Language And Intercultural Communication In The New Era

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.

This edited research volume explores the development of what can be described as the ‘critical turn’ in intercultural communication pedagogy, with a particular focus on modern/foreign language education. The main aim is to trace the realisations of this critical turn against a background of unequal power relations, and to illuminate the role that radical culture educators can play in the making of a more democratic and egalitarian social order. The volume takes as a starting point the idea that criticality draws on a number of intellectual traditions, which do not always focus on social and political critique, and argues that because ideological hegemony impacts on the meanings that people create and share, intercultural communication pedagogy ought to locate itself within wider socio-political contexts. With reference points drawn from critical and transnational social theory, critical pedagogy and intercultural theory, contributors to this volume provide readers with powerful ways that show how this can be achieved, and together assess the impact that their understanding of criticality can make on modern/foreign language education. The volume is divided into three major parts, namely: ‘theorising critically’, ‘researching critically’ and ‘teaching critically’.

This fully updated third edition of Introducing Language and Intercultural Communication provides an accessible, lively introduction for students who are new to the study of intercultural communication, with special attention devoted to the language dimension. Incorporating real-life examples from around the world and drawing on current research, this text argues against cultural stereotyping and instead provides students with a skill-building framework to enhance understanding of the complexities of language use and intercultural communication in diverse settings. Readers will learn to become more attuned to power relations and the ways in which a complex mix of internal and external factors can influence language choice/attitudes, the intercultural communication process, and intercultural relationship building. Features new to this edition include: ‘pause and reflect’ boxes and images throughout each chapter that encourage meaning making and connections between theories and practice dialogues and student accounts of intercultural experiences that link theories with real-life applications discussion questions, journal jumpstarts, and suggested activities at the end of each chapter to engage students and provide a more interactive experience new material that takes account of key social, cultural, and political events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the refugee crisis, the climate emergency, and the rise of populism updated theoretical constructs that reflect recent developments in this area of study, such as criticality and reflexivity in intercultural communication refreshed references and glossary to enhance understanding of key terms and concepts revised and updated Instructor and Student Resources, including recommended resources on intercultural pedagogy, sample course schedules and assignments, in-depth chapter-specific resources, and a test bank revised and updated student resources, including suggested readings and links to online resources, key terms for each chapter, e-flash cards, study quizzes, and a glossary This is the essential textbook for introductory courses in language and intercultural communication within applied linguistics and communication studies.

This is a thoroughly revised, updated and expanded edition of a practical introduction to intercultural education for teachers of English as a second language. It provides a concise summary of the intellectual and pedagogical traditions that have shaped intercultural language education, from ethnography to critical pedagogy and cultural studies. The book offers clear illustrations of the practical impact of these traditions on curriculum design, classroom activities and assessment. As well as addressing developments in the field since the publication of the 1st edition, this new edition also reflects on the impact of online resources for English language education. The book continues to make a powerful case for developing intercultural as well as linguistic competences and will remain invaluable reading for English language teachers across the world.

Chinese and English are the world’s largest languages, and the number of interpreter-mediated interactions involving Chinese and English speakers has increased exponentially over the last 30 years. This book presents and describes examples of Chinese–English interpreting across a large number of settings: conference interpreting; diplomatic interpreting; media interpreting; business interpreting; police, legal and court interpreting; and healthcare interpreting. Interpreters working in these fields face not only the challenge of providing optimal inter-lingual transfer, but also need to fully understand the discourse-pragmatic conventions of both Chinese and English speakers. This innovative book provides an overview of established and contemporary frameworks of intercultural communication and applies these to a large sample of Chinese–English interpreted interactions. The authors introduce the Inter-Culturality Framework as a descriptive tool to identify and describe the strategies and footings that interpreters adopt. This book contains findings from detailed data with Chinese–English interpreters as experts not only in inter-lingual exchange, but cross-linguistic and intercultural communication. As such, it is a detailed and authoritative guide for trainees as well as practising Chinese–English interpreters.

This volume encompasses the range of issues encountered by language scholars who teach and research in departments of languages and cultures within the higher education system, predominantly in Australia, but touching other universities worldwide. Related studies on language planning, methodology or pedagogy have focused on one or more of these same issues, but rarely on their totality. Intersections as a metaphor running discreetly through the essays in this volume, connects them all to a lived reality. The field of languages and cultures, as it is practised and reflected upon in Australian universities, is essentially an interdisciplinary and interconnecting space - one in which linguistic and disciplinary diversities meet and join forces, rather than collide or disperse along different pathways. The international and local studies featured here focus on language planning, new pedagogies and language reclamation and link to meeting points and commonalities. They show that language scholars are increasingly finding themselves on common ground as they tackle issues of policy and practice affecting their field, whether within their institutions, within the tertiary system, or within the framework of government policy.

The premise that intercultural contact produces intercultural competence underpins much rationalization of backpacker tourism and in-country language education. However, if insufficiently problematized, pre-existing constructions of cultural 'otherness' may hinder intercultural competence development. This is nowhere truer than in contexts in which wide disparities of power, wealth, and privilege exist, and where such positionings may go unproblematized. This study contributes to theoretical understandings of how intercultural competence develops through intercultural contact situations through a detailed, multiple case study of three conceptually comparable contexts in which Western backpackers study Spanish in Latin America. This experience, often 'bundled' with home-stay, volunteer work, social, and tourist experiences, offers a rich set of empirical data within which to understand the nature of intercultural competence and the processes through which it may be developed. Models of a single, context-free, transferable intercultural competence are rejected. Instead, suggestions are made as to how educators might help prepare intercultural sojourners by scaffolding their intercultural reflections and problematizing their own intersectional identities and their assumptions. The study is a critical ethnography with elements of autoethnographic reflection. The book therefore also contributes to development of this qualitative research methodology and provides an empirical example of its application.

Metaphor and Intercultural Communication examines in detail the dynamics of metaphor in interlingual contact, translation and globalization processes. Its case-studies, which combine methods of cognitive metaphor theory with those of corpus-based and discourse-oriented research, cover contact linguistic and cultural contacts between Chinese, English including Translational English and Aboriginal English, Greek, Kabyle, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, and Spanish. Part I introduces readers to practical and methodological problems of the intercultural transfer of metaphor through empirical (corpus-based and experimental) studies of translators' experiences and strategies in dealing with figurative language in a variety of contexts. Part II explores the universality-relativity dimension of cross- and intercultural metaphor on the basis of empirical data from various European and non-European cultures. Part III investigates the socio-economic and political consequences of figurative language use through case studies of communication between aboriginal and mainstream cultures, in the media, in political discourse and gender-related discourses. Special attention is paid to cases of miscommunication and of deliberate re- and counter-conceptualisation of clichés from one culture into another. The results open new perspectives on some of the basic assumptions of the 'classic' cognitive paradigm, e.g. regarding metaphor understanding, linguistic relativity and concept-construction.