Purpose of Reading and Speaking

1. Situation: What happened?

What happend to me when I was in Germany. The house master provides booklet that contains all the information - about the street, the bus I took, the village name. When I left my room in the morning, I just left that booklet thinking as irrelevant. At night I lost on the street.

2. Expectations: What did you expect (if anything)?

The reason is that here in Ethiopia by asking people you get all information you want but in Europe things are different. You cannot get any information from people regarding to your specific problem. Unless you read things. Two differenct background experiences 

3. Interpretation: How did you make sense of it?

Here people don't like to put things on written material and we don't have the habit of reading things. 

Even at school - We posted something on the notice board, our students don't read it
thoroughly, they come to us for more elaboration. In Ethiopia people
don't pay much emphasis on written things, they preferer to hear from
the person's mouth. 

4. Response: What did you do in response, and what was the result of that?

When I left my room in the morning, I just left that booklet thinking
as irrelevant. At night I lost on the street. How could I comeback. No
inforamtion in my hand even the house street name.

5. Questions: What do you wonder about other(s) motivations/feelings/thoughts etc?

I had the exprience of getting people from different countries - african, latin american and asian culture is somehow similar - the contrast is between west and developing countries. How do other people find this issue? 

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This really makes me think

On October 11th, 2007 Clint Rogers says:

I think you are right that perhaps people from Western countries too often assume that everyone expects to learn and receive information by reading and writing. In you case, as is true I think in many other places, even if people can read, they would prefer (and expect) that the most valuable information come through speaking.
I am thinking perhaps we need to consider restructuring the way we are doing this research group and have more talking time together and less reading and writing individually?