Conducted in four schools with six FETs and fourteen LETs in total for a whole semester, this present study qualitatively investigated two questions regarding the cross-cultural communication among team teachers, i.e., the common issues and the sociopragmatic failures that occurred in the communication between the FETs and LETs and how these two questions changed throughout the time of collaboration.
To answer the first research question, issues concerning three main categories, teaching, administration, and socializing, were found. First, issues regarding
“teaching” were the most frequently mentioned, such as “discussion of lessons,”
“classroom management,” “cooperation about teaching,” “discussion about
language,” “current ability of students,” “progression of the class,” “discussion about communication,” “facilitating comprehension between FETs and students,” and
“increasing FETs’ interaction with students.” Among them, “current ability of students,” “progression of the class,” and “discussion about communication” were mostly initiated by the FETs, and “increasing FETs’ interaction with students” was only initiated by the LETs. Second, in the category “administration,” issues
commonly addressed were “brainstorm of activities,” “classroom equipment,” “time and place for classes and meetings,” “discussion about language,” “work
distribution,” “teachers’ right,” “work announcement,” and “contract.” Among them,
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“classroom equipment,” “work announcement,” and “contract” were more likely to be initiated by the LETs, and no issues were found to be only initiated by the FETs in this category. Third, issues regarding “socializing” that were frequently touched upon were “etiquette,” “daily conversation,” “discussion about language,” “gossip,”
“appreciation or compliment,” “opinions about the job,” and “facilitating
comprehension between FETs and other school teachers or staffs,” all of which were initiated by both the LETs and FETs evenly. Among all these common issues, notable changes were found in three sub-issues, which were “facilitating comprehension between FETs and students” and “increasing FETs’ interaction with students” from the category “teaching” and “etiquette” from the category “socializing.”
As for the first part of the second research question, “classroom management”
and “discussion of lessons” in the category “teaching” were found as the most frequently discussed sub-issues and also more likely to induce the occurrence of sociopragmatic failures, because of the need for the team teachers to frequently perform directive acts, which were potentially face-threatening. To answer the second part of the second research question, observed sociopragmatic failures in this study were categorized into two stages, at which the LETs and FETs were found having different strategies and perceptions when performing directive acts. Four dimensions were revealed in the first, pre-communication stage. For the dimension—tell it or not, the LETs tended to avoid performing directive acts while the FETs were prone to openly perform the acts. When approaching the second dimension—tell it to whom, the LETs were less likely to perform the acts to people with higher power status, whereas the FETs were not as concerned about the status of the interlocutors. As to the third dimension—when to tell it, the LETs performed the acts after they build consensus among speakers and establish relationship with hearers; the FETs, on the other hand, preferred to perform the acts more quickly as they prioritized task over
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relationship. The last dimension at this stage was where to tell it. The LETs tended to avoid performing the acts in public, and the FETs did not have such preference.
All these various concerns regarding the four dimension occurred when team teachers were about to enact directive acts. In terms of how they performed directive acts at the second, during-communication stage, they also displayed differed
preferences for their language behaviors in four different aspects. For linguistic forms, the LETs were inclined to use hedge words and interrogative sentences, and the FETs tended to use modal verbs and negative questions. The other three aspects were all relevant to interactional skills. The first one is skill of sugarcoating, the LETs were found to sugarcoat their directive acts frequently, but the FETs did not show this tendency. For another interactional skill regarding information sequencing, the
subordinate “because” clause was usually emphasized and placed before or right after the main clause by the LETs. In contrast, the FETs focused on the message in the main clause and presented it first. The last interactional skill is about conversational style. The LETs’ showed less overlapping with longer pauses between speaking turns, while the FETs overlapped more and had shorter pauses.
The third part of the second research question regarding how sociopragmatic failures changed throughout the time cannot be fully answered. Sociopragmatic failures observed in the two communication stages were not found to change
throughout the time of team teachers’ collaboration in this study, possibly due to the insufficient data collected from only one semester.
The FETs’ direct and straightforward language style and the LETs’ indirect and ambiguous way of communication can be explained by the different cultural patterns by which they were influenced. The FETs were from individualistic, low-context, task-oriented cultures, where self-autonomy is emphasized and direct way of using language is encouraged. The LETs, on the contrary, grew up in collectivistic,
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high-context, relationship-oriented cultures, where group rapport and harmony plays an important role and indirect way of speech is appreciated.
Again, this study does not try to claim that the examples found in these four schools can be generalized to all the other teachers from the same culture. Other social factors such as demographic variables and individual differences like
personality should be taken into consideration as well. However, the findings of this study do shed light on the importance of culture and how it may influence the communication between LETs and FETs and attitudes toward each other. Hopefully, after learning the experiences from the participants in this study, future LETs and FETs can be more open-minded and communicate more efficiently when interacting with each other.