ALI259 0901

From Jeong-Yoon Lee's Wiki

Assignment

• Personal Opinion About 3rd Paragraph

When I worked at company before. I had many projects to cooperate with my collegue. For team projects, social conversation is very important to share our knowledge and goal. By sharing one's mistake on a work, the others can avoid the same mistake. The more we talk over the project, the better we understand what to do in the project. As a result, social conversation make us effective to work. Like this, one of purposes of social conversation is permitting groups to be effective.

Purposes of Social Conversation

• Sharing Information

 "Two heads are better than one" - you have heard this old saying many times. One brain has information that another does not have. "Putting your heads together," another old saying, simply means finding a way to connect two brains so that information can be chared. Social conversation does that. Conversation is a major method for education and learning.

• Reducing Tension

 When you meet someone for the first time and feel ill at ease, you usually attempt to reduce those feelings by trying to get to know the other person. You exchange simple messages such as, "Nice day, isn't it?" "Where are you from?" "My name is Hank Gallagher. What's your name?" "It sure is hot, isn't it?"
 These simple statements may seem unimportant, but they are an exploration of the other person. How the other person responds and how you reply give you and the other person information. You want to discover whether this other person is likeable, threatening, helpful, or useful. The other person has the same with to know things about you. Social conversation works to reduce initial fears and help you predict the behavior of others.

• Permitting Groups to be Effective

 Groups come into existence as a means of securing something of value to the members of the group. For example, a group of persons form a business to make a product and thereby earn a living. A sports team talks over the plays, game plan, and the signals to be used in order to win the game. Social conversation is the communication method most often used in a group to defined itself, to perform its activities, and to guarantee its success.

• Having Fun

 You and your friends like to have a good time - you enjoy telling jokes, relating gossip, criticizing, sharing experiences, and making plans. In other words, you like to "hang out." A major reason for social conversation is just that.

• Connecting with Others

 When you are just hanging out, you may observe that some peple inn the group do most of the talking, take charge, and direct the conversation, while others are quiet, listen, and make fewer contributions. This is fine unless you are one of the quiet ones and don't want to be. One of the important purposes of social conversation is to give you a feeling of belonging, a feeling of being an insider.

• Empathy

 Conversation too often is like listening to two individuals who are each carrying on a monologue, in other words, talking to themselves. It is much like the conversation above between John and Paolo. Successful conversation requires a dialogue, people talking to each other.
 If you observe and understand the real feelings of others, so that you are able to feel what another feels, then you are being empathic. One way to understand empathy is to think of going to sooky, scary movie. When watching it, you feel frightened. The feeling you experience is what is meant by empathy. You are not being threatened, but the characters in the movie are. You feel for them and identify with them. You are putting yourself in their shoes. Another way of understanding empathy is to imagine watching someone slice and eat a big, yellow, juicy lemon. How would you feel? Would you have a physical response?

Common Problems of Social Conversation

• Differences in Purpose

 Conversations between two or more persons often have several purposes going on at the same time. It is easy not to be aware of the various motives in another person's mind during a conversation. For example, your younger sister falls and scrapes her knee. She comes to see you, crying and asking for a bandage. You clean the cut, put on a bandage, and ask how it happened. You are responding to the problem you see. But you might not see that the reason your sister came to you and asked for help was that she wanted sympathy, attention, and love not just first aid.

• Self-centeredness

 All humans are, of course, interested in themselves. When you are young the tendency to be self-centered is generally greater than it will be as you grow older. A common problem in conversation is that others seldom really hear what you are saying and you seldom hear what they are really saying.
 More often that not, there are many different motives operating when you gather with friends and start talking about an approaching game, dance, or party. Conversation is often self-centered: It is an activity for you to express your feelings and needs rather than to listen to the needs and feelings of another.
 There are generally two levels of meaning in conversation. The first is the logical and surface level, and the second is the emotional and feeling level. It is easy to hear another person tell you that he or she is not going to a dance; it is another matter to hear what really lies behind that decision. In self-centered conversation, participants tend not to ask questions that reveal the emotional and feeling level.