Week 8: Cross-gender interaction

The languages i know (english, mandarin, japanese) are all sexist. i guess there is no helping it as women used to have a lower status in the past. however, modern women are fighting back against that. in japanese, there are a lot of phrases or words that women are not allowed to use as they sound crude, yet the men can use them as freely as they like. this also happens when using the japanese equivalent of 'i'. women should use 'watashi' as it is more feminine and men can use 'boku' or 'ore'. our japanese teacher would cringe when female classmates (including myself) used these masculine terms. well, as a way to fight against sexism in language, i would still freely use these masculine terms as long as it is not done in front of the teachers. :P

Week 7: Computer-mediated Communication

This topic is extremely relevant to such times as surely everybody uses this means of communication at least once.
However, there can even be generation gaps when using CMC. I remember once looking at my younger cousin's blog (she's 13) and i could hardly understand what she had posted. Our manager at work also complains when we send him sms-es which he couldn't understand. For example, when he asked whether this particular colleague could extend her working time, the reply he got through sms was "cn". At this point, he passed me the phone as asked if is was 'can' or 'cannot'. But i really couldn't decipher that so eventually he still had to call my colleague to confirm. That was really amusing.

Week 6: E-learning Face and Politeness

really interesting information!! politeness in many different degrees. never thought about it like that before.

Week 5: Communication Systems 1: Components & Representation

This week's tutorial was spent mostly on identifying individualist or collectivist. after the activity i find it rather difficult to do so for some. the line is rather blur for me. i or c??

Week 6: Written Discourse

This week's materials could be said as deep as chinese text writings. No matter how much i read the articles, i can understand what i can understand sicne its all english. yet it is still quite difficult for me to differentiate the different styles of writing. the doodles of kaplan were sure interesting. but i think that it can be quite true for the chinese and english texts, since i can't say anything about the romance, russian or arabic styles since i do not read their texts. but the style of writing can be influenced by the way the students were taught to write. i still remember how my jc gp teacher drilled the different parts that should go into our essay. the topic sentence, elaboration and summary (something like that). so naturally every student we were taught this way would write in similar fashion. coming to think of it, wouldn't that make all our essays pretty boring? but i guess it's still better than an essay which only the writer understand.

Week 5: Spoken Discourse

Spoken discourse = combining a number of speech events (??)
i do understand how a telephone conversation can be spoken discourse. if it is made up of several speech events, does this mean that summon, answer and recognition are three different speech events? the phone openings are interesting enough to study across different cultures. it really reflects the differences. upon reflecting, my phone openings between friends and strangers are also really different. to friends: "what!?!" at work, i would just pause and wait for the caller to state his business.
R: Hello, Tully's coffee, Mag speaking.
(pause while waiting for caller to state his/her purpose of calling)
C: (reason for calling, eg: place order or looking for someone else)

I also realize that they often do not identify themselves if i do not ask. that's the singapore culture i guess.

Week 4: Speech Events

The categories really do help simplify the analysis of a speech event.
Genre, topic, purpose/function, setting, key, participants, message form, act sequence, rules for interaction, norms of interpretation.
Without these guidelines, i doubt i would be able to classify or describe a speech event that easily.

But among all those, i think the most difficult to develop upon on would be the norms of interpretation. since most of the times it comes so naturally to us that we tend to think that it is a given and fail to notice it.