Culture in context

We speak to be understood , and we make significant assumptions about what kind of a person the other person is and what kind of a person he or she would like us to think of him or her as being (Scollon Wong-Scollon , 2001 , p45 ) and what kind of person we intend them to think of us as . -- Discuss

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A Study of the Face

Introduction

A communication event takes place for the achievement of some goal or objective . To

be able to achieve the targeted goal , the participants in the event have to first understand the under discussion . A discourse can culminate in success only if the participants know what each other is talking about (Scollon Wong Scollon a , 2001 , pp . 86 . It is a usual experience even in monocultural dialogue , when the participants are speaking the same mother tongue , it sometimes becomes difficult enough to comprehend what is actually being spoken of if the participants are not certain of what kind of roles the others are playing in the discussion or how exactly to perceive the others Alternatively , communication also becomes hampered if the one is not sure of how the others perceive him or her , or how he or she ought to project himself or herself in the discourse

With rapid development in communication technologies the world is fast turning into a global village where people from different communities of different cultures need to communicate with each other on a regular basis . The chance of miscommunication in such intercultural communications becomes very high as various factors add to their complexities . Very broadly , these factors include the inability to look at the world from the other 's point of view or the inability to appreciate cultural differences , holding on to stereotypes and prejudices , and difficulty in following the communicative styles of the participants . A careful scrutiny of each of these factors however reveals that their roots can be traced back to the cultural matrix of the participants . Unlike in monocultural communication where the emphasis is the similarities and differences are discouraged in intercultural communication , the focus is on the differences or rather on the proper understanding or appreciation of the differences (Bennett 1998 , pp . 3

The concept of the `face ' in the discourse approach takes all of these socio-cultural factors into consideration . The face has been defined as the public role or image that is granted to each participant in a communication event through a mutual process of negotiation (Scollon Wong-Scollon , 2001 , pp .35 . Each of the participants adopts a face strategy to project the face that she or he wants to . Participants in all communication event make certain assumptions about their relationship with one another and about the face that they want to claim or accord to other even before the start of the communication event During the event itself , negotiations are carried on by the participants to alter or modify the assumed `faces . Therefore , it becomes very...