an american and vietnamese cross-cultural study on teachers’ criticisms to students’ 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: iv TABLE OF CONTENTS DECLARATION ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ABSTRACT i ii iii Part I: Introduction 1 1. Rationale of the Study 1 2. Aims of the Study 1 3. Scope of the Study 2 4. Methodology 2 5. Design of the Study 2 Part II: Development 4 Chapter 1: Literature Review 4 1.1. Speech acts 4 1.2. Speech act of criticizing 6 1.3. Directness and Indirectness 8 1.3.1 Directness and Indirectness in Language 8 1.3.2 Directness and Indirectness in Culture 10 1.4. Oral Presentation 12 1.4.1 Definition of Presentation 12 1.4.2 Class Presentation Assessment Criteria 12 Chapter 2: The Study 15 2.1 Comments on Participants and Questionnaires 15 2.2 Data collection procedure 17 2.3 Data coding 17 Chapter 3: Results and Discussion 20 3.1 Criticizing strategies used by American and Vietnamese teachers 20 3.1.1 Direct criticisms 20 a. Negative evaluation 20 b. Disapproval 21 c. Identification of problem 22 v d. Consequences 23 3.1.2 Indirect criticisms 24 a. Demand for change 24 b. Indicating standard 25 c. Request for change 25 d. Advice for change 26 e. Suggestion for change 27 f. Asking/ Presupposing 28 3.2 Similarities and differences in using direct and indirect strategies 29 Part III: Conclusion 36 Appendix I 1 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 2 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. 3 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. I REFERENCES 1. Austin, J. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford, England: Calderon Press. 2. Bum – Kulka, (1987). Indirectness and politeness in requests: Same or different? Journal of Pragmatics 11, 131-146 3. Blum – Kulka, S., House, J, & Kasper G. (1989). 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Research on Language and Social Interaction 24, 37-70. 27. Wierzbicka, A. ( 1991). Cross- Cultural pragmatics. The semantics of human interaction. Mouton de Gruyter. 28. Wikipedia. (2007). Wikipedia. 2006. Presentation. Retrieved February 21, 2007 from http:// en. Wikipedia.org/wiki/presentation [online] 29. Yule, g. (1996). Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . 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’. 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. an american and vietnamese cross-cultural study on teachers’ criticisms to students’ presentations Vũ Thùy Linh Trường Đại học Ngoại