Overview

With a focus on intercultural communication between Japanese and Americans, this book describes how differing listening styles and conversational behaviours across cultures can negatively influence intercultural communication. Responding to the many calls for studies examining the teachability of listener responses in the language classroom, the author investigates whether listener responses would be a suitable target for instruction in the EFL/ESL classroom, and, if so, what instructional methods are best suited to teaching this elusive aspect of pragmatic competence. By addressing these issues, this book provides exciting and novel insights into various aspects of applied linguistics. By supplementing language data and questionnaires with retrospective and longitudinal research techniques, the author is able to present a much richer description and deeper understanding of how and why participants used listener responses in the manner they did. With the findings supporting an explicit approach to teaching listener responses, this book provides language practitioners with a direction in which to move forward. Beyond this practical application, this study sheds new light into such theoretical debates as the role of consciousness in language teaching (the Explicit vs. Implicit debate), the universality of Grice's theory of conversation and the potentially differing conceptualisations of politeness across cultures.

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9781443846066

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Reviews

This book makes a major contribution to studies in intercultural communication (IC), providing robust evidence to support the teaching of pragmatic skills (and specifically backchannel behaviour) to L2 learners of English. Through a detailed and sophisticated tour through the literature on IC, backchannels and the Japanese context, and a detailed explication of his research project, Cutrone illuminates our understanding of an area previously unresearched. This book is compulsory reading for any academic or advanced student interested in the pragmatics of IC. - Dr Lisa McEntee-Atalianis, Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication, Birkbeck, University of London This book details a fascinating study in which the English of Japanese learners comes under the microscope. The book focuses meticulously on how Japanese speakers behave as listeners. Their listenership behaviour is observed and described in terms of their use of backchannels in conversations with American native speakers of English. The results clearly point to the cultural differences in listenership behaviours and, in turn, illuminate how these differences can be negatively stereotyping for learners. The book also details a classroom study where listenership instruction was tracked over time, among three groups. For anyone interested in English Language Teaching, discourse and intercultural communication, this book is a wonderful model of meticulousness and rigour, leading to solid insights from empirical data and classroom practice. - Dr Anne O'Keeffe, Center for Applied Language Studies, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick The teaching of discourse features in relation to speaking in a second language is becoming a very important topic. Pino Cutrone's study of backchannels provides a very interesting account of a careful piece of research in this sub-field which is well worth reading by teachers and researchers alike. - Dr Alan Tonkyn, Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics, Department of English Language and Literature, School of Literature and Languages, The University of Reading

This book makes a major contribution to studies in intercultural communication (IC), providing robust evidence to support the teaching of pragmatic skills (and specifically backchannel behaviour) to L2 learners of English. Through a detailed and sophisticated tour through the literature on IC, backchannels and the Japanese context, and a detailed explication of his research project, Cutrone illuminates our understanding of an area previously unresearched. This book is compulsory reading for any academic or advanced student interested in the pragmatics of IC. - Dr Lisa McEntee-Atalianis, Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication, Birkbeck, University of London This book details a fascinating study in which the English of Japanese learners comes under the microscope. The book focuses meticulously on how Japanese speakers behave as listeners. Their listenership behaviour is observed and described in terms of their use of backchannels in conversations with American native speakers of English. The results clearly point to the cultural differences in listenership behaviours and, in turn, illuminate how these differences can be negatively stereotyping for learners. The book also details a classroom study where listenership instruction was tracked over time, among three groups. For anyone interested in English Language Teaching, discourse and intercultural communication, this book is a wonderful model of meticulousness and rigour, leading to solid insights from empirical data and classroom practice. - Dr Anne O'Keeffe, Center for Applied Language Studies, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick The teaching of discourse features in relation to speaking in a second language is becoming a very important topic. Pino Cutrone's study of backchannels provides a very interesting account of a careful piece of research in this sub-field which is well worth reading by teachers and researchers alike. - Dr Alan Tonkyn, Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics, Department of English Language and Literature, School of Literature and Languages, The University of Reading

Author Information

Pino Cutrone has been teaching in Japan for fifteen years and is currently an Associate Professor at Nagasaki University. He received his PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Reading and has published widely in his field. His research interests include intercultural pragmatics, sociolinguistics and EFL pedagogy.

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