Story Co-construction and Establishment of Mutual Consent: Convergences and Divergences between English, Japanese and Korean Story Co-construction and Establishment of Mutual Consent: Convergences and Divergences between English, Japanese, and Korean

Abstract

This paper aims to show similarities and differences in the establishment of mutual consent in problem-solving tasks engaged in by English, Japanese, and Korean speakers. We examined `Mr. O Corpus`, where two people worked together to construct a coherent story by arranging 15 picture cards. We classified all the verbal behaviors into three categories: a) the storyline, b) descriptions about the cards, and c) ordering of the cards. The results show that 82.6% of their total turns by English pairs but only 73.7% by Japanese and 77.2% by Korean pairs belong to the three types of talk. Further analyses show that English speakers tend to be direct and task-oriented whereas Japanese and Korean speakers tend to be interactionally- oriented.