Teaching Pragmatic Competence in English to Arabic-Speaking Students

[Prof. Ahmed Shafik Elkhatib]

TEACHING PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE

IN ENGLISH TO ARABIC-SPEAKING STUDENTS







1. Introduction



Teaching English to Arabic-speaking students involves--or rather should involve--more than just familiarizing students with the sounds, vocabulary and grammar of the foreign language. It requires helping students use the language effectively, or at least in a social setting; i.e. it requires sociolinguistic or pragmatic competence. Although many linguists and English teachers realize the importance of such competence, little has been written on the nature of what must be taught or how teachers may go about helping students acquire it. In this paper we purport to attempt an approach to teaching pragmatic competence to our students, mainly through a role-playing/simulation approach. But before we set out to do this, we will first define the terms pragmatics, pragmatic competence, role playing, simulation, and speech act, which constitute the basic concepts used in the present paper.





2. Definitions



2.1 Pragmatics:

In the present paper, we adopt the definition of pragmatics offered by Richards, Platt, and Platt (1993:284-5):

the study of the use of language in communication, particularly

the relationships between sentences and the contexts and situations

in which they are used. Pragmatics includes the study of:

a how the interpretation and use of utterances depends on knowledge

of the real world

b how speakers use and understand speech acts

c how the structure of sentences is influenced by the relationship between

the speaker and the hearer.

Pragmatics is sometimes contrasted with semantics, which deals with

meaning without reference to the use and communicative functions of

sentences.



2.2 Competence: Communicative and Pragmatic:

Before we set out to define what is meant by pragmatic competence, it is necessary to define competence in the first place. Then we move to a definition of communicative competence, of which pragmatic competence is seen to form a part. (Cf. 2.2.2, 2.2.3, and Endnote 1.)



2.2.1 Competence: In Transformational Generative Grammar, Chomsky (1965) defines competence as a speaker’s internalized grammar of a language. This means a person’s ability to form and understand sentences, including sentences he/she has never heard before. It also includes a person’s knowledge of what are and what are not sentences of any language he/she is familiar with. Competence often refers to the ideal speaker/hearer, that is an idealized but not a real person who would have a complete knowledge of the whole language. A distinction is made between competence and performance, the latter being the actual use of the language by individuals in speech and writing.



2.2.2 Communicative Competence: Richards, Platt, and Platt (1993:65), Coulthard (1985), and Hymes (1977) define communicative competence as the ability not only to apply the grammatical rules of a language in order to form grammatically correct sentences but also to know when and where to use these sentences and to whom.

Communicative competence includes:

a knowledge of the grammar and vocabulary of the language

b knowledge of rules of speaking (e.g. knowing how to begin and end conversation, knowing what topics may be talked about in different types of speech events, knowing which address forms should be used with different persons one speaks to and in different situations

c knowing how to use and respond to different types of speech acts, such as requests, apologies, thanks, and invitations

d knowing how to use language appropriately

When someone wishes to communicate with others, he/she must recognize the social setting, his/her relation to the other person(s) (i.e. role relationship), and the types of language that can be used for a particular occasion. He/she must also be able to interpret written or spoken sentences within the total context in which they are used. For example, the English sentence It’s rather cold in here could be a request, particularly to someone in a lower role relationship, to close a window or door or to turn on the heating.

Fraser, Rintell, and Walters (1980:76-7) elaborate on more or less the same sentence given by Richards, Platt, and Platt above. They consider the sentence It’s cold in here. Uttered by the lord of the manor to his butler, the utterance may take on the meaning of the request, “Please close the window”; uttered by a wife to her husband, it might be intended to convey the suggestion, “Let’s leave now”; spoken by a tenant to his landlord, it might be interpreted as a complaint about the lack of heat.



2.2.3 Pragmatic Competence: Having defined the terms competence and communicative competence, we now turn to a definition of pragmatic competence. Fraser, Rintell, and Walters (1980:76) define pragmatic competence as “ the knowledge of how to use the linguistic competence in a social context.” (1) This definition should be seen in light of the fact that “a grammar is a system of rules that characterizes the sentences of a language, not the rules for use of the sentences”. (ibid.) They then (ibid.:77) sum up the situation by stating that

whereas linguistic competence can be viewed as the knowledge required

to construct or understand well-formed sentences of the language,

pragmatic competence can be viewed as the knowledge required to

determine what such sentences mean when spoken in a certain way

in a particular context.



We should bear in mind that pragmatic competence deals with the utterance level, while the more general level of communicative competence embodies some other areas (e.g. conversation structure, and participants’ choices of language structures) as well as the relevant nonverbal aspects of language use.



2.3 Role Playing:

Role playing, which is also called role play, is defined by Richards, Platt, and Platt (1993:318) as drama-like classroom activities in which students take the roles of different participants in a situation or act out what might typically happen in that situation. For example, to practice how to express complaints and apologies in a foreign language, students might have to role-play a situation in which a customer in a shop returns a faulty article to a salesperson. Role play is connected to simulation, which is similar to it in some respects and different from it in others, the major difference being the lack of group discussion in the case of role play.



2.4 Simulation:

Simulation consists in classroom activities that reproduce or simulate real situations and that often involve dramatization and group discussion. As we have already said, it is basically in the absence of group discussion that role play differs from simulation. In simulation activities, learners are given roles in a situation, tasks, or a problem to be solved, and are given instructions to follow, e.g. an employer-employee discussion over wage increase in a factory. The participants then make decisions and proposals. Consequences are “simulated” on the basis of decisions the participants take. They later discuss their actions, feelings, and what happened.



2.5 Speech Act:

A speech act, as defined by Richards, Platt, and Platt (1993:342-3) is “an utterance as a functional unit in communication.” It has two kinds of meaning: a a propositional/locutionary meaning, i.e. the basic literal meaning of the utterance which is conveyed by the particular words and structures which the utterance contains; b an illocutionary meaning/force, i.e. the effect the utterance or written text has on the reader or listener. For example, in I am thirsty the propositional meaning is what the utterance says about the speaker’s physical state. The illocutionary force is the effect the speaker wants the utterance to have on the listener. It may be intended as a request for something to drink. A speech act, then, is a sentence or utterance which has both propositional meaning and illocutionary force.

It is to be noted that in language teaching, and in syllabus design, speech acts are often referred to as “functions” or “language functions”. (2)





3. Underlying Assumptions



Attempting to teach pragmatic competence to our Arabic-speaking students, or rather to help them acquire/learn it, is based on the following assumptions:



3.1 Speaking Means Performing Speech Acts:

What a native speaker or a second/foreign language learner does in using the language in a social context is that he/she performs one or more speech acts, such as requesting, complaining, authorizing, declaring, apologizing, promising, etc. [L1] We can characterize the meaning of an utterance in terms of what speech act or acts the speaker has performed. With reference to the example given in 2.2.2 above, Fraser, Rintell, and Richards (1980:77), say that in uttering “It’s cold in here”, the lord of the manor is both making a declaration, and at the same time indirectly making a request to the effect of something like “Please close the window”. They add that the fact that the speaker in this case recognizes that this particular sentence under the conditions of speaking will serve his purposes of conveying a request to his butler to close the window, without having actually told him to do so, reflects his pragmatic competence.

For any particular speech act, there is a variety of ways by which the speaker conveys his intentions. The observed variation of ways to perform such speech acts is part of the speaker’s pragmatic performance.



3.2 A Basic Set of Speech Acts:

Every language makes available to the user the same basic set of speech acts, such as requesting, apologizing, declaring, and promising, etc. There may be certain exceptions which are related to culture-specific speech acts like baptizing, for example.



3.3 A Set of Strategies:

Every language makes available the same set of strategies (i.e. semantic formulas) for performing a given speech act. If one can request, for example, in one language by asking the hearer about his/her ability to do the act (Can you do that?), by expressing one’s desire for the hearer to do the act (I’d really appreciate it if you’d do that), or by explicitly announcing what one intends (I request that you do that), then the same strategies/semantic formulas are available to the speaker of every other language. There are, of course, limitations on the equivalence of strategies across languages regarding some details of the strategy, e.g. the non-existence in some languages of an elliptical version like Why not do that now?



3.4 ‘When’ and ‘How’ Differences Between Languages:

Languages differ significantly with respect to both when a particular speech act ought to be, ought not to be, or may be performed, and with what strategy. Two languages, or rather two language-culture pairings may differ significantly in terms of what the speakers of each do when and how. Fraser, Rintell, and Walters (1980:79-80) cite some interesting examples:

Consider, for example, the situation in which the English speaker is

eating in a restaurant, and another person, sitting nearby, is permitting

cigarette smoke to cloud the diner’s space. The English speaker might

very well request that the smoker move, or perhaps put out the cigarette.

Hispanic speakers report that they would probably say nothing at all—it

would not be appropriate to ask the smoker to alter his behavior. Similarly,

in the united States today, the individual who belches is expected to offer an

apology to the surrounding company; In Germany or Japan, such an

apology is not expected. Finally, one friend meeting another on the street in

Italy might request a cigarette by using the Italian equivalent of “Hey, give

me a cigarette.” This comes off in English as far more abrupt and lacking

appropriate deference.



3.5 Cultural Transfer:

When an individual belonging to a pairing of language-culture A is trying to learn the pairing of language-culture B, and in the process observes a certain form in culture B, he grasps the same complex of meaning as in his own language-culture. And when he/she in turn engages actively in a unit of behavior in culture B he chooses the form which he would choose in his own culture to achieve that complex of meaning. (3)

In Lado’s words (1974:2),

individuals tend to transform the forms and meanings, and the distribution

of forms and meanings of their native language and culture to the foreign

language and culture – both productively when attempting to speak

the language and to act in the culture, and receptively when attempting

to grasp and understand the language and the culture as practiced by natives.





4. The Proposed Approach



Now we turn our attention to the proposed approach to teaching pragmatic competence to Arabic-speaking students.



4.1 Role Play/Simulation:

This approach consists basically in developing a method of role-playing and simulation in which the students are asked to participate with the teacher in a series of more or less structured situations/exercises. The teacher describes in some detail to the students a situation and then asks them to tell him/her exactly what they would say or do. They are told that they should talk to the teacher and to each other as if they were actually the person(s) with whom they are speaking in the situation which the teacher describes, even though the addressee(s) will not usually resemble that/those person(s). Students are advised that sometimes they might want to go on at some length in expressing their views.

It is important for students to understand that they are in no way given a “mark” on their responses. They are also told that there are no right or wrong answers, and that sometimes more than one answer might be appropriate, in which case they should feel free to offer the alternatives. Also, if they want to talk about the situations after they respond, or raise any other topics they might feel to be relevant, they are encouraged to do so.

During the role play and/or the simulation sessions, the teacher’s part is basically that of a facilitator and moderator. Sometimes, he/she actively participates in the role play or the simulation through assuming the role of one of the participants. At all times, he/she should be readily available to take part in the discussions following the sessions, and to answer any queries the students may pose, especially those related to the culture(s) of English-speaking people. The teacher’s role is also to comment on and set right any communicative pitfalls which the students may get themselves into. Needless to say that the teacher is definitely in a better position to undertake this task if he/she is adequately familiar with such cultural matters.



4.2 Conversational Rules, Non-verbal Behavior, Pronunciation, and Taboo:

To supplement the role play/simulation technique, teachers may also make use of some other techniques. Dufva (1991) mentions familiarizing the students with non-grammatical errors, or the errors related to the breakdown of conversational rules or non-verbal behavior, which are seen to ‘compromise a speaker’ more than grammatical or lexical errors. She also calls for giving some attention to non-native pronunciation difficulties when the foreign language learner inadvertently uses what she calls ‘a taboo expression’, e.g. impotent rather than important. Dufva also calls attention to the problems related to inter-lingual taboo words in advertisements or what she calls taboo names. Dufva finally draws our attention to some discourse problems such as temporal patterns of communication, (4 ) and social errors related to eating, (5 ) drinking, (6) and sanitation.



4.3 World Knowledge:

It is important to familiarize our students, especially junior students, with ways of the world, or what is usually referred to as world knowledge, which, according to Hirose (1993) influences the interpretation of ambiguous sentences and affects linguistic development. World knowledge plays an important role in sentence comprehension, which involves more than a syntactically autonomous issue and relies on the clues that are not part of the grammar. Hirose found that world knowledge helps children in assigning an alternative structure they would not normally assign to the sentence. As a result of this, a child may become aware of the fact that a sentence can have more than one meaning.



4.4 Indirect Speech Acts and Politeness Strategies:

Special care should be given to teaching students how to make indirect speech acts and how to employ politeness strategies. A speech act which is performed indirectly is sometimes known as an indirect speech act, such as the speech acts of requesting given above in 2.5 (I am thirsty) and 3.1 (It’s cold in here.). The students’ attention should be drawn to the fact that direct speech acts are often felt to be more polite ways of performing certain kinds of speech act such as requests and refusals. (7)



4.6 Using Authentic Teaching Material:

I quite agree with McKnight that all human communication, whether among native or non-native speakers, is inherently problematic, ambiguous, and subject to negotiation, and therefore, learners of a second/foreign language should be taught to cope with ambiguity, approximations, hypotheses, and guesses rather than be pushed to find the “right answer”. (8)

Unfortunately, much of the instructional material used in English courses for Arabic-speaking students is inappropriate. (9) Language teaching materials should expose learners to carefully-selected authentic data as soon as possible, to assist them in developing strategies for dealing with difficult language. Such authentic materials should follow the grammatical, phonological, orthographic, as well as the social, cultural, discourse, and pragmatic conventions of English. These authentic materials may be used as the basis for role play/simulation sessions and for class discussions.







5. A Few Examples of Role Play/Simulation Situations



5.1 The Library Situation: Students are asked to request that a stranger, about to check out a book from the public library, allow the student to take out the book instead, for a couple of days.



5.2 The Game Situation: In this situation, a student/spectator has to ask another member of the audience to change seats to allow the student’s nine-year old nephew a better view.



5.3 The Appointment Situation: You have made an appointment to meet a friend at noon on a certain day. On that day, you are very busy and completely forgot about the date until 12:30. You hurriedly find a taxi and rush to the meeting place to find your friend waiting for you. What would you say?



5.4 The Next-Thursday Situation: On Monday, you make an appointment with an American friend to meet a few days later. You say something like, “How about next Thursday?” to which he agrees. You go to the meeting place on time but you do not find him. You later call him to know why he did not show up. He says to you something like, “But you said ‘next Thursday’, not ‘this Thursday’ ”. What would you say?









ENDNOTES



(1) It is to be noted that the domain of pragmatics or pragmatic competence as defined in the present paper falls far short of what some linguists (e.g. Hymes:1972) call communicative competence. For example, excluded from consideration are: the knowledge of the speaker-hearer that deals with the use of language in conversation; the way conversations are structured; and the particular choices of language structures which the conversational participants make. Research into this broader area of investigation goes under a variety of names, including discourse analysis, conversational analysis, conversational interaction, and ethnomethodological studies.



(2) Language functions have relatively recently become part of the English language syllabus in Egyptian schools. For example, A Self-Evaluation Guide in English (1995-6:3-10;45-52) includes three types of questions:

A. Students are asked to look at pictures and complete missing parts in mini-dialogues. For example, in a picture there are two boys and a big suitcase on the floor. We read the following:

Ahmad: …………………

Sherif: I’m afraid I can’t.

B. Students are asked what they would say in certain situations. For example:

You never drink tea. You visit a friend. He offers you a cup of tea. What do you say?

C. Students are asked to supply the missing parts in dialogues. For example:

Usama asks Hany to go with him to the cinema. They want to watch a new film.

Students are then supposed to provide five sentences or parts of sentences to complete the dialogues. In some of the sentences students are required to provide what the first person said and in others what the second person said.



(3)The source of this assumption is Lado (1974:114). As an example of the same form having a different meaning, he gives (ibid.:114-5) the interesting example of bullfighting. In Spanish culture bullfighting is a sport. It symbolizes the triumph of art over the brute force of a bull. It is entertainment. It is a display of bravery. However, the meaning of the same spectacle is quite different to an American. It is the slaughter of a “defenseless” animal by an armed man. It is unfair because the bull always gets killed. It is unsportsmanlike – to the bull. It is cruel to animals. The fighter is therefore cruel. The public is cruel.

A probably similar example is the recent uproar the French actress Bridget Bardot caused when she expressed the view that “killing” sheep by Muslims in Id Al-Adha was merciless.



(4) Levinson (1993:76) points out the ambiguity in the time deixis next Thursday, which can refer either to the Thursday of the week that succeeds the week that includes CT [i.e. coding time], or that Thursday that first follows CT. He calls our attention to the fact that on a Friday or a Saturday, these will coincide.

It is interesting to note that next Thursday is ambiguous in Arabic only on Friday, but not on Saturday since Saturday is the beginning of a new week in the Arab culture, but not so in the American or British culture. In other words, there is coincidence in the case of making the utterance on Friday but no coincidence in the case of making it on Saturday.



(5) Probably related to this is an expression such as “eat one’s soup”, which I first heard as a newcomer to the States. In Arabic, one “drinks one’s soup”.



(6) Mattar (1989:51), in discussing Egyptian students’ errors in the use of certain items that bring up the wrong associations in the target culture (in this case English culture), gives this example: We took lunch and had a drink, which, to her, may have the connotation of an alcoholic drink, while the student only meant a soft drink/a soda.



(7) Takahashi and Roitblat (1994:475-506) tested the comprehension of indirect requests by native English speakers and Japanese learners of English. Subjects read stories inducing either a conventional or a literal interpretation of a priming sentence. Both native and non-native groups were found to be able to process both meanings of an ambiguous conventional request.



(8) Speaking of the “right answer”, I remember that when I was a first-year preparatory student, our English textbook started with the sentence: My name is Zuhdy written under the picture of a schoolboy. When our English teacher asked one of the students, “What’s your name?”, the student answered, “My name is Zuhdy.” The teacher, who knew that this was not the student’s name, asked him about his real name. The student very confidently said, “My name is (so and so), but the right answer is ‘My name is Zuhdy’ ”.



(9) Almost all students in Egypt remember such ‘classic’ examples as :

When I was walking in the street, I met my friend Ali and If it rains, I shall stay at home. (Incidentally, the friend was always Ali, and no one else but Ali. The only possible ‘variation’ was the alternative spelling Aly. As far as the other example is concerned, one cannot help saying that rain occurs in ‘Egyptian’ English much more frequently than it falls in Egypt.





BIBLIOGRAPHY



Applied Linguistics. (Dec. 1984) Vol. 4 (A Special Edition on Pragmatics)



Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House, and Gabriele Kasper, ed. (1989)

Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex Pub. Corp.



Chomsky, Noam. (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.



Coulthard, M. (1985) (Second Edition). An Introduction to Discourse Analysis. London: Longman.



Dufva, Hannele. (1991) “Innocents Abroad: The Politics of Cross-Cultural Communication”. ERIC Document No. ED 341277.



Fraser, Bruce, Ellen Rintell, and Joel Walters. (1980) “An Approach to Conducting Research on the Acquisition of Pragmatic Competence in a Second Language.” In Diane Larsen-Freeman, Discourse Analysis in Second Language Research. Rowley, MA: Newbury House Publishers.



Fries, Charles C. (1955) “American Linguistics and the Teaching of English.” Language Learning, Vol. 6, Nos. 1 and 2.



Hirose, Yuki. (1993) “World Knowledge in Children’s sentence Comprehension”. MITA Working Papers in Psycholinguistics. Vol. 3, pp. 17-31.



Hymes, Dell. (1972) Models of the Interaction of Language and Social Life. In J. Gumperz and D. Hymes (eds.), Directions in Sociolinguistics. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.



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Lado, Robert. (1974) (Eleventh Printing). Linguistics Across Cultures: Applied Linguistics for Language Teachers. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.



Levinson, Stephen C. (1983) Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



Mattar, Olga. (1989) “Form and Meaning in the Written Language of Egyptian Students”. In Literature, Linguistics, and Culture in Language Teaching. Proceedings Ninth National Symposium on English Language Teaching in Egypt. Cairo: Centre for Developing English Language Teaching (CDELT).



McKnight, Alex. (1995) “Pragmatics and TESOL: Using Authentic Language Data”. ERIC Document No. 384 221.



Richards, Jack C., John Platt, and Heidi Platt. (1993) (Third Impression). Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics. Longman.



Takahashi, Satomi and Herbert L. Roitblat. (Dec. 1994) “Comprehension Process of Second Indirect Requests”, Applied Psycholinguistics. Vol. 15, No. 4, pp. 475-506.



Wierzbicka, Anna. (1991) Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: The Semantics of Human Interaction. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.



















APPENDIX



(This appendix includes some anecdotes related to cultural differences between the Arab culture and the American culture. These anecdotes may be used as the basis for some role play/simulation situations to help Arabic-speaking students improve their pragmatic competence. Some of these anecdotes may also be useful in teaching Arabic to English-speaking learners.)





(1) According to Lado (1974:118), a hiss (a sharp, voiceless sibilant sound) expresses disapproval in the United states. In Spanish-speaking countries it is the normal way to ask for silence in a group. Fries (1955:17) reports being taken aback the first time he faced a Spanish-speaking audience and heard them “hissing”. He wondered if they were hissing at him. Later he learned that they were calling for silence.

It is to be noted that hissing in some Arabic-speaking countries (at least in Egypt) has the same meaning it has in Spanish-speaking countries.



(2) Lado (ibid.) also gives this example about drinking milk and wine across cultures. He says that drinking milk at meals is a standard practice in the United states. To Americans it has a primary meaning of food and drink, standard drink at meal time. It does not have any special connotation of social class, national group, religious group, age group, or economic stratum. Wine, on the other hand, may be served on special occasions or by special groups of the population who have had special contacts with other cultures. Wine, thus, has the meanings special occasion, special group of people.

Lado goes on to tell us that in France milk at meals is not the standard drink. Some children may drink milk, some adults may drink milk for special reasons, some individuals or families or groups may drink milk because of special cultural contacts. Drinking milk at meals in France has the secondary meanings of special drink, special occasion, or special group of people. Its primary meaning would be food and drink for the body.

It is to be noted that in Egypt at least, the situation as regards drinking milk is very similar to, if not identical with, that in France. As for the attitude towards drinking wine, it is much different from that in the States since it is prohibited for Muslims, who form the great majority of the population, to drink it. While it has the meaning of special occasion, and special group of people in America, it has the meaning of religious prohibition in Muslim countries.

Now to the anecdote! Having successfully defended my M.A. Thesis way back in the late seventies, one member of the examination committee, who happened to be American, wanted to be nice and therefore suggested champagne. My mother, who was among the audience, could not help feeling upset. It was only when her feeling showed on her face that the well-meaning man realized the trap he got himself into.



(3) Lado (ibid.:118-9) tells us about a young man from Iran, who gets off the train in a small town of the United States. He claims his baggage and attempts to hail a taxi. A likely car with a white license plate and black letters goes by. The young man waves at it. The car does not stop. Another car appears with the same type of license plate. The young man waves again, without success. Frustrated because in the United states taxis will not stop for him, he picks up his suitcases and walks to his destination. He later finds out that taxis in the United states are distinguished not by a white license plate, but by bright flashing lights and loud colors. In the native town of the Iranian man at that time the signal for a taxi was a white license plate. This was an intelligent university-level student stumbling over a predictable type of problem.

What happened to me in Tunis was that I stopped a police car instead of a taxi!

Similar to this anecdote is what happened to me the first time I took a bus in New York City. I got on the bus and immediately occupied one of the vacant seats. I waited for a while for the conductor to show up, but he did not. Looking around and back, I failed to see him. Meanwhile, I caught the Driver’s eyes in the mirror. He looked a little angry, but I could not realize why. He waved at me and asked me to pay the fare. After asking him how much it was, I took the money out of my pocket and tried to hand it to him. Once again he looked angry. He finally pointed at a box with a slot where I was supposed to drop the money, which I finally did. The lessons I learned from this embarrassing situation were: the driver was the ‘conductor’ at the same time; how much the fare was; the fare must be dropped in the slot; and finally that one must have the exact fare, and must not expect to get change from the driver-conductor.



(4) As Lado rightly tells us (ibid.:120), the same form of behavior may have different meanings across cultures. For example, back in the late seventies and early eighties when I was a graduate student in the States, a female colleague of mine who happened to be American, and who was usually very casually dressed, showed up in class one day very elegantly dressed, and wearing full make-up. She apparently expected a compliment from any of the few men taking the course. Although I thought to myself that she was entitled to a compliment, I was afraid to make it lest she should think I was “flirting”—the interpretation which in the Arab culture is more often than not assigned to such cross-sex compliments, unless you know the person very well. Eventually, she had to ‘complain’ that the class was being inconsiderate. (She presumably wanted to avoid stronger words such as ‘rude’ for example.) The issue we have here concerns cross-cultural differences in complimenting behavior.



(5) During my stay in the States, I once received a letter which included an invitation to participate in sweepstakes. On opening the letter, I was immediately shocked by the picture of an owl looking at me in the eye. Remembering what I had once read about the (‘strange’) choice of this bird to be the sign of good luck in America, I started to relax. But I soon started to think about why is it that we in the Arab culture consider an owl (or even its picture) to be a bad omen.



(6) My wife once went to see a doctor during our stay in New York City. When he asked her what her name was, she -- as is usual in the Arab culture -- told him her first name. The man later called up to tell us about the arrangements for hospitalization for a minor surgery she had to undergo. On answering the phone, I was immediately asked if I was Mr. so and so. This so-and-so was nothing but my wife’s first name. Needless to say that it took me a while to recover from the amusement and laughter of this inadvertent situation.