Intercultural Communication New Perspectives From Elf

La comunicazione interculturale è il filo rosso che attraversa quasi tutti i contributi di questo volume. Negli ultimi venti anni tale nozione è stata esplorata e, più recentemente, rivisitata in una prospettiva ELF in diverse aree di ricerca come, ad esempio, la comunicazione strategica d’affari, la consapevolezza interculturale, l’insegnamento delle lingue, la formazione docenti, i discorsi socioculturali, così come gli stessi studi interculturali. Scopo di questo libro è fornire ai lettori una selezione di articoli recenti e stimolanti, nonché contribuire alla fiorente crescita di pubblicazioni su ELF. Il libro è diviso in tre parti, che coprono tre temi principali: 1) ELF, insegnamento delle lingue e la formazione dei docenti; 2) La comunicazione in contesti migratori e plurilingui; atteggiamenti e interazioni; 3) ELF nel mondo degli affari e in quello universitario. Il volume contiene ventiquattro capitoli scritti da studiosi e ricercatori che hanno partecipato al Convegno Internazionale ELF6, svoltosi a Roma presso l’Università Roma Tre nel 2013. I contributi si fondano sulle presentazioni da loro fatte in occasione di tale convegno.

What is intercultural communication? How does perspective shape a person’s definition of the key tenets of the term and the field? These are the core questions explored by this accessible global introduction to intercultural communication. Each chapter explores the topic from a different geographic, religious, theoretical, and/or methodological perspective, with an emphasis on non-Western approaches, including Buddhist, South American, Muslim, and Chinese perspectives. Featuring the voices of a range of international contributors, this new textbook presents the full breadth of diverse approaches to intercultural communication and showcases the economic, political, and cultural/societal needs for and benefits of communicative competence.

This book investigates the cultural and intercultural aspects of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). Authors discuss how ‘culture’ and the ‘intercultural’ can be understood, theorised and operationalised in ELF, and how the concepts can be integrated into formats of ELF-oriented learning and teaching. The various cultural connotations are also discussed (ideological, political, religious and historical) and whether it is possible to use and/or teach a lingua franca as if it were culturally neutral. The chapters consider the communication and pedagogical implications of the cultural and intercultural dimensions of ELF and offer suggestions for new directions in ELF research, pedagogy and curriculum development.

The use of English as a global lingua franca has given rise to new challenges and approaches in our understanding of language and communication. One area where ELF (English as a lingua franca) studies, both from an empirical and theoretical orientation, have the potential for significant developments is in our understanding of the relationships between language, culture and identity. ELF challenges traditional assumptions concerning the purposed 'inexorable' link between a language and a culture. Due to the multitude of users and contexts of ELF communication the supposed language, culture and identity correlation, often conceived at the national level, appears simplistic and naïve. However, it is equally naïve to assume that ELF is a culturally and identity neutral form of communication. All communication involves participants, purposes, contexts and histories, none of which are 'neutral'. Thus, we need new approaches to understanding the relationship between language, culture and identity which are able to account for the multifarious and dynamic nature of ELF communication.

Despite unsubstantiated claims of best practice, the division of language-teaching professionals on the basis of their categorization as ‘native-speakers’ or ‘non-native speakers’ continues to cascade throughout the academic literature. It has become normative, under the rhetorical guise of acting to correct prejudice and/or discrimination, to see native-speakerism as having a single beneficiary – the ‘native-speaker’ – and a single victim – the ‘non-native’ speaker. However, this unidirectional perspective fails to deal with the more veiled systems through which those labeled as native-speakers and non-native speakers are both cast as casualties of this questionable bifurcation. This volume documents such complexities and aims to fill the void currently observable within mainstream academic literature in the teaching of both English, and Japanese, foreign language education. By identifying how the construct of Japanese native-speaker mirrors that of the ‘native-speaker’ of English, the volume presents a revealing insight into language teaching in Japan. Further, taking a problem-solving approach, this volume explores possible grounds on which language teachers could be employed if native-speakerism is rejected according to experts in the fields of intercultural communicative competence, English as a Lingua Franca and World Englishes, all of which aim to replace the ‘native-speaker’ model with something new.

This textbook provides a succinct, contemporary introduction to intercultural communication with a focus on actual language use. With English as a lingua franca and Communicative Accommodation Theory as the underpinning concepts, it explores communication, language use, and culture in action. Each chapter includes discourse extracts so that students can apply what they have learned to real text examples, and supplementary instructor materials including suggestions for discussion points and activities are hosted on springer.com. The book will be key reading for students taking modules on Intercultural Communication or Language, Culture and Communication as part of a degree in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, or English Language both at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

Offering a unique reading experience, this book examines the epistemologies of interculturality and explores potential routes to review and revisit the notion anew. Grounded in different sociocultural, economic and political perspectives around the world, interculturality in education and research bears a paradoxical attribute of 'contradictions' and 'inconsistencies', making it a polysemous and flexible notion that has no definitive diagnosis and requires constant unthinking and rethinking. The author provides a toolbox of 'out-of-box ideas' in the form of fragmental yet standalone writings and follow-up questions concerning stereotypes about the very notion of interculturality and conceptual and methodological flaws in the way it is used. Readers are encouraged to critically reflect about interculturality as it stands today in global research and education. In identifying the paradoxes of interculturality and proposing alternative directions, the book stimulates a diversity of thoughts about the notion that goes beyond the 'West'. The book will be an essential reading for scholars, students and educators interested in education philosophy, applied linguistics and the broad field of intercultural communication education. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license. Funded by University of Helsinki

Studies of intercultural communication in applied linguistics initially focused on miscommunication, mainly between native and non-native speakers of English. The advent of the twenty-first century has witnessed, however, a revolution in the contexts and contents of intercultural communication; technological advances such as chat rooms, emails, personal weblogs, Facebook, Twitter, mobile text messaging on the one hand, and the accelerated pace of people's international mobility on the other have given a new meaning to the term 'intercultural communication'. Given the remarkable growth in the prevalence of intercultural communication among people from many cultural backgrounds, and across many contexts and channels, conceptual divides such as 'native/non-native' are now almost irrelevant. This has caused the power attached to English and native speaker-like English to lose much of its automatic domination. Such developments have provided new opportunities, as well as challenges, for the study of intercultural communication and its increasingly complex nature. This book showcases recent studies in the field in a multitude of contexts to enable a collective effort towards advancements in the area.