Road Project Management Unit 2 (RPMU2). The subjects in both groups are from 25 plus to below 50 years old; have had high levels of education. All subjects of the study are classified into two groups: Native Speakers of English (NSE) and Native Speakers of Vietnamese (NSV).
The characteristics of each group are listed in the following table:
Criteria
NSE
NSV
Nationality
English, American, Australian
Vietnamese
Language
English as native language
English as a foreign language
Number of participants
14 (50%) (7 males and 7 females)
14 (50%) (7 males and 7 females)
Occupation
Teachers: 7 (25%)
Staff: 4 (14.3%)
Manager: 1 (3.6%)
Assistant: 2 (7.1%)
Teachers: 9 (32.1%)
Staff: 3 (10.7%)
Manager: 1 (3.6%)
Assistant: 1 (3.6%)
Table 3. Summary of characteristics of subjects
4. Data collection procedure
The two questionnaires were conducted on 63 Vietnamese subjects and on 47 English ones. Two groups of subjects were asked to write what they would say in such a situation. After 3 months, 39 Vietnamese questionnaires and 21 English questionnaires were returned. However, only 14 English questionnaires and 16 Vietnamese questionnaires satisfactorily comply with the purpose of the study.
The purpose of the questionnaire was to elicit how the English and the Vietnamese subjects express their responses to questions and how the two groups of subject differ in choosing question response forms.
The data collected was considered as a source to gain some significant insights in pragmatic strategies of responding acts, the situations are designed to investigate socio-cultural factors including the decision of using different types of question responses in English and Vietnamese.
5. Data analysis
As mentioned in the previous parts, we collected various kinds of question responses in English and Vietnamese, bilingual samples, on the basis of their communicative meaning; the data was classified into groups on the basis of the presented forms for the realization of responses to questions in each language. Contrastive analysis was employed so that the similarities and the differences in responses to questions in English and Vietnamese were found out on the foundations of the findings in each language. The number of overlaps by both native speakers and non native speakers was codified, counted and compared.
The data was also analyzed according to the pragmatic function of question responses. It followed the discourse frame work proposed by Tsui (1994). The instruments for an analysis of the study are adopted in Tsui’s Model: Responding Move; Challenging Move; Responses and Challenges. According to Tsui (1994), the use of some terms “question”, “answer” (response) and “challenge” (reaction) is understood as follows:
Question (Q): any eliciting of a response regardless of grammatical form.
Answer (A): any response that fulfills the expectation of the question.
Challenge(C): any response that modifies (clarifies; expands) or rates (negatively) a previous statement (question; answer; or another reaction)
Fussell & Krauss (2002; p.41) gives an example of a information-seeking question and its response as follows:
A: Who is president of the United States? (Q)
B: That’s too easy. (C to Q)
A: No it isn’t. (C to C)
B: George Washington. (A to Q)
In this study, we try to isolate some types of responses to que...
Download miễn phí Luận văn An investigation on some types of verbal responses to questions in English and Vietnamese conversation
As Thomas (1998) proposes, in stead of repetitively saying “Yes”/ “No” or supply the information blatantly, a variety of reasons has been put forward for the universal use of indirectness. An utterance with indirect acts always has multiple meanings with interpretation of the indirect acts based on the direct act and the context. They require certain extent of mutual knowledge between participants. Most of the indirect acts are used purposefully, but mostly for politeness/ regard of “face”. Grice (1975) states that in direct speech act the speakers say what s/he means, while in indirect speech acts the speaker means more than s/he says, i.e. the speaker performs one illocutionary act implicitly by way performing another illocutionary act explicitly. As discussed above, in this section, we present some indirect response patterns to questions on the basis of “implcature”. When a speaker blatantly fails to observe a maxim, not with any intention of deceiving or misleading, but because the speaker wishes to prompt the hearer to look for a meaning which is different from, or in addition to, the expressed meaning. This additional meaning is “conversational implicature”. In addition, when a speaker blatantly fails to observe a maxim at the level of what is said, with the deliberate intention of generating an implicature.
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Tóm tắt nội dung:
previous sections, our purpose is to examine the types of verbal responses to questions in English and Vietnamese, how Vietnamese speakers differ from English native speakers in their choice of response types to questions.In this study, data collection instruments will include two main questionnaires. First, The Discourse Completion Task (DCT) was designed to elicit some types of question responses from the set of English Native Speakers in English. Second, the Vietnamese translated phiên bản of the DCT questionnaire was used to collect some types of question responses from the set of Vietnamese Speakers in Vietnamese.
Some issues in choosing methods to collect data
In an attempt to answer these questions, a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) was used. Arguments for the choice of this data collection will be discussed in the following section.
Several methods have been used in researching speech acts. Ethnographic methods have been used to collect naturally occurring question responses (or whatever types of speech events in being studied), which are observed or recorded, along with information about the sex, age, status, situation, culture, relationship…of the interactants. The advantage of this method is that it can reveal the linguistic strategies used in many contexts in a given language and culture. However, this method seems to be infeasible in Vietnam because Vietnamese people do not want to be recorded for any reasons. This method also wastes time and money in recording and transcription of taped interactions. Multiple choice methods, in which a series of questions is prepared with answers, subjects are asked to choose the answer they think is most appropriate. A possible advantage of this method is that it makes the job of the subjects easier and enables the researchers to get information from a large number of the subjects in a short time. However, it does not allow the subjects to provide as many possibilities as in the case of open-ended questions, as the responses given depend on the number of possibilities anticipated in the design of the questionnaire. In a study of linguistic forms of a speech act, therefore, this method would limit the variety of the information provided.
One method that seems to overcome some of the disadvantage of the methods mentioned above is the Discourse Completion Task (DCT) (Cohen. 1996 – quoted in Tam, 2005, p.55). In the DCT, which is used in this study, the discourse is structured so that part of it is left open and part closed. A space is provides for the subjects to supply the speech acts under investigation, but the response is provided in order to cue the respondent as to the appropriate nature of the speech act realization. The DCT allows to elicitation of data from a large sample of subjects relatively easily, using the same situations where contextual variables can be controlled. It is a good way to gain insight into social factors that are likely to affect speech and performance. Cohen (1995, p.25) concedes that “Discourse Completion Test are effective means of gathering a large amount of data quickly, creating an initial classification of semantic formulas and ascertaining the structures of speech acts under consideration.” However, a major difficulty in using a DCT for research of this kind is that the researcher designing the questionnaire and the subjects providing responses to the situations may perceive the social factors of the context differently. Moreover, a difficulty when using a written task for collection of spoken language is that some certain kinds of information such as, non-verbal features of oral –interaction cannot be recorded.
In brief, every method has its advantages and disadvantages. In this study, in order to collect sufficient data within the time and resource constrain available, and as discussed in the previous sections, our purpose is to understand some types of verbal responses to questions in English and Vietnamese conversations, not non-verbal responses, we will use DCT to collect data.
The content of the questionnaire
The situations in the questionnaire were designed to reflect real life situations. Additional information about the subjects’ personal backgrounds was obtained by a section at the front page of each questionnaire. The questionnaires are in English and in Vietnamese. The English Native Speakers were asked to answer the questions in English and the Vietnamese Speakers were asked to answer the questions in Vietnamese. The questionnaire was intended to elicit response forms from subjects. It consists of eight situations.
To obtain the data for the study, observation was employed in order to bolster the results from the questionnaire, as well as to clarify and test the validity of the obtained information. Observation was paid on some types of English and Vietnamese question responses in daily-life situations, books, articles, novels, stories, authentic listening materials.
3. The selection of subjects
The process of collecting data lasted for nearly five months with the Giúp of my friends who works in offices and in universities where there occur native and non native speaker interactions. Data was collected from two groups of participants: one group of the English participants who come from Australia, America, and England; another group consist of Vietnamese people. All of them are working in RMIT University and American International College (AIC), World Bank Office of Road Project Management Unit 2 (RPMU2). The subjects in both groups are from 25 plus to below 50 years old; have had high levels of education. All subjects of the study are classified into two groups: Native Speakers of English (NSE) and Native Speakers of Vietnamese (NSV).
The characteristics of each group are listed in the following table:
Criteria
NSE
NSV
Nationality
English, American, Australian
Vietnamese
Language
English as native language
English as a foreign language
Number of participants
14 (50%) (7 males and 7 females)
14 (50%) (7 males and 7 females)
Occupation
Teachers: 7 (25%)
Staff: 4 (14.3%)
Manager: 1 (3.6%)
Assistant: 2 (7.1%)
Teachers: 9 (32.1%)
Staff: 3 (10.7%)
Manager: 1 (3.6%)
Assistant: 1 (3.6%)
Table 3. Summary of characteristics of subjects
4. Data collection procedure
The two questionnaires were conducted on 63 Vietnamese subjects and on 47 English ones. Two groups of subjects were asked to write what they would say in such a situation. After 3 months, 39 Vietnamese questionnaires and 21 English questionnaires were returned. However, only 14 English questionnaires and 16 Vietnamese questionnaires satisfactorily comply with the purpose of the study.
The purpose of the questionnaire was to elicit how the English and the Vietnamese subjects express their responses to questions and how the two groups of subject differ in choosing question response forms.
The data collected was considered as a source to gain some significant insights in pragmatic strategies of responding acts, the situations are designed to investigate socio-cultural factors including the decision of using different types of question responses in English and Vietnamese.
5. Data analysis
As mentioned in the previous parts, we collected various kinds of question responses in English and Vietnamese, bilingual samples, on the basis of their communicative meaning; the data was classified into groups on the basis of the presented forms for the realization of responses to questions in each language. Contrastive analysis was employed so that the similarities and the differences in responses to questions in English and Vietnamese were found out on the foundations of the findings in each language. The number of overlaps by both native speakers and non native speakers was codified, counted and compared.
The data was also analyzed according to the pragmatic function of question responses. It followed the discourse frame work proposed by Tsui (1994). The instruments for an analysis of the study are adopted in Tsui’s Model: Responding Move; Challenging Move; Responses and Challenges. According to Tsui (1994), the use of some terms “question”, “answer” (response) and “challenge” (reaction) is understood as follows:
Question (Q): any eliciting of a response regardless of grammatical form.
Answer (A): any response that fulfills the expectation of the question.
Challenge(C): any response that modifies (clarifies; expands) or rates (negatively) a previous statement (question; answer; or another reaction)
Fussell & Krauss (2002; p.41) gives an example of a information-seeking question and its response as follows:
A: Who is president of the United States? (Q)
B: That’s too easy. (C to Q)
A: No it isn’t. (C to C)
B: George Washington. (A to Q)
In this study, we try to isolate some types of responses to que...