What Does That Have To Do With the Flow of Ideas? Relevance in indonesian and American Interaction

Abstract

The study of communicative style is important for understanding difficulties that arise in cross-cultural communication, but has been little researched in Indonesia, an area with a long history of cross-cultural interaction. This thesis looks at one aspect of communicative style, the maintenance of relevance, in groups of Indonesians and Americans involved in discussing an issue of professional concern through the medium of English. Relevance is analyzed in terms of the topic frameworks which the participants use for establishing the relevance of contributions made in the discussions. It is found that the American participants actively create relevance in the discussions, while the Indonesians participants assume the relevance of contributions to the discussions. Implications for the field of discourse analysis and for cross-cultural communication are discussed.