| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 華語文教學系 === 102 === Online communication has made it far easier for people from different countries to communicate. However, for cross-cultural communication to be successful, interlocutors must have adequate cultural knowledge in addition to being able to speak the same language. Many studies have already compared the cultural differences between Westerners and East Asians, and most of these have found that East Asian cultures are more indirect, more cooperative and define self through relationships (Ma, 1996; Gao, 1998; Chang, 1999; Yang, 2009; Xu, 1985; Yang, 1995), while Western cultures are more direct and define self through innate characteristics (Yu, 2005; Markus and Kitayama, 1991; Kanagawa, Cross and Markus, 2001). However, this research frequently does not use naturally occurring language, and rarely focuses on casual conversation.
This study aims to use data collected from the social network website Facebook to analyze the differences between how Taiwanese and Americans conduct casual conversation. The author collected status updates and responses to those updates from the Facebook webpages of 133 Taiwanese and Americans. The updates and comments were sorted according to topic and the gaps between the two groups were analyzed to determine the differences between the two cultures they implied. The results show that Taiwanese and American communication on Facebook is similar overall, though Americans post more opinions about social issues, more positive updates about their lives, and more updates about their actions. Taiwanese post more philosophical updates, more updates about negative events in their lives and more updates about things that happened to them. Both groups’ comments expressed agreeing opinions more than any other behavior, but Americans tended to express more opinions while Taiwanese expressed more positive feelings about the poster. These results show that Americans have a higher tolerance for positive face threats than Taiwanese, but both groups have a similar tolerance for negative face threats. Both groups also show a similar tendency to be cooperative and indirect.
Finally, the author critiqued the presentation of casual Chinese-language conversation in three popular Chinese textbooks, and provided an outline for a lesson plan that uses brainstorming, exposing students to target language input and discussion to raise students’ awareness of cultural differences.
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