3. SpEakWise
“We are not aware of our own culture until we are
confronted with other cultures” (Edgren, 1990)
4. Aims and Learning Objectives
• Allowing students to link theory and practice of
Intercultural Communication
• Developing critical cultural awareness through
e-learning
• Furthering (pragmatic) linguistic competence
• Developing transferable skills
• Promoting learner autonomy
5. SpEakWise Participants
• Business Studies and German Students,
Department of Germanic Studies, Trinity College
• Students of the Institut für Interkulturelle
Kommunikation, University of Hildesheim
(2008-2010)
• Students of the Institut für Anglistik, University
of Vienna (2007-2008)
6. Sequence of Activities 2009-2010
A: Postcard from Ireland/Germany
B: Unobtrusive Measures of Culture/Non-
participant Observation
C: Diary Entry
D: Word Association and Sentence
Completion
E: Critical Analysis
F: Discourse Completion
G: Negotiation Task
7. Activity B: Unobtrusive Measures of Culture
• Cultural artefacts: Statues, stamps,
street names.
• Videos or powerpoint presentations
posted to Moodle.
• Webchat
9. Who is being commemorated?
Oskar Schindler
• * 28. 4. 1908 Zwittau, † 9. 10. 1974 Hildesheim
• A German industrialist
• Member of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers` Party)
• 1939: Schindler emigrates to Cracow where he opens an enamelware
factory
• He takes on Jewish employees that saved them from concentration
camps
• About 1100 Jews survived the World War II because of his activities
10. “Mahnmal für die österreichischen jüdischen Opfer
der Shoa“
A memorial or cenotaph is a special kind of monument dedicated to the memories of
groups of individuals, such as the war dead of one country or empire. Through their
presence in public they commemorate a negative historical event in a hortative way -
beyond generations they shall evocate consternation.
13. Non-participant Observation
• Setting
U6 (metro between Floridsdorf and Siebenhirten)
• Participants
mixed: male, female, old, young, Austrian, non-Austrian,
participants all obviously knew each other
• End
mainly interactional aims – maintain interpersonal relations
some transactional aims – passing on information
• Act sequence
informing, thanking, requesting
• Key
neutral, used very low voice (except phone calls), mostly not
even looking at each other
16. Activity D: Responses for ‘Religion’
2007-2008 Dublin: God, Mass on Sunday and rivalry, Vatican, pope, mass,
cross, communion, funeral, neighbours, beliefs, mass, god, holiness, God;
Beliefs; Fear Death; Unknown; Faith, Church, Faith, Belief, Praying, War
2008-2009 Vienna: Religionsfreiheit, jeder sollte darüber selbst
entscheiden, Glaube, Sicherheit, Krisenherd, Macht, belief, strong feeling,
God, Christian, identity, church, Christmas, Glaube, Zuversicht, Kirchen,
Rituale, Tradition, Glaube, persönlich, Gott, Gott. Jesus. Salvation. Die
Kirche. Traditionen, God; church; belief; morals, (Ch.) Buddha; church;
Sunday; temple
2007-2008 Dublin: meaningless backward corrupt prejudice dangerous
solice; Catholic church muslim prayer beliefs; tradition, spirtual,
enlightenment. mass, communion, choir, priest; pray, control, church, god;
God faith worship church; Conflict Extremism Hope; streit, krieg,
menschheit, bomben, elend, luegen, obdachlosen; Catholic, priest, Ireland,
conservative, restrictive, male dominated; Controversial Complicated
spiritual; god, Catholicism, church, mass; colleagues, long hours; church,
family, priest, charity, mass, community, faith
2008-2009 Hildesheim: Glaube, Freiheit, Kultur, christlich, islamisch...;
Glaubensgemeinschaft, (Treffpunkt zur Zusammenkunft), wichtig für die
moralische Bildung; Glaube, Hoffnung, Gott/Götter, Spiritualität; religious
wars, George W. Bush, personal, in general good
17. Activity E: Critical Incident Analysis
Am Sonntag unternehmen Sie mit Ihrem Freund und dessen
Hund einen Spaziergang durch die Innenstadt. Sie nehmen
den Hund an die Leine. In der Fußgängerzone begegnet Ihnen
ein älteres Ehepaar mit mehreren Hunden, die nicht angeleint
sind. Während sich die Hunde beschnuppern, macht die
Dame eine Bemerkung darüber, dass Sie den Hund an der
Leine führen. Sie erkundigt sich, ob Ihr Hund wenig
Gehorsamkeit zeigt und betont, dass Ihre Hunde „die Freiheit
lieben“.
(a) Wie fühlen Sie sich in dieser Situation?
(b) Wie würden Sie das Verhalten der älteren Dame
interpretieren?
(c) Wie verhalten Sie sich?
18. Activity F: Discourse Completion
• Online discourse completion exercise
• Elicitation of specific speech acts
• Building pragmatic competence in foreign
language
• Increasing awareness of differences in
communication style
19. Activity F: Discourse Completion
a. You have booked flights to Munich and want to find out if your flight is on time,
so you ring the airline.
Customer Service: Munich Air, how can I help you?
You:
_______________________________________________________
b. You are waiting in Outpatients. Your appointment was for 2 pm. It is now 4pm
and you are starting to get annoyed. You go up to the reception desk to
complain:
You:
_______________________________________________________
c. Sie sind im Studentenwohnheim. Ihr/e neue/r MitbewohnerIn, die/den Sie
nicht gut kennen, schnarcht im Schlaf. Sie wollen sie/ihn aber unbedingt darauf
aufmerksam machen, da Sie fast die ganze Nacht wach geblieben sind. Beim
Frühstück sprechen Sie mit ihr/ihm.
Sie: ______________________________________________________
20. Activity G: Negotiation Task
• Set of five products for each team
• Four brands: techniflit, domuhouse, benwellfit,
horteck
• Hypothetical €100
• ‘Rummy’ format: Buy and sell products in order
to get a complete ‘product line’.
21. Bathroom Scale
Bathroom scale or work of art?
Here’s a masterpiece of modern sculptural art, designed not for your living room wall but for your
bathroom floor! Created around a 29 x 31 cm sheet of toughened glass, this state-of-the-art scale
offers stunning looks, technical innovation and exceptional accuracy. Operation is completely
automatic – simply step on and your weight is displayed in metric or imperial on the large 25 mm (1”)
LCD readout. So how does it work? Concealed in each of the four ‘feet’ is an active high-precision
sensor that makes the scale accurate within +/- 0.3% of total body weight, with clever technology that
‘locks in’ the reading only when your position on the scale is fully stabilised. Supplied with 2 standard
batteries for approx. 10 years’ use before replacing.
Domuhouse
ΩΩΩΩΩ
22. Negotiation Task - English
Ireland: If you give us fifteen euros plus one of your products, then we’ll give you this –
the::: the Techniflit. How does that sound?
Austria: So you want one of ours and fifteen euros?
Ireland: Yes. And you get this, because it’s a very high quality product.
Austria: Why is that...Why why is the securignome less, worth less than than your
product?
Ireland: Well, this is a highly functional product. You can store, um, um, seventy-two
ties and it’s only, um, thirteen, er, sorry, er eleven centimetres wide. It’s built to high
specifications. It has [?] built into the top of it so that you can use it in the dark. So it’s,
um, frankly more useful than a security gnome.
23. Acknowledgements
- CAPSL for funding the initiative
- Catherine Kane and Patrick Doyle in the Centre
for Learning Technology, Trinity College Dublin
- Kathrin Kordon in the University of Vienna
- Wiebke Müller, Vasco da Silva, Stephan
Schlickau in the University of Hildesheim
- The students in Trinity, the University of Vienna
and the University of Hildesheim.
Editor's Notes
I’d just like to show you this quotation as an example of the spirit within which the SpEakWise course was developed. In confronting our students with cultural differences through comparing their spontaneous responses to a range of scenarios, we hoped to give students the opportunity to stand back and reflect on their own cultural frames of reference in a conscious way, and thereby to develop critical cultural awareness. This is a key step in developing intercultural competence.
We wanted students to grow more aware of the cultural frames of reference from their native culture through which they might be misinterpreting events and interactions in the foreign culture.
• raise awareness of how differences in values and beliefs across cultures might impact on linguistic realisation (I’ll talk more about this in just a moment)
• allow students to test hypotheses about how to communicate in particular settings and to reflect on the success of these
• promote team-working, problem solving in teams, negotiation [access to videoconferencing also valuable experience for future career
• encourage students to engage in self-directed learning
And crucially we wanted students to be able to link the theory of intercultural communication with their own practical experiences on the course
Activity A – looking at statues, stamps and street names and producing a powerpoint with information. This year asked students to produce a video because we wanted to increase student visibility/audibility in the hope that it would improve online communication through discussion boards.
(Track 5 – clearest and loudest, gets straight to the point about statues!)
Slide 13: WebCT discussion
Pro-Europeanism of Irish (based on Irish group’s interpretation of the Spire).
Quotation from slide
Last year we used a discussion board for the feedback on this activity as you can see, however, in order to try to promote interaction between the students we held instead a video-conference this year at which students were to ask each other questions on the videos and on some of the cultural issues raised. This wasn’t hugely successful in engendering further interaction throughout the course – partly perhaps because of the poor quality of the images transmitted by video-conference so that it was difficult for students to see each other’s eyes and faces, for example. Also, perhaps because of inhibition engendered by speaking out not only in front of one’s peers, but also in a foreign language to strangers via an unfamiliar medium. This triple or quadruple layer of communicative difficulty i.e. Public speaking, in a foreign language, to strangers, via video-conference is one that it would be worth taking greater account of as a learning point for transferable skills in future versions of the course. Certainly all students of foreign languages are more likely to be using the language at a distance than face-to-face. Unless they move abroad, they are more than likely to find themselves speaking the foreign language using the e-mail and the phone if not video-conference, but this is not something that is generally practised or taught in university despite its compounding impact on issues of intercultural communication.
To turn now to the Tagebuch activity.
The diary entry activity is one which was recommended by our partner this year, Wiebke Mueller, on the basis of an activity she had taken part in in a course run by Alison Phipps and John Corbett at the University of Glasgow.
The idea is for students to write a diary entry about an everyday event they have been involved in, such as going to the supermarket or the dentist or eating in the cafeteria and chatting to friends. Students write up the event, including any conversations and these are used as a basis for cultural comparison and discussion. As you can see in the entry on this slide, this student has chosen to talk about a visit to the dentist. The conversation is interesting from a pragmatic point of view. The directness of the German has been translated almost word for word into the English description.
There is also the issues of gate-keeping – interactions with people such as receptionists who allow you access and the extent to which this varies culturally.
Turning now to the Word Association activity.
Slide 14-15: Activity C: Word Association and Sentence Completion
Collating answers to word association and sentence completion task using WebCT.
Comparison of collated answers across groups as basis for discussion of cultural values in class.
In discussing this activity the German students were surprised at the negative connotations of ‘religion’ expressed by some of the Irish students, though otherwise this activity did not raise a huge number of striking cultural differences on the level of national culture, but raised issues of similarity across different layers of culture e.g. Professional, national, generational. Here an over-arching student culture was identified.
The other issue with it from a technical point of view was that the platform did not allow for automatic collation of responses – instead individual student responses were sent to me which were then collated manually. One of the issues here was with the fact that our use of WebCT was experimental. When we set out to use an e-learning tool we weren’t sure what the tool was capable of with the result that all of the activities ended up being embedded in WebCT, whether or not it was exactly suited to the activity.
The next activity the students engaged in was a critical incident analysis type activity. This activity was conceived with a view to encouraging student interaction online. The activity was set up as a blog in webct with each critical incident scenario posted as a separate blog entry which individual students could add a comment to. A sample scenario written by Wiebke Mueller is shown above. I’ll just give you a moment to read through it.
Each student was assigned to a cross-cultural team with partners either in Ireland or Germany. Once every student had posted a comment to the scenario, one hour of the class time was set aside for interaction with the members of their team in the other country. The idea behind having teams was that students would not have to interact with a large number of other individuals at once and could benefit from being able to contribute more – just as in real-life interactions. In order to facilitate the teams different blog boards were set up. In class students were able to benefit from WebCT’s chat function in order to discuss the scenarios and the related comments synchronously.
Activity E was an online discourse completion exercise, which, as for the word association and sentence completion task involved the collation of data submitted via WebCT and received via e-mail. The collective responses from each national group to a particular discourse prompt were collated with both groups responding to the same prompts. There were two sets of prompts, one group in English and one in German. Each group of prompts aimed to elicit two examples of either a request, an offer or an expression of thanks.
Students found this to be the most enjoyable and engaging activity.
Examples – Austrian students less likely to use please.
Here are a few examples of scenarios to elicit specific speech acts (request, offer, thanks)
This kind of discourse elicitation can be criticised for eliciting written rather than spoken data – written responses are likely to be more elaborate and don’t take account of paraverbal and nonverbal features of communication such as stress, intonation, volume, pitch etc.
This activity raised issues of levels of directness in making requests in German and English.
The final task made use of video-conferencing and aimed at drawing together all of the theory and discussion of intercultural communication gathered in the previous activities so as to put it together in real-time interaction.
Transferable skills: Negotiation, Communication; Cultural awareness; Video-Conferencing.
Strange products provoked humour and helped to break the ice between the two groups.
High motivation to succeed in task – communication is not for its own sake but subsidiary to task completion.
