Volume 5, Issue 2 , September 2017, , Pages 91-104
Abstract
Outside of Western contexts, natural-conversation-based research on intergenerational communication is relatively rare. To help redress this imbalance, this paper explores the conversational styles of first-encounter talks between five pairs of college students and older adults in Taiwan, and infers ...
Read More
Outside of Western contexts, natural-conversation-based research on intergenerational communication is relatively rare. To help redress this imbalance, this paper explores the conversational styles of first-encounter talks between five pairs of college students and older adults in Taiwan, and infers the interactional norms that underlie them. It is found that younger Taiwanese adults tend to exhibit great formality in their conversational styles, manifested as frequent appeals to older people’s positive face, and a preference for quick question-asking especially at the opening of the talks. Older adults, in contrast, exhibited lower levels of commitment to eliciting information from their interlocutors and were more likely to interrupt them. Younger adults appeared uneasy when hearing older adults’ painful self-disclosures, as reflected in the former’s minimal responses or quick shifts to other topics. The conversational styles pinpointed by this research are discussed in terms of how the observed intergenerational communication could be problematic.
This paper uses critical discourse analysis to examine discursive representations of older people in Taiwanese newspapers. A total of 926 references to older people were sampled from 62 articles published in four Taiwanese newspapers from January to August 2013. The findings suggest that, older people ...
Read More
This paper uses critical discourse analysis to examine discursive representations of older people in Taiwanese newspapers. A total of 926 references to older people were sampled from 62 articles published in four Taiwanese newspapers from January to August 2013. The findings suggest that, older people were frequently allocated roles suggestive of dependency. Those portrayed in line with the positive golden ager stereotype were more likely to be treated as identifiable individuals, via referential strategies including nomination, titulation, functionalization, and honorifics. People of very advanced ages, meanwhile, were often discussed in the contexts of problems or tragedies. On the whole, negative stereotypes of older people were dominant within the sample, and appeared to be treated as more newsworthy. The articles occasionally reported positive experiences of aging, but implied that, these were exceptional. The nature of older age and aging as discursively constructed in Taiwanese newspapers appears to be problematic for those seeking to build a less ageist society in Taiwan.