VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY-HA NOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGE & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES ***************** LẠI HOÀI CHÂU A CROSS – CULTURAL STUDY OF USING THE SANDWICH FEEDBACK BY VIETNAMESE AND AMERICAN TEACHERS AND ITS EFFECTS ON STUDENT’S UPTAKE (NGHIÊN CỨU GIAO VĂN HOÁ VỀ VIỆC SỬ DỤNG CHIẾN LƯỢC “SANDWICH FEEDBACK” ĐỂ PHÊ BÌNH CỦA CÁC GIÁO VIÊN NGƯỜI VIỆT VÀ NGƯỜI MỸ VÀ TÁC ĐỘNG CỦA NÓ ĐỐI VỚI SỰ TIẾP THU CỦA SINH VIÊN) M.A Minor Thesis Field: English Linguistics Code: 60.15 Hanoi - 2012 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com VIET NAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY-HA NOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGE & INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES ***************** LẠI HOÀI CHÂU A CROSS – CULTURAL STUDY OF USING THE SANDWICH FEEDBACK BY VIETNAMESE AND AMERICAN TEACHERS AND ITS EFFECTS ON STUDENT’S UPTAKE (NGHIÊN CỨU GIAO VĂN HOÁ VỀ VIỆC SỬ DỤNG CHIẾN LƯỢC “SANDWICH FEEDBACK” ĐỂ PHÊ BÌNH CỦA CÁC GIÁO VIÊN NGƯỜI VIỆT VÀ NGƯỜI MỸ VÀ TÁC ĐỘNG CỦA NÓ ĐỐI VỚI SỰ TIẾP THU CỦA SINH VIÊN) M.A Minor Thesis Field: English Linguistics Code: 60. Ngô Hữu Hoàng Hanoi - 2012 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com TABLE OF CONTENT Page DECLARATION ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ABSTRACT LIST OF ABBREVIATION CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1. Aims of study 4 1. Significance of study 5 1.
Scope of the study 5 1. Organization of the study 6 CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 8 2. Definition of feedback 8 2. Definition of criticism 9 2.
Definition of sandwich feedback communication (SFC) 11 2. Pragmatics and significance of SFC in communication 13 2. What is pragmatics? 13 2. What is Politeness? 16 2.
Relation of sandwich feedback and politeness 20 2. Vietnamese and American cross-cultural SFC 21 CHAPTER 3: DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS 24 3. Overview of the research methodology 24 3. Design of study 25 3.
Selection of informant 25 3. Data collection instrument 27 3. Data processing procedure 28 3. The patterns of SFC (Structures of SFC that teachers often use) 29 3.
SFC as a politeness strategy 34 3. Discussion 41 CHAPTER 4: PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS AND CONCLUSION 43 4. Limitation of study and the suggestion for further researches 44 4. Conclusion 45 REFERENCE 46 QUESTIONNAIRE v LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.
Rationale In the world where globalization has connected everyone closer, it is so common when people mention every aspects of it day after day. The expression of globalization has shown everywhere from the food to clothes, from house decoration to the choice of car, especially in the way people communicate. The need of exchange information becomes greater, leading to the born and development of cross-cultural communication. In this type of communicating, besides the content of information, culture understanding played a crucial role for the message to be understood fully and politely.
Without awareness of culture, communication can negatively impact to the relationship and on the contrary, the relationship between interlocutors will be motivated with a deep understanding of culture. For example, in America, after the presentation, people are often got good comments like: “You did an excellent presentation”. In fact, it is just a polite signal in their culture and possibly the performance is not as good as that praise, the presenter will recognize the necessity of improving their behaviors then. It would not be a big problem if those styles of comment were not applied in Vietnam where people trust all the words in the feedback they get and think of their performance as vivid as those words‟ description.
After all, the problem of cross cultural communication, sooner or later, will be shown out. The above example can be found anywhere in international companies and schools in Vietnam, inspiring the author to have a careful scan of this matter – giving feedback. Though it is not new, there is type that has not been widely known: sandwich feedback. This topic caught the author‟s great attention, leading to the decision of researching about it.
1 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com So far, no one could deny the role that English has empowered in aspects of life and became the international language, being learnt and taught widely in all countries. However, in process of teaching this language to students, teachers from different countries have their own way of monitoring classroom in each part of a lesson. In my opinion, among parts of teaching, presenting, eliciting, the skill of giving feedback is one of the most noticeable matters. This act follows other activities as a review part for both teacher and students to have a reflection on what they have done before.
It not only greatly benefits students in correcting or editing their products but also be a challenge for teachers. The instructors may find it a difficult part for the fact that giving comment on others‟ work is inherently a sensitive case, requiring them to think and talk carefully in accordance with culture. Hence, it is a good reason for the choice of this act to be the focus of research. In Vietnam, the teaching and studying of English have a long time been imposed to the curriculum, but it is clear that cultural factors were not paid enough attention.
It is required from the fact that teachers must have an orientation for their teaching strategies, basing on solid knowledge of cross culture and politeness strategies, bringing good effects to their teaching. In position of a teacher, the author of these papers (researcher) has a motivation to carry out the research to raise her own understanding of giving sandwich feedback, benefiting her in the way of giving assessment for students. Moreover, not only is this politeness limited to the use in classroom but also it can be applied in daily life among wise communicators which helps them a lot in work and other fields. Previous studies There are hundreds of papers writing about cross cultural communication and politeness strategies like: “Politeness strategies in Oprah Winfrey show” by Jantima (2009), or “The use of politeness strategies as a factor in peer-editing in foreign 2 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com language classroom” by Amores, etc.
In Vietnam, there are previous researches about Vietnamese-American cross culture but none of them has mentioned about the use of sandwich feedback. Communication strategies are also gets the concerns of many learners (study of boasting by Nhung, 2010, about economicality and redundancy in requesting by My, 2010, about expressing sympathy by Hien, 2010, about disparaging by Van, 2010). Giving comment strategies are paid notice as well by Huong (2011) with dissertation about corrective feedback, by Hang (2010) with application of feedback in writing, etc. However, “sandwich feedback” (see definition in 2.2) is still a new term in Vietnam.
Hence, these papers not only revise the way that teachers in Vietnam use feedback but also introduce a new type of feedback. In short, under the push of finding something new, interesting and useful, the topic of sandwich feedback in cross cultural communication had been chosen to be the main discussion of these papers. According to this study, teachers could have a deeper look at their teaching manners, see clearly the advantages and drawbacks of the new method of comment and consider applying it in their teaching. Aims of study Regarding to the previous researches, the author inspire herself looking up the answers for some following questions as the purposes of the whole research.
First, what sandwich feedback is and what its roles are in communication in general and in giving comment to Vietnamese students in particular. The background part will be considered under the view of communication, looking at feedback as a strategy to strengthen the effects of communication. The discovery about the acts of giving feedback and the use of sandwich feedback basing on the theories of speech and politeness will be covered first and then its application in second language classrooms. 3 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com The second aim of these papers is to find out the similarities and differences in the use of sandwich feedback among Vietnamese and American teachers.
Giving comments is an art that can affect hearers‟ attitudes and feelings. Due to the distinction in background culture, teachers in different countries give their students feedback in various ways. Thus, the dissertation heads to search out a worthy comparison between the two cultures. Hopefully some useful pedagogical implications could be implied from those findings, contributing to the teaching procedure of the author in particular and of other teachers in general.
Those main aims orient the papers to set up some detailed goals. For the first target to build up a trustful background, the definitions and relating aspects would be retrieved from rare materials of previous studies and sources on the Internet. The searching would provide the author and readers a theory part on which other following parts of collecting data could be based on. The searching will focus mostly on the metaphor images of sandwich, comparing it with a politeness strategy of giving comments to students.
Besides, the types, methods and field of application would also be paid attention. On the other hand, to narrow the view on Vietnam circumstances, the author would carry out a survey and observations to calculate the data and make the necessary implications. In this main part, the frequency, the method that teachers used would be focused most. It is great if the author could find out some common structures and sentences that teachers often use.
In addition, the questions in the survey would be around the attitude of students towards feedbacks and sandwich feedbacks. Their uptakes should be let evaluated from their general results and their self-evaluation. Research questions - In what way that criticisms are often given to students by Vietnamese and American teachers? 4 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com - How often do the teachers use the sandwich feedback in their assessment to students‟ work? - What may be the effects of sandwich feedbacks on students‟ uptake? - What are the suggestions for teachers in teaching English for Vietnamese students? 1. Significance of study In the trend of studying about cross culture and its expression in daily life, this linguistic dissertation adds an unfilled part about strategy of giving smart feedback to learners.
As mentions above, in Vietnam, those there are researches of politeness strategy have been touched several years ago but the volume wrote about feedback is still limited and there is no study about sandwich feedback before. Another expected contribution of these papers is the withdrawal of similarities and differences in the use of sandwich feedback between American and Vietnamese teachers, providing more useful knowledge for teachers. The result of these papers could help not only the author in reacting to students but also other teachers in finding a wise way to communicate with students in classrooms. Scope of the study The research is going to be carried out in 4 months, from April, 2012 to September 2012.
For the limitation of time and trustful reference documents, the author has to constringe the scope of a cross cultural research in all aspects. In this dissertation, the differences between American and Vietnamese cultures are taken into consideration through the comparison of English using. It is necessary to emphasize that English in these papers is only considered the tool to express the thoughts and conventional habits of people in different countries with different cultural backgrounds. To be more 5 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com detailed, the focus of the study is about the way teachers giving sandwich feedbacks to students, not disparaging, ill speaking or other acts of communication.
During the time of researching, the author found out that there are many types of feedback presented by the scholars: differentiated, early warning, peer grading, etc. However, for her own interest, only “sandwich feedback” is chosen to be the main concern of these papers.