LING 487 MLC ProSem2014 April 6

Anna Trester Hanwool Choe

Industry Research Report

Linguistic Analysis of Guidebook for living in Korea and Welcome to the U.S.

I am a practical sociolinguist with emphatic understanding

When I was given a Fulbright Gateway Orientation at New Jersey from August 5 to August 9, 2013, a state department officer said “as a Fulbrighter and a student ambassador, your mission is to bridge people and increase mutual understanding between them.” However, newness that I encountered since I came to the United States has overwhelmed my missionary zeal. As a foreigner, to get used to such new environment, culture, and people, all I need is understanding and adjustment. Many challenges that I have faced with are revealed through communication with others. It is not a simple matter like language barrier. It is about how to read others beyond their words.

While attending school, I happened to realize that sociolinguistics has the power to accomplish that mission. Through discourse analysis, I learn that heart meaning and intention of interaction exist behind words and structures seen and written. To understand and be understood, the concept of emphatic understanding is the key to bridge the communication gap. As a sociolinguist, using my academic training and knowledge, I want to be an insightful empathy builder for people.

South Korea: Are you ready for all-embracing society?

The industry that I will look into through this report is a guidebook for immigrants/refugees industry. My home country, South Korea, has been entering a multicultural phase with an increasing number of immigrants, North Korean defectors and international students, especially immigrant wives from Southeastern Asian countries. But since we have been used to racial/ethnic homogeneity, this multiculturalism has brought us a culture shock. I admit that Koreans have the lack of understanding and accepting differences. Although the government has been trying hard to establish legal, social, and cultural systems for newcomers, due to the lack of human resources, we have been taking slow steps to make progress through trials and errors.

What I am hoping is that through my Industrial Research Report, for those who write such guidebooks for newcomers, this report can set guidelines for how to design well-crafted consumer-oriented guidebooks and suggest substantive and effective feedback to the Korean government to make a more resourceful, informative, and truly immigrant-oriented guidebook. Then, Korean society can have an all-embracing vision.

Overview: Guidebook for Living in Korea (GLK) and Welcome to the United States (WU)

With the linguistic point of view, I am going to delve into Guidebook for Living in Korea (GLK), published by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family Republic of Korea and Welcome to the United States, a Guidebook for Refugees (WU) prepared by the Cultural Orientation Resource Center in the Center for Applied Linguistics. I mainly focus on what strengths WU has which would help GLK to complement and reinforce

GLK, third edition, was published on June 2013 and WU, fourth edition in 2012. Their publications were funded by each government. Each guidebook is downloadable at http://www.liveinkorea.kr/guidebook/en/ and http://www.culturalorientation.net/index.php/resources-for-refugees/welcome-set/welcome-to-the-united-states-guidebook. Both guidebooks include over 200 pages offering a variety of information to help newcomers to settle down, ranging from housing, health care to legal rights and responsibilities. Also, they are provided in many different languages. WU has 12 versions (Amharic, Arabic, English, Farsi, Karen, Kirundi, Nepali, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, and Tigrigna) and GLK is translated in 9 languages (Korean, English, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Khmer, Mongolian, Russian, and Japanese) for diverse readers’ convenience.

Analysis: Takeaway from WU

What I found most compelling from WU is its bottom-up methodology. It tries really hard to describe American life, being in immigrants’ shoes. I will take a look at how WU constructs and furnishes its reader-oriented contents and information in three linguistic aspects: 1) metamessage, 2) pronoun choice, and 3) word association.

1. Metamessage: “We Are Here To Help You”

Message includes hidden meaning and intentions as well as literal. According to Tannen (2012), metamessage is what is actually communicated beyond message. The WU’s way to guide newcomers succeeds in establishing positive metamessage: “We are here to help you. We know what struggles you would meet in your new community. We can take care of you”. This reader-oriented consideration is highly effective to convey friendliness and get readers to develop rapport with their new environment and people. To be specific, other than general daily life topics such as housing, health care, transportation, and employment, WU also spends their pages in Cultural Adjustment and Changing Roles (chapter 10) and Learning English (chapter 13). Chapter 10 tells how to learn living in a new country, coping with culture shock and stress. The most impressive section from chapter 10 is that it gives time to reflect on role-change happening within family members through resettlement in order to prevent difficulties and family struggles. For example, the book says one of the most widely expected thing is because children could pick up English faster than their parents, many immigrants/refugees’ kids become their parents’ translators or interpreters. The guidebook poses a lot of “if” questions to make readers get prepared for those situations and then suggests how American society will stand by them.

Secondly, WU’s contents are true-story based. It has others’ experiences, stories, and situations to think about and compare yours. Simultaneously, readers can get motivation and confidence, reading others in the same situation. WU’s joint attention strategy to share the focus on readers’ situations and problems is able to contribute to immigrants and refugee’s adaptability.

2. Friendly Pronoun

The linguistic concept of stance is useful to understand how speakers create and signal relationships with the propositions they give voice to, and the people they interact with (Biber and Finegan 1988,1989; Conrad and Biber 2000). Sets of choices for stance to present participant roles or subject positions are referred to as “footing” by Goffman (1981) and “framing” by Tannen (1979). The speaker’s footing or framing can be shown in personal pronouns. Their meticulous and careful pronoun use makes readers feel welcome, which leads to think that their new home country is friendly and secure. When WU calls readers, it uses the pronoun, “you”, compared to GLK, however, GLK mention its readers, employing third person (pro) nouns such as “they, foreigners, and foreign residents.” In addition, when a subject in sentence has to be a country – either Korea or U.S., WU uses tighter knit pronoun, first plural pronoun, “we”, instead of America or U.S., while GLK just uses “Korea”, which relatively gives the impression that naturalized people are still foreigners and Korea is just a foreign land to them, not their new home.

3. Learning through Word Association

The most significant feature of WU is integrated learning with word association. Each chapter starts with its overview, learning goals, and key English vocabulary related to each topic. For example, in Chapter 1, when you learn about Resettlement Journey, Chapter 1 key English vocabulary is courage, determination, goals, independent, journey, resettlement, and self-reliance. Readers are asked to translate them into their native language, draw a picture of the word, to write its meaning or make a sentence, using the word. Through key English vocabulary related to the topic, the readers get a naturally a sense of the topic and associate those words with the purpose of resettlement. The learners can themselves define what resettlement is and how to deal with resettlement through word association activity. Also, every chapter has a wrap-up test to double check what the readers learn and remind them of key points of the chapter, which is designed for self-learning. However, in GLK, it is more information-oriented. The general organization of GLK is to list and narrative amount of information which seems to be redundant and too much. For instance, GLK even includes the philosophy of national flag. It is a guidebook for resettling down in Korea, not a national promotional brochure.

References

Baldwin, D. A. (1995). Understanding the link between joint attention and language.

Biber, D., & Finegan, E. (1989). Styles of stance in English: Lexical and grammatical marking of evidentiality and affect.Text,9(1), 93-124.

Goffman, E. 1981. “Footing”, in Forms of Talk, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press: 124-59.

Moore & P.J. Dunham (Eds.)Joint attention: Its origins and role in development(pp.131- 158). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Tannen, D. 1979. “What’s in a frame? Surface evidence for underlying expectations”, Feedle, R. (ED), New Directions in Discourse Processing, Norwood, NJ: Ablex: 137-81.

______. (2012). The medium is the metamessage. Conversational style in new media interaction.Discoursce,2.0.: Language and New Media. Wasghinton, D.C. Georgetown University Press.

Guidebook for Living in Korea (GLK), published by Ministry of Gender Equality and Family Republic of Korea

Welcome to the United States, a Guidebook for Refugees, Fourth Edition, English Version 2012 prepared by the Cultural Orientation Resource Center, Center for Applied Linguistics

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