View Content #25427

By Isabelle Sackville-West, CASLS Fellow

I went abroad to Beijing the summer after my freshman year of college. At the time, I was an intermediate-level Mandarin speaker who had been studying Chinese for three years. In terms of culture, I truly believed that I was well-versed. This, I soon realized, was actually ignorance born out of a misconception of what culture fully entails. When one thinks of culture, in general what first comes is art, food, clothing, religion, and distinct social phenomena; the things one of my professors would call “capital C culture.” These larger cultural pieces, like major holidays, gift giving, and felicitous numbers, were well-addressed in my previous Chinese classes. What I didn’t understand, however, were the little intricacies that make up subtle, every-day interactions; the "little c" cultural phenomena bound in pragmatics. For example, 对不起，不好意思，and很抱歉 can all loosely translate into “sorry” in English. They all vary, however, in level of formality, appropriate context of use, and implication, ranging from something more like “excuse me” to “I am very apologetic.”

Pragmatic ability is something that teachers can begin cultivating even in the early years of students’ second language learning. To provide a concrete definition of what pragmatic ability entails, Cohen and Ishihara state that, “Pragmatic ability means being able to go beyond the literal meaning of what is said or written, in order to interpret the intended meaning, assumptions, purposes or goals, and the kinds of actions that are being performed” (Ishihara & Cohen, 2010: 5). Of course, capturing the multi-faceted nature and complexities of everyday existence in the L2 is difficult to manage in a formal classroom setting. To better prepare, however, I wish that pragmatics had been emphasized more in my beginning language education.

While big C cultural understanding is undoubtedly important, I found that knowledge of cultural artifacts didn’t come in handy in a variety of daily situations. For example, I struggled to decide what term to address an elderly waitress with. I wish I had known what statements come off as flirtatious or what phrases have a gendered association. I wish I had known how to better interact with peers in my age-group and how to behave in digital spaces. I recall, for example, that one of the Mainland Chinese students I became friends with used to mock me for being “too uptight.” I was frustrated by this judgement. I didn’t understand why I was projecting this image that I had no intention of displaying, but I realize now that my formal, traditional language is what lead him to develop this impression of me. I was slow to pick up on slang terms, and was altogether unfamiliar with the dialectal variation of Beijing Mandarin. This, coupled with the fact that my salutations and leave takings sounded rehearsed, contributed to the cold, stand-offish impression that I gave off.

Now, I definitely still make these types of pragmatic slip-ups, but I am glad to say that I am far more aware of the impact my language, gestures, and behaviors have on intercultural interactions. Integration of pragmatics into the classroom would have built up my awareness of smaller, subtler cultural differences and helped prevent numerous pragmatic missteps, aiding my integration into the target culture.

Reference

Ishihara, N. & Cohen, A.D. (2010). Teaching and Learning Pragmatics: Where Language and Culture Meet (Revised ed.). Routledge.