| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 103 === Since 2001, a growing number of public schools in Taiwan have started to recruit foreign English teachers (FETs henceforth) from native English speaking countries to team teach with local English teachers (LETs henceforth). After years of implementation, more team teaching projects will be carried out by central and local educational bureaus in Taiwan, which leads to a growing opportunity for FETs and LETs to cooperate with each other. However, some research has presented that communication between team teachers was a common problem, especially due to teachers’ differed cultural backgrounds. Therefore, research about how to improve communication between LETs and FETs from the perspective of culture is of great importance.
The present study aimed to investigate the cross-cultural communication among FETs and LETs by examining what kind of common issues and sociopragmatic failures may occur in the communication of team teachers. To achieve this goal, four public schools in Taiwan with EFL team teaching programs were chosen for the current study. Six FETs from USA, South Africa, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia and fourteen LETs all born and raised in Taiwan were observed for 18 meetings and 43 classes, and interviewed for 23 times in total.
Based on the observation notes and taped discourse data from the meetings and interviews, the study revealed the frequently discussed common issues from the communication of team teachers and categorized them into those regarding teaching, administration, and socializing. Many sociopragmatic failures were noted by this study, and they were found to occur when the LETs and FETs had different concerns at two stages, pre-communication stage with five dimensions, i.e., “tell it or not,” “tell it to whom,” “when to tell it,” and “where to tell it,” and during-communication stage with the question “how to tell it” from four aspects, i.e., linguistic forms, sugar coating, information sequencing, and conversational styles. Cultural patterns such as individualism and collectivism, low-context culture and high -context culture, and task-oriented culture and relationship-oriented culture were used to explain why the FETs and LETs tended to behave and perceive differently toward the occurred sociopragmatic failures.
Some general guidelines and an eight-step training model are provided by this study to facilitate the cross-cultural communication between FETs and LETs. By examining communication breakdown resulting from different strategies of language use preferred by various cultural norms, this study hopes to improve the communication among LETs and FETs, and further facilitate team teaching programs and English education in Taiwan.
Keywords: team teaching, sociopragmatic failures, cross-cultural pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, intercultural communication
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