Going Beyond Words: 'Request' Activities in Constructing Japanese Workplace Personae
| Autor: | Zhang, Ying |
|---|---|
| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2022 |
| Předmět: |
Foreign Language
Language Pedagogy Sociolinguistics Business Education Communication Continuing Education Curriculum Development Multicultural Education persona construction social indexing indexing stance performed culture approach non-verbal communication Japanese workplace interaction Japanese as a foreign language Business Japanese training request-making performances |
| Druh dokumentu: | Text |
| Popis: | Previous pedagogical research and field work demonstrate that neither academic programs nor employee training programs provides speakers of Japanese as a second/foreign language with adequate toolkit to meet the practical needs of potential employers and participate fully in the Japanese workplace. Even with advanced linguistic skills, non-Japanese professionals face a daunting cultural barrier that inhibits effective communication at work: their understanding and beliefs of “what it means to be a professional” are often incongruent with the intentions and expectations of their Japanese interlocutors. The pedagogical challenge lies in identifying and fostering employability skills that match up to the expectations for professionalism, building a professional persona, in Japanese business settings.This dissertation takes its inspiration from a sociolinguistic view of seeing language acquisition and socialization as an integrated process (Ochs 1996). Having a grasp of the essential sociopragmatic toolkits to engage in joint activities in a collaborative manner empowers non-native speakers to construct a viable persona in the target culture/language (C2L2), where they learn to become successful players thriving in the surrounding environment. In actuality, workplace communication is enormously facilitated by effective relationship management strategies. Under these circumstances, my goal is to reify the innerworkings of conversation through the lens of indexicality (or social deixis) and interpret their constitutive roles in facilitating a professional to convey a desirable impression, or persona of herself in others. This effort is spurred, in part, from the numerous questions about being recognized as a fully functioning professional for which I wish I knew the answers when I was a company employee in Japan in my early 20s.My central claim in this dissertation is that to achieve a general understanding of how we can construct a viable persona in the natural environment of interactive contexts, we must apprehend the sociocultural indexicality of our collaborative, multimodal acts of meaning-making (cf. Ochs 1996; Holler & Levinson 2019). It is my aim to dig out the culturally situated ‘stancetaking’ (Du Bois 2007) indexical moves embedded in face-to-face workplace interactions, through a close look at the socialization behavior, including the language use, nonverbal cues and other symbolic forms that are salient in clearly specifiable professional contexts. By taking up requestive procedures as an exemplary ‘activity type’ (Levinson 1992)—from a Japanese TV drama series featuring pharmaceutical professionals—the current study articulates the social indexing that contributes to persona construction. The key pedagogical takeaway for Japanese as a second/foreign language and culture is that keeping up the indexical antenna in day-to-day social interactions enhances situated awareness and autonomy as L2 Japanese learners move forward to their future for a sustainable working career. |
| Databáze: | Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations |
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