Developing Cultural Scripts for Congratulation Strategies in British English and Turkish: A Suggestion for Foreign Language Teaching

Developing Cultural Scripts for Congratulation Strategies in British English and Turkish: A Suggestion for Foreign Language Teaching

Can, Humeyra

The experiences that we have throughout our lives enable us to live culturally because we are influenced and shaped by the culture and we actively act on and reconstruct cultural elements in our social environment (Atkinson, 1999). This highlights the importance of the development of cultural awareness for successful communication especially in a world where intercultural communication is now inevitable. One way of reaching the cultural information in a particular society is by closely studying its speech acts (Wierzbicka, 1985). This study aims to find out the strategies in the performance of the speech act of congratulation in British English and Turkish using a corpus approach and to formulate cultural scripts using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage Approach (NSM). NSM is said to ease intercultural communication by providing a natural language that can be understood by people from different backgrounds and that helps to understand speech practices from the perspective of the speakers themselves (Goddard & Wierzbicka, 2007; Goddard, 2009). To collect the data, the study follows a corpus approach whereby the performative verbs (i.e., English congratulation and Turkish tebrik and kutlama) and their various lexical forms are searched for in various corpora (i.e., BYU-British National Corpus, METU Turkish Corpus, Google) from the newspaper and blog genres. The contexts where the congratulation was directly performed were selected and examined qualitatively and quantitatively. The results of the study show that there are some cultural differences as well as similarities in the performance of congratulation, which can be presented in a cultural script. It is suggested that the cultural scripts be used as language teaching sources specifically for the development of intercultural communicative competence, which includes the cultural knowledge and awareness that will help interlocutors ‘survive’ in new contexts by using the language in socially and culturally appropriate ways (Byram et al., 2002).

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2012-05-04

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