For Openers

This book investigates request strategies in Mandarin Chinese and Korean, and is one of the first attempts to address cross-cultural strategies employed in the speech act of requests in two non-Western languages. The data, drawn from role-plays and naturally recorded conversations, complement each other in terms of exhaustiveness and authenticity. This study explores the similarities and differences of the request patterns that emerged in the Chinese and Korean data, and the intricate relation between request strategies and social factors (such as power and distance). The findings raise questions about the influence of methodology on data, and the applicability of so called universals to East Asian languages. They also offer new insights into generally held ideas of directness and requesting behaviours in Chinese and Korean, and the problems of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic communication.This research is suggestive for the disciplines of cross-cultural pragmatics, cross-cultural communication, contrastive linguistics, applied linguistics and discourse analysis.

Whether you run board meetings, community groups, a family, a staff meeting or you teach, you are a group leader. But whether or not you are a good one is an open question. Joan Haley, who has led groups and given presentations most of her professional life and studied educational theory and training, shares a proven process for effectively leading groups and provides many concrete techniques to facilitate learning. She shares the Group Process Formula® which is a conceptual framework she developed to work with groups of any kind. The Formula is a failsafe structure ensuring leaders enjoy their groups and maximizes the learning of each participant. Just as important, she reveals how a leader effectively facilitates learning so that participants feel the group is a safe place to work through their own process of self-discovery, and utilizes the power of the group as a whole to bolster that learning. Haley provides information to make sure participants walk away with newfound skills, attitudes and behaviors to use in their lives.