Communication

Activity 5.1 — Name That Function ★

Practices: the six functions and identifying the dominant one (§5.3).

For each Thai-context message below, identify all functions present and circle the dominant one (referential, emotive, conative, phatic, metalingual, poetic).

1. BTS announcement: “The next station is Siam. Change here for the Silom Line.”
2. A billboard: “อร่อยที่สุด! (The most delicious!)”
3. A friend’s LINE message: “อยู่ไหน 555 (Where are you 555)”
4. A teacher: “The word ‘kreng chai’ means a feeling of considerate deference.”
5. A protest chant or campaign slogan with rhyme.
6. A monk beginning a chant in Pali.
7. “โอ๊ย! (Ouch!)”

Instructor notes

• (1) referential (states facts about the world). (2) conative (persuade to buy) with poetic (superlative, punch). (3) phatic (maintaining contact; “555” = laughing, keeps the channel warm). (4) metalingual (talking about the code, defining a word). (5) poetic in service of conative: good moment to note poetic devices can be subordinate (§5.4). (6) largely phatic/poetic, and if the meaning is opaque to the listener, primarily contact/ritual. (7) emotive.
• Emphasize Jakobson’s key insight: all six are usually present; analysis means finding the dominant one (§5.3).
• Have pairs argue any disagreements: dominance is often genuinely debatable (e.g., is an ad’s superlative poetic or conative-first?).

Activity 5.2 — Rewrite for a Function

Practices: how the same content changes the message when re-oriented (§5.3).

Start with one neutral, referential sentence, e.g. “The night market closes at 10 p.m.” Rewrite it five times so that a different function dominates each version:

• emotive (express your feelings about it)
• conative (get someone to act)
• phatic (just keep a chat going)
• metalingual (clarify a word in it)
• poetic (make it rhyme or use parallelism)

Instructor notes

• Sample: emotive (“Ugh, the market shuts at ten already?!”); conative (“Hurry, the market closes at ten. let’s go!”); phatic (“You know the market? Closes at ten, right? Anyway…”); metalingual (“By ‘market’ I mean the night market, and it closes at 22:00.”); poetic (“Ten o’clock, the stalls all lock.”).
• Demonstrates that function is about orientation, not content (§5.3). Same facts, six messages.
• Quick, playful, and a strong formative check of whether students really grasp the functions.

Activity 5.3 — Why Slogans Stick: The Poetic Function

Practices: the poetic function as the projection of equivalence onto the sequence: rhyme, rhythm, parallelism (§5.4).

Collect three “sticky” Thai texts: an advertising jingle, a luk thung or mo lam lyric line, a proverb (suphasit), or a campaign slogan. For each, identify the device that makes it memorable (rhyme, alliteration, assonance, rhythm, or parallelism) and explain, in Jakobson’s terms, how “the formal patterning of the message is itself part of what it means.”

Then test the claim: rewrite one of them in plain, non-poetic language. Is anything lost?

Instructor notes

• The plain rewrite is the crucial test: the referential content survives, but memorability and force collapse, proof that “the patterning of the message is itself part of what it means” (§5.4).
• Thai is tonal and rhyme-rich; luk thung and advertising exploit internal rhyme heavily. Students often find Thai examples more obviously poetic than English ones.
• Reinforce the “dominant” point: in a slogan the poetic function usually serves a conative aim (§5.4); it is a tool, not the end.

Activity 5.4 — Register and Kreng Chai: A Role-Play

Practices: pragmatics, code-switching, register, and context-dependent meaning (§5.5).

The same request must be delivered to four addressees, adjusting register each time. Take the simple message “I can’t come to the meeting tomorrow” and script/perform it to:

1. a monk or a senior teacher/professor,
2. your boss,
3. a close friend,
4. a younger sibling.

For each, note the changes: pronouns, polite particles (ครับ/ค่ะ), directness, honorifics, and how kreng chai (เกรงใจ, considerate deference) reshapes what you can say.

Instructor notes

• Thai grammaticalizes register far more than English (pronouns, particles, honorific vocabulary), so students feel §5.5 immediately. Map the changes back to Saussure’s paradigm (§3.6): each slot offers a set of options with social value.
• Kreng chai is the pragmatic key: with a monk or boss, the conative directness of “I can’t come” is softened almost out of existence; the same proposition, radically different encoding. Ties to §7.7’s point about doctor–patient communication.
• Keep monk role-play respectful; students may prefer a “teacher” framing.

Activity 5.5 — Diagnose the Breakdown

Practices: using Jakobson's factors + noise/redundancy/code to diagnose miscommunication (§5.1, §5.6–5.7).

Read (or recall) a real cross-cultural mishap in Thailand (e.g., a tourist and a vendor, an expat and a landlord, a foreigner misreading a wai or a smile). Using the model, locate the failure: was it a mismatch of code, context/common ground, channel/noise, or a wrong assumption about which function was dominant?

Write a two-sentence “diagnosis + fix.”

Instructor notes

• Model diagnoses: a smile read as “happy” when it signalled embarrassment = code mismatch; “up to you / same same” misread as indecision = context/common-ground gap; a phone call dropping key words = channel/noise; taking a polite phatic “yes” as a referential commitment = function mismatch (§5.7).
• Reinforce §5.6: real communication is interactive; feedback is where such failures get repaired.
• Encourage students to bring their own mishaps: the personal cases are the most memorable, and non-Thai students can contribute cross-cultural examples from their own backgrounds.