The Routledge Handbook of Language and Intercultural Communication

Jane Jackson, Jane Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000056198
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Routledge Handbook of Language and Intercultural Communication provides a comprehensive historical survey of language and intercultural communication studies with a critical assessment of past and present theory, research, and practice, as well as an insight into future directions.

Drawing on the expertise of leading scholars from different parts of the world, this second edition offers updated chapters by returning authors and many new contributions on a broad range of topics, including reflexivity and criticality, translanguaging, and social justice in relation to intercultural communication.With an emphasis on contemporary, critical perspectives, this handbook showcases the varied range of issues, perspectives, and approaches that characterise this increasingly important field in today's globalised world.

Offering 34 chapters with examples from a variety of languages and international settings, this handbook is an indispensable resource for students and scholars working in the fields of intercultural communication, applied linguistics, TESOL/ TEFL, and communication studies.

Part I

Foundations of language and intercultural communication studies

1

A global look at the history and development of language and intercultural communication studies

Judith N. Martin, Thomas K. Nakayama, and Donal Carbaugh

Introduction

A review of the literature since our previous chapter in the first edition of the Handbook (2012) reveals an increasing number of histories of intercultural communication study in various world regions (see Kim 2018; Kulich 2012; Kulich and Zhang 2012; Prosser 2018) revealing research traditions that vary greatly in impetus for study, disciplinary focus, research topics, and paradigmatic commitments. Thus, while our goal for this updated chapter is to provide a more global review of the historical foundations of contemporary intercultural communication and applied linguistics research, we recognise the etic–emic dialectic tension in these histories – a desire for an etic framework of global study as well as the emic impulse of the study in particular regions with enormous variation. We must acknowledge that all academic knowledge is ‘historically contingent and a contextual production’ (Mendoza and Kinefuchi 2016: 275) and any attempt to describe our discipline’s global history is now more daunting than ever!

We need to acknowledge the absences in our account – absences that have histories of their own, and partly due to the fact that our review was limited to descriptions of recent formalised and disciplinary study accessible in English. As Dutta (2018) points out, people have interculturally interacted, learned, and shared knowledge with the rest of the world for millennia – for example, the great Nalanda University, operational 427–1197 CE in India, provides evidence of the intercultural exchange of ideas, knowledge, and religions (Buddhist, Hindu, and other religions). We know there are scholars investigating intercultural communication now in many areas of the world – research that is unfamiliar to us.

Using the broadest of Kuhn’s (1970) meanings for paradigm – strongly held worldviews and beliefs that undergird scholarship – in this chapter, we show how the initial scholarship was interdisciplinary and aparadigmatic in the USA and Japan (1950s–70s), and then became dominated by functionalist/postpositive research traditions in many countries and later incorporated interpretive and critical approaches. The second part of the chapter describes the burgeoning scholarship in many countries (1980s and 90s onward), and the very different research trajectories in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, many of which centred on language, recognising that our framework and categories are constructed and fallible, with a great deal of overlap. We conclude the chapter by noting that the current study of intercultural communication is worldwide, multidisciplinary, and multiparadigmatic, and pose several questions concerning the future of the study of intercultural communication and applied linguistics.

Beginnings: Intercultural communication in the USA and Japan, from aparadigmatic to functionalism

The history of academic study of intercultural communication and applied linguistics in the USA and Japan has been described by many and recognised as interdisciplinary and aparadigmatic (Rogers and Hart 2002). The many disciplinary foundations include works of key Western intellectuals in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, including Charles Darwin’s ethology (the study of animal behaviour) and Sigmund Freud’s (1954) concept of the unconscious, which influenced assumptions that nonverbal cultural behaviour lies outside the awareness of individuals. In addition, sociologist Georg Simmel’s (1908/1921) concept of ‘the stranger’ impacted decades of investigation into cultural transitions and adaptation (cf., Carbaugh and Berry 2001; Cooks 2001) and sociologist William Graham Sumner’s (1906/1940) concept of ethnocentrism was also integrated as a key element in intercultural communication studies. Later work by American anthropologists, including Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Gregory Bateson, and Clyde Kluckhohn led to important assumptions that set the stage for the formation of the intercultural communication discipline in the USA. Also influential was the work of Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf who developed what is termed the Sapir/Whorf Hypothesis: the notion that differences in the way languages encode cultural and cognitive categories significantly affect the way people perceive the world around them.

It was in the mid-twentieth century that a formal (sub)discipline of intercultural communication developed as a result of the collaboration of linguists including George Trager and Ray Birdwhistell, along with anthropologists (influenced by the traditions of American scholars Mead and Benedict) who were hired by the U.S. Foreign Service Institute (FSI) to train government and business personnel in the overseas post-war rebuilding efforts (Leeds-Hurwitz 1990; Kitao 1989; Rogers and Hart 2002). These scholars, along with Edward T. Hall (acknowledged by many as the ‘founding father’ of the formal study of intercultural communication), recognised that no one discipline could explore, explain, predict, and train people how to interact effectively in intercultural contexts. They needed anthropologists to focus on macro-level structures as well as linguists to analyse micro elements of language, along with Hall’s notion of ‘microculture’ – a novel idea that nonverbal communication, just like language, varies across cultures and in Hall’s opinion, played a large role in intercultural encounters (Hall 1955; Leeds-Hurwitz 1990; Rogers et al. 2002). The influence of Hall’s work (emphasis on nonverbal variation’s and broad-based cultural differences in international contexts) can be seen even today in intercultural communication scholarship and textbooks.

As noted earlier, the fledgling field of intercultural communication in the USA was relatively aparadigmatic in its early years (1960s and 70s). There were no agreed-upon theories or methods, just an ‘invisible college of scholars’ mostly in the communication discipline, working to better understand nonverbal and verbal aspects of intercultural communication (Rogers and Hart 2002: 4). The first published scholarly works reflect the multidisciplinarity of this young field. For example, Alfred Smith’s (1966) edited volume Communication and Culture was organised within a linguistic framework (theory, syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics) and included contributions from linguists Noam Chomsky, Kenneth Pike, Ray Birdwhistell, and Jurgen Ruesch, as well as other prominent scholars such as Erving Goffman, Robert Bales, Joshua Fishman, Elihu Katz, Gregory Bateson, Basil Bernstein, Charles Osgood and, of course, Edward T. Hall.

By the 1970s, the ‘Decade of Research’ (Baldwin 2017: 25), the subdiscipline was becoming formalised within the academy in the USA, mostly in communication departments (see recent excellent summaries of the textbooks, courses, conferences and professional associations and journals established in the USA: Baldwin 2017; Kulich 2012; Prosser 2018). By the 1980s, about 60 American universities offered graduate-level courses and more than 200 offered undergraduate-level intercultural communication courses (Kitao 1989); professional organisations (ICA: Intercultural Communication Association; NCA: National Communication Association; SIETAR: Society for Intercultural Education, Training, and Research) were thriving and the International Journal of Intercultural Communication was the primary outlet for intercultural communication research. Additionally, the NCA publication, the International and Intercultural Communication Annual, served as a valuable resource for many.

There were similar efforts in Japan. As early as 1953 the Japan Center for Intercultural Communications (JCIC) was established by private-sector volunteers to increase mutual international understanding in the wake of a devastating world war. In the subsequent decades, as Japan and the USA became economic powers, there was a great deal of collaboration and exchange between Japanese and American scholars –for example, John (Jack) Condon and Dean Barnlund both taught at Japanese universities for many years (Kitao and Kitao 1989). Mitsuko Saito, a prominent scholar at International Christian University, and John Condon organised two conferences in Japan, bringing together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars (Condon and Saito 1974; 1976). Another Japanese scholar who had great influence in intercultural communication was Masao Kunihiro, who, along with Professor Saito, translated Hall’s The Silent Language (Chinmoku No Kotoba) into Japanese. They, like their American counterparts, realised that to be effective in intercultural communication required more than mastery of foreign languages, and they highlighted the importance of contrasting cultural values and nonverbal patterns of communication. The field continued to grow and by the 1980s, the first intercultural communication textbook written by Japanese authors appeared (Satoshi Ishii, Roichi Okabe and Teruyuki Kume) and is still popular today (Takai 2018). Japanese scholars explored many aspects of nonverbal communication (Miike and Ishii 1997; 1998) and much of the early scholarly work focused on concepts directly connected to East–West cultural differences, initiating an enduring research trajectory.

By the mid-1980s, intercultural communication scholarship in the USA (and Japan) moved from being aparadigmatic to paradigmatic; in Kuhn’s (1970) terms, this means that the prevailing scholarship was now informed by strongly held worldviews and specific beliefs regarding the conduct of research; in this instance the paradigm ascribed to by most scholars was functionalist. Two other paradigms have gained more prominence in later research – interpretive and critical.¹

Thus in the 1980s intercultural communication disciplinary influences shifted away from anthropology and linguistics to social psychology approaches (within the functionalist/postpositive paradigm), which were becoming increasingly influential in the broader communication discipline (Harman and Briggs 1991; Hart 1999). For example, many studies compared Asian vs. Western cultural values, or Hall’s (1976) high/low context distinction, and predicted concomitant and differing nonverbal and verbal communication behaviours (e.g., conflict resolution styles, communication style, uncertainty reduction, etc.) (see Gudykunst et al. 2005; Ito 2000; Kincaid 1987; Kitao and Kitao 1989; Suzuki and Okabe 2009).

The expansion phase: 1980s onward

The 1980s–90s and beyond saw the explosion of the study of intercultural communication and applied linguistics around the world.

Japan

In the 1990s, Japan saw a proliferation of communication departments and majors; and in 2002 the first intercultural communication graduate school (St. Paul’s University/Rikkyo University) offered Masters degrees and eventually Ph.D. programmes in this area of study. In addition to the functionalist comparative studies that continued for the next several decades, Japanese scholarship also focused on intercultural adjustment and competence, especially in relation to Japanese as expats, returnee children, and international students in Japan. Some current research focuses on prejudice and hate speech directed at Koreans–Japanese and Brazilians of Japanese descent, and most recently Chinese (Takai 2018).

The USA

In the 1980s, the functionalist research paradigm (more commonly referred to as postpositivist) dominated and is still followed by a number of contemporary American communication and culture researchers (see review in Dutta and Martin 2017), often focusing on cross-cultural comparisons, for example, individualism/collectivism and other value frameworks (see Gudykunst’s 2005 edited volume). Other strong examples of continuing intercultural communication research topics include intercultural communication competence (Arasaratnam and Deardorff 2015) and communication and sojourner adaptation (Kim 2005). In 1997, a move to facilitate primarily functionalist/positivist research across disciplinary lines, led by Dr. Dan Landis, editor of the International Journal of Intercultural Relations, and colleagues, resulted in the formation of the International Academy for Intercultural Research (IAIR). The primary mission continues – to promote and encourage interdisciplinary research, theory, and practice in the field of intercultural relations, now including scholarship following different paradigms.

By the 1990s and into the 2000s there was a move in the USA toward more interpretive and critical approaches to studying intercultural communication. These paradigms were closely aligned with research in European and other countries in language education, international business, and political encounters, and were subjected to careful linguistic, cultural, or ethnographic study described later in the chapter (Isaksson and Røkaas 2000; Kelly and Tomic 2001). For example, Hecht’s interpretive communication theory of identity (Hecht 1993; Hecht et al. 2005) led to many studies, including Witteborn’s (2004) study of Arab women’s expressions of cultural identity before and after 9/11 and Ting-Toomey’s (2005) theories of identity linked to face negotiation and conflict styles (Ting-Toomey and Oetzel 2002). Some interpretive scholarship was increasingly influenced by critical impulses. Collier’s (1998; 2005) interpretive theory of identity began as interpretive and la...