Communication Tips

Tips for speaking to an American   

                           Eye contact

Making eye contact with someone is important in America.  Holding eye contact with someone during a conversation demonstrates confidence and tends to generate a feeling of trust.

Personal space

This may be more important in America than a lot of other countries, as most Americans don’t feel comfortable if someone is standing too close to them while speaking with them.  It is important to maintain a distance of about four feet or more between yourself and the person you are talking to. 

       Exhibit good listening skills and don’t interrupt

In some cultures it is ok to interrupt, but not in America.  Making sure you show the person you are talking to that you place value on what they are saying is important, and not interrupting them is one way you can do this.  Another way you can demonstrate your good listening skills is to look interested in what they are saying and once in a while repeat something important they have said back to them.  Click on the link for more information about this. 

Different settings call for different and more specific etiquette.  For example, if you are conversing with a standardized patient for the Step 2 CS test to get your U.S. medical license, you need to exhibit a lot of empathy during the conversation.  For a business meeting, empathy may not be appropriate, but attentive listening would be. 

Along with good speaking skills, communication skills, which include body language and cultural norms, are important.

-->

English- Evolving or Devolving Language?

Is English an evolving or devolving language?
As I use clips from various television programs for student exercises, I find students having more difficulty understanding what people are saying in recent shows, as opposed to older television programs.  Speech from older programs seems to be more intelligible (understandable).  I've chosen two clips from two programs- one is from Mike and Molly which is a very recent program, and the other is from I Love Lucy which was produced in the 1950's.

•  Please watch the two clips below and leave comments as to which was easier for you to understand.

Sorry your comments are not showing up!  I am going to have to work on this and fix it.  Thank you.

Which video can you understand better?  I Love Lucy or Mike and Molly?

Language Mystery

Living without Numbers or Time


By Rafaela von Bredow

The Pirahã people have no history, no descriptive words and no subordinate clauses. That makes their language one of the strangest in the world -- and also one of the most hotly debated by linguists.

Linguistics generally focuses on what idioms across the world have in common. But the Pirahã language -- and this is what makes it so significant -- departs from what were long thought to be essential features of all languages.

The language is incredibly spare. The Pirahã use only three pronouns. They hardly use any words associated with time and past tense verb conjugations don't exist. Apparently colors aren't very important to the Pirahãs, either -- they don't describe any of them in their language. But of all the curiosities, the one that bugs linguists the most is that Pirahã is likely the only language in the world that doesn't use subordinate clauses. Instead of saying, "When I have finished eating, I would like to speak with you," the Pirahãs say, "I finish eating, I speak with you."

Equally perplexing: In their everyday lives, the Pirahãs appear to have no need for numbers. During the time he spent with them, Everett never once heard words like "all," "every," and "more" from the Pirahãs. There is one word, "hói," which does come close to the numeral 1. But it can also mean "small" or describe a relatively small amount -- like two small fish as opposed to one big fish, for example. And they don't even appear to count without language, on their fingers for example, in order to determine how many pieces of meat they have to grill for the villagers, how many days of meat they have left from the anteaters they've hunted or how much they demand from Brazilian traders for their six baskets of Brazil nuts.

The debate amongst linguists about the absence of all numbers in the Pirahã language broke out after Peter Gordon, a psycholinguist at New York's Columbia University, visited the Pirahãs and tested their mathematical abilities. For example, they were asked to repeat patterns created with between one and 10 small batteries. Or they were to remember whether Gordon had placed three or eight nuts in a can.

The results, published in Science magazine, were astonishing. The Pirahãs simply don't get the concept of numbers. His study, Gordon says, shows that "a people without terms for numbers doesn't develop the ability to determine exact numbers."

Consonant Clusters

Idioms

Full ahead (short for full steam ahead) (0:45)-we are going to make the ship go as fast as we can.  The ship was powered by steam, and they would have to heat the water as much as they could to create as much steam as they could, for the engine to be run at full capacity.  For more information on the engine of the Titanic click here.
Put your backs into it (0:46)- Work as hard as you can, with all the strength you have.