SPLIS Newsletter - February 2019 (Plain Text Version)
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In this issue: |
"I SIT SILENTLY": UNDERSTANDING SMALL TALK FOR PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT Rebecca Oreto, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
A successful international graduate student who is a PhD candidate from a highly competitive business school confided, “I have to eat lunches with my advisor and students from the Executive MBA program, and I never know what to say. I end up sitting silently the whole time, and that makes me feel stupid.” Even international graduate students who are fluent when presenting or participating in class discussions often lack the cultural knowledge and linguistic fluency to interact smoothly in casual discussions with an academic or professional audience. They often misunderstand the importance of “small talk” in professional situations. These linguistic and cross-cultural gaps can especially cause problems in professional development. A great deal of professional development stems from what begins as a casual chat with colleagues, but which develops into a more meaningful exchange of techniques, ideas, and experiences (Haigh, 2005, p. 8). In his article, “How to Get the Most Out of Scientific Conferences,” Reis (2000) highlights the importance of interacting with other researchers, as well as the informal conversations and the “no-notes talks” that scholars often give about their work and research. Without the linguistic ability and cross-cultural knowledge needed to take part in such collegial discussions, international graduate students are often left out of highly useful (but casual and spontaneous) professional development opportunities. The Intercultural Communication Center at Carnegie Mellon has developed a 90-minute Small Talk seminar that focuses on the cross-cultural background and practices of small talk in the United States. Typical small talk in the United States plays the role of getting people comfortable in a culture where social status and context are less defined than in some other cultures. In the United States, it is expected that you will chat with people who are both above and below you in social status; in fact, many Americans are uncomfortable with the idea that there are differences in social status in the United States. Also, because the United States is an immigrant country, it is hard to know another person’s background or how other people fit into U.S. society simply by looking at them. Americans use small talk to help set context and define the role of their discussant so that they can interact more comfortably. Although even many Americans themselves don’t realize it, successful small talk is about building comfort with each other. In addition, Americans are socialized as children to be able to move in and out of social groups smoothly—witness that in K–12 schooling in the United States, children rarely stay with one classroom group for longer than a year and by high school, they move in and out of different student groups with each class period. The ability to move smoothly into these groups is a high value skill. This is very different than in other cultures, where students may start with one group in school and stay with that group in all classes until they graduate—not only K–12, but also in the university. Discussing this information with the students gives them a perspective on U.S. culture that has been hidden to them up to this point and gives them a very different perspective on how U.S. culture functions. Students are usually confused about every part of the small talk process: how to start small talk, how to keep a conversation going, what topics to talk about, and how to end small talk. They realize that Americans often talk about the weather, but they don’t understand why: that the weather is a ritualized, nonthreatening topic that is used to begin a conversation with a person whose role you cannot pinpoint without further discussion. People in the United States use the weather (or local sports or upcoming holiday breaks and events) as an introduction to a more consequential topic. Americans also use these ritualized topics to extend an invitation to chat; a statement like “It’s really hot out there today!” is not a statement about the weather, but an invitation to engage in conversation. If students say a simple “yes” with no follow up, they are rejecting the invitation to chat, and may not receive another one. In the class session, I illustrate how the process of successful small talk works by looking at the “string of pearls” method:
In the session, we work together as a group to invent several sample small talks that might play out like this:
The students can easily see how the conversation could continue until the speakers wanted to break it off to go about other tasks and how, if they meet a second time, they could easily fall back into a conversation that refers to information from the previous conversation. The collocutors are now comfortable with each other. After this whole group practice, the students move into dyads or triads to work on building small talks with each other in prescribed situations:
Students begin to make small talk using the first context. After about 3 minutes, I stop them and say “Now imagine that the receptionist in the office has just called your name. You have to go. How do you end the conversation?” We brainstorm ways to end the conversation quickly and pleasantly, then they try it out in their small groups and report back how it worked out. The students then begin with new partners to try the second, then the third situations. After 3 or 4 minutes, I stop the small talk by telling them they need to end the conversation. They try out ways to end each of the small talks, share how they ended the small talks in each situation, and talk about how successfully they felt their conversations were. By the end of the 90-minute session, students report feeling more at ease with the concept of small talk as well as more willing to try out these conversations in the future. References Haigh, N. (2005). Everyday conversation as a context for professional learning and development. International Journal for Academic Development, 10(1), 3–16. Reis, R. M. (2000, February 4). How to get the most out of scientific conferences. Chronicle of Higher Education, Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-Get-the-Most-Out-of-/46399/ Rebecca Oreto is the associate director for the Intercultural Communication Center at Carnegie Mellon University. She is the founder of the ITA Professionals Symposium and has held several leadership positions in the TESOL International Teaching Assistants Interest Section. |
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