THE USE OF JAPANESE LANGUAGE DIRECTIVE SPEECH ACTS BY MALAYSIAN TOUR GUIDES

Background and Purpose: Cultural collisions in tourism communication can elicit obstacles or failure to achieve communication goals in social interactions with people of different backgrounds. A communication between cultures can present misunderstandings, vagueness in meanings and frustration due to the diverse social and cultural norms arising from various discourse systems. Among the several types of tourism communication, this study attempted to foreground delivering instructions, which is a frequently utilised speech act (SA) during tour sessions. More specifically, the study examined the use of SA in giving instructions, as expressed by tour guides throughout tour sessions. Delivering instructions is a straightforward mode of communication, even in intercultural context. Methodology: This study adopted a qualitative research method through the collection of data from audio and visual recordings, along with observational notes from interactions between tour guides and tourists particularly during the five Free Independent Travel (FIT) packages. Five Japanese speaking Malaysian tour guides and 17 Japanese tourists (JTs) were recruited for this study. Categorisation of directive speech act (DSA) by Searle (1979) and structure formation of SDA by Blum-Kulka (1989) were employed to analyse the subcategories of directive. Findings: Findings indicate that only three subcategories were used, namely the command, insist, and request. The findings also reveal that there were alignments and adjustments to the expressions or utterances when giving instructions. With the aim of effective intercultural communication, the tour guides were identified to have adapted to the tourist culture. The expression of instructions even in an intercultural context did not confer any contradiction of cultural norms, and were unlikely to cause conflict between the tour guides and the JTs. Contributions: This research is expected to serve as a foundation and reference for parties involved in the teaching and learning of the Japanese language, especially in the expression of SA for tourism communication.