Intercultural Interaction

Written in a highly accessible style and in four parts, this book provides rapid and authoritative access to current ideas and practice in intercultural communication. It draws on concepts and findings from a range of different disciplines and uses authentic examples of intercultural interaction to illustrate points.

Cutting across the world of work and education, this is a timely refresh for equipping a diverse range of both students and professionals with the tools to understand, discuss, and ultimately fulfil the role that they can play on the international stage.

This new edition of Intercultural Interactions presents a fully updated set of training materials which have been developed to form the basis of a variety of cross-cultural orientation programmes. These materials are based on the assumption that there are commonalities, or similar personal experiences, when people live and work in cultures other than their own. More comprehensive in scope than its predecessor, the Second Edition also contains a practical new user's guide, and its expanded coverage draws readers in with more vivid scenarios and examples reflecting changing world events and social milieu.

Taking an educational model for counselling, this volume presents training modules relevant for a variety of circumstances from the world of business to that of education. Included throughout are practical exercises and self-assessment questions which promote cultural awareness. The volume is a companion to Improving Intercultural Interactions - the third volume in the Multicultural Aspects of Counseling series. It builds upon Volume Three to address a new cluster of topics specific to various types of intercultural experience. These include: ethics; ethnocultural identification; conflict and mediation across cultures; empathy; and cross-cultural communication.

This book provides a critical analysis of the key concepts in culture and interaction. Drawing from a breadth of perspectives and contemporary analysis, it equips students and professionals from varied backgrounds with the tools to understand, discuss and apply these concepts to their own experiences of intercultural interaction.

Cutting across the world of work and education, this is a timely refresh for equipping a diverse range of both students and professionals with the tools to understand, discuss, and ultimately fulfil the role that they can play on the international stage.

In recent years the traditional approach to common ground as a body of information shared between participants of a communicative process has been challenged. Taking into account not only L1 but also intercultural interactions and attempting to bring together the traditional view with the egocentrism-based view of cognitive psychologists, it has been argued that construction of common ground is a dynamic, emergent process. It is the convergence of the mental representation of shared knowledge that we activate, assumed mutual knowledge that we seek, and rapport as well as knowledge that we co-construct in the communicative process. This dynamic understanding of common ground has been applied in many research projects addressing both L1 and intercultural interactions in recent years. As a result several new elements, aspects and interpretations of common ground have been identified. Some researchers came to view common ground as one component in a complex contextual information structure. Others, analyzing intercultural interactions, pointed out the dynamism of the interplay of core common ground and emergent common ground. The book brings together researchers from different angles of pragmatics and communication to examine (i) what adjustments to the notion of common ground based on L1 communication should be made in the light of research in intercultural communication; (ii) what the relationship is between context, situation and common ground, and (iii) how relevant knowledge and content get selected for inclusion into core and emergent common ground.

This collection brings together a range of perspectives on multimodal communication in intercultural interaction, bridging cognitive, social, and functional approaches towards promoting cross-disciplinary dialogues and taking research at the intersections of these fields into new directions. The volume assembles conversationalist, socially oriented, cognitive, and sensory approaches in considering culture as a dynamic construct, co-constituted and (re)negotiated among participants in interaction and filtering it through a multimodal lens, drawing on a range of examples, such as educational settings or online video platforms. Each chapter offers a unique perspective on "culture" and "intercultural," while also situating their own definitions of these labels against those of the other chapters. Taken together, the chapters form a fluid conversation on the nature of intercultural encounters in today’s globalizsd world, as digital environments intertwine with the physical mobility of people, encouraging researchers across these fields to adopt a more holistic multimodal perspective to approach intercultural interaction. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in intercultural communication, multimodality, sociolinguistics, cognitive and interactional linguistics, and semiotics.