Language and Intercultural Communication in the New Era

Farzad Sharifian, Maryam Jamarani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415808897
• eBook ISBN: 9781136173264
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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.

1 Language and Intercultural Communication From the Old Era to the New One

Farzad Sharifian and Maryam Jamarani

DOI: 10.4324/9780203081365-1

Background

Tracing back the history of interest in studying intercultural communication across time is difficult not only for historical reasons, but for the multiplicity of locations, approaches, and scholarly traditions that can be identified as having had research interests in intercultural communication. As Martin, Nakayama, and Carbaugh (2012, 17) put it: “The study of intercultural communication and applied linguistics developed in different ways at different times in various world regions, with scholars in each region following particular research trajectories, including accepted practices as well as disjunctures.” Martin, Nakayama, and Carbough (ibid.) argue that even the works of scholars such as Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx could be viewed as instrumental to laying the foundations of research and thinking in the area of intercultural communication. This overview, therefore, is not intended as a thorough historical review but as simply providing a brief backdrop to traditional research in the area of intercultural communication, as a preamble for the current volume.

One important aspect of research on intercultural communication is exploring the intricate relationship between language, thought, and culture, the study of which dates back at least to the nineteenth century. Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), Franz Boas (1858–1942), Edward Sapir (1884–1939), and Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941) are prominent scholars who all emphasized the relationship between language, thought, and culture. Humboldt viewed language as expressing the spirit of a nation. He argued that every language is entrenched in a particular worldview, and therefore diversity of languages reflects diversity of thought patterns, driven by different worldviews. This view was later followed and extended by Sapir and Whorf, who believed that differences in the way languages encode cultural and cognitive categories affect the way people think, and this is known as the “linguistic relativity hypothesis.” In other words, they argued that linguistic categories influence the language user’s perception of the world. This version of the hypothesis became known as the “strong version.” The weaker version simply views language, thought, and perception as interrelated. Implicit in this trend of thought is the idea that culture is a cognitive system, which exists in the mind.

During the 1920s and 1930s a group of American anthropologists, among them Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Gregory Bateson, and Clyde Kluckhohn, worked on the themes of the notion of culture as a homogenizing factor and the effect of culture on personality, which contributed significantly to laying the foundation of the discipline of intercultural communication (Martin, Nakayama, and Carbaugh 2012).

The rise of the discipline of intercultural communication occurred around the middle of the twentieth century, when the Foreign Service Institute in the United States recruited a number of anthropologists and linguists to provide language and culture training to Foreign Service officers and other State Department personnel (Martin, Nakayama, and Carbaugh 2012). Among these was anthropologist Edward T. Hall, who is viewed by many to be the founder of the field of intercultural communication. His book, The Silent Language (Hall, 1959), is considered “the founding document of the new field of intercultural communication, although it was not written with this purpose in mind, nor was it even directed at an academic audience” (Rogers, Hart, and Miike 2002, 11). The book mainly focused on nonverbal communication and introduced the concept of proxemics, or the study of how people use “space” to communicate, and chronemics, or the study of the use of time in nonverbal communication.

Interest in studies of intercultural communication grew in a parallel fashion in some other parts of the world, for example, in Japan and Europe (see Martin, Nakayama, and Carbaugh 2012). Japanese scholars explored aspects of intercultural communication, including aspects of nonverbal communication, such as bowing and silence (Kitao and Kitao 1989). In Europe, interest in the study of intercultural communication “was firmly oriented towards language issues—the role of language in intercultural encounters and the role of intercultural communication in language education” (Martin, Nakayama, and Carbaugh 2012, 22).

In the areas of business and politics, researchers interested in intercultural communication have typically examined negotiation between politicians and business delegates from different nations. A main focus of such research has been toward intercultural communication skills training. A key notion in this area of research has been “national negotiating style” (e.g., Gabrielidis et al. 1997; Graham 1983, 1985; Graham and Andrews 1987). Extensive work has been carried out, for example, on Chinese negotiating style, Japanese negotiating style, Brazilian style, etc.

A tradition was also established following the work of sociolinguists Dell Hymes and John Gumperz (e.g., Gumperz and Hymes 1972), who placed the study of language within the context of culture and society. Hymes and Gumperz, Hymes in particular, established a framework for the ethnography of communication, or culturally distinctive means of communication. A significant contribution of this tradition is the focus on the emic, or the insider, perspective, as opposed to the etic, or the outsider. This focus is also fundamental to Hall’s work.

During the 1980s and 1990s, a large number of studies began to appear that explored topics such as storytelling (narrative) in different cultures, discourse structures across cultures, and cultural influences on thought patterns and language. Clyne (1994) classifies studies of intercultural communication in that period into three categories, based on their approach adopted, as follows:

1. Contrastive approach
2. Interlanguage approach
3. Interactive intercultural approach

Studies that followed a contrastive approach compared discourse across cultures, mainly between native speakers (NS) and nonnative speakers (NNS). An example of this was the study of the speech act of apology across different languages and cultures (e.g., Olshtain 1989). The interlanguage approach examined the discourse of nonnative speakers in their L2, often in comparison with their L1 or with native speakers of the language. An example of this was the study of apology in L2 by Venezuelan speakers in comparison with speakers of American English (Garcia 1989). The interactive approach examined and compared “the discourse of people of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds interacting either in a lingua franca or in one of the interlocutors’ languages” (Clyne 1994, 3). This approach was adopted, for example, in Clyne’s (1994) study of the use of English as a lingua franca by speakers from various linguistic and cultural backgrounds in the Australian workplace. It is to be noted here that some scholars have used the term “cross-cultural communication” for studies that fall under the category of (a) and have reserved the term “intercultural communication” for those that adopted the interactive intercultural approach (c).

The period between the 1970s and 1990s also saw the publication of an increasing number of edited books and monographs (e.g., Asante and Gudykunst 1989; Carbaugh 1990; Coupland, Giles, and Wiemann 1991; Gudykunst and Ting-Toomey 1988; Kim 1988; Pride 1985). A number of academic journals have also been launched in recent decades that focus on publishing research in the area of intercultural and cross-cultural communication, including Multilingua, Journal of Language and Intercultural Communication, and Intercultural Pragmatics. As time went by, research in the area of intercultural communication turned its attention to factors other than culture itself that in one way or another had a bearing on the dynamics of intercultural communication, such as notions of “gender” and “power” (e.g., Henley and Kramarae 1991; Scollon and Scollon 2001a; Tannen 1990, 1994; Uchida 1997).

Another line of recent work on language and culture that is relevant to intercultural communication is the development by Paul Friedrich of the notion of linguaculture, which he defined as “a domain of experience that fuses and intermingles the vocabulary, many semantic aspects of grammar, and the verbal aspect of culture” (1989, 306). Influenced by Friedrich’s work, Michael Agar used the term languaculture to refer to the nexus between language and culture. Agar’s book, Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation (1995), is considered a classic work that deals with miscommunication as a result of cultural differences. This work is further developed in Risager’s (2006) treatment of “global flows and local complexity,” where she explores the intricate relationship between language and culture from a transnational perspective, presenting a critique of simplified accounts of language and culture. This view emphasizes the fact that “linguistic and cultural practices change and spread through social networks along partially different routes, principally on the basis of transnational patterns of migration and markets” (Risager 2006, 2).

Intercultural Communication in the New Era

The advent of the twenty-first century has witnessed a revolution in the contexts and contents of intercultural communication. Technological advances such as chat rooms, e-mails, personal weblogs, Facebook, Twitter, and 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 words “intercultural communication.” For many people across the globe, intercultural communication is now the default context of communication in everyday life. The remarkable growth in the prevalence of intercultural communication among people from many cultural backgrounds, and across many contexts and channels, now requires more sophisticated approaches, theoretical frameworks, and analytical tools to be developed and applied to the study of intercultural communication. Scholarly literature has already seen an upsurge of many studies that explore various aspects of communication in the new era, in particular in cyberspace (see Ess and Sudweeks 2001; Macfadyen, Roche, and Doff 2004) and within the context of globalization (e.g., Kramsch and Boner 2010).

Some of the changes to the nature of intercultural and international communication are demographic. For example, when it comes to English as a language of intercultural communication, it has been estimated that more than 80 percent of communication in English is now taking place, in the absence of native speakers, among the so-called “nonnative” speakers of the language (Crystal 1997). Graddol (2006, 29) observes:

There were around 763 million international travellers in 2004, but nearly three-quarters of visits involved visitors from a non-English-speaking country travelling to a non-English-speaking destination. This demonstrates the scale of need for face-to-face international communication and a growing role for global English.

The scale of intercultural communication that is now taking place between speakers who do not speak English as a native language makes traditional studies of intercultural communication that mainly focused on native–nonnative communication less relevant and thus calls for further studies that explore communication between nonnative speakers.

The demographic changes and the ever-increasing complexity of the nature of communication in the new era, among other things, have led to proposals regarding certain types of “competence” that either naturally arise from the complexity of modern forms and contexts of communication or appear to be required for successful and smooth communication. Among these are the notions of “intercultural communicative competence” (e.g., Byram 1997), “multidialectal competence” (Canagarajah 2006), “symbolic competence” (e.g., Kramsch 2006), and “metacultural competence” (Sharifian, this volume). For example, as for the notion of “multidialectal competence,” Canagarajah (2006, 233) notes, “In a context where we have to constantly shuttle between different varieties [of English] and communities, proficiency becomes complex. … One needs the capacity to negotiate diverse varieties to facilitate communication.” For Canagarajah, this capacity to some extent involves “multidialectal competence,” part of which is “passive competence to understand new varieties [of English]” (ibid.).

Globalization has brought peoples from various cultural and linguistic backgrounds closer to each other and has thus led to an increase in multilingualism and people learning each others’ languages and speaking multiple languages during intercultural communication, resulting in what Kramsch (2008, 400) calls “symbolic competence,” described as follows:

Social actors in multilingual settings, even if they are non-native speakers of the languages they use, seem to activate more than a communicative competence that would enable them to communicate accurately, effectively and appropriately with one another. They seem to display a particularly acute ability to play with various linguistic codes and with the various spatial and temporal resonances of these codes.

The growth in interest in studies of intercultural communication in recent years has led, on the one hand, to an increasing number of projects focusing on the examination of communication between speakers from different cultural backgrounds in various contexts and across different channels. On the other hand, a number of scholars have, at the theoretical level, reexamined the very basic notions of “language,” “culture,” and “interculture,” the main concepts in studies of intercultural communication, from various perspectives. The contributions to this volume represent this spectrum, beginning with theoretical advancements, moving on to exploring the interplay between intercultural communication and new technologies, and finally examining intercultural communication across different contexts.

Theoretical Advancements

In her chapter, “History and Memory in the Development of Intercultural Competence,” Kramsch, adopting a post-structuralist approach to critical discourse analysis, expands the notion of “culture” to include historical and political consciousness. Kramsch points out that culture includes both the objective history of historians (discourse on history) and the subjective collective memories of people who have personally experienced events or learned about them in school textbooks and in the news (discourse from history). Teaching language as discourse places emphasis on the primacy of historical and cultural meanings, as realized in language and other symbolic systems like pictures, charts, and diagrams. Kramsch argues that foreign-language textbooks, through their language exercises and through the texts and pictures they choose to feature, represent historical events in a way that either minimizes or maximizes the gaps between their discourse and that of other discourses in the students’ culture. They can choose to minimize these gaps if they want to show that their discourse on and from history is shared by L1 and L2 speakers alike; on the contrary, they can choose to maximize the gap to show that members of the foreign culture might have interpretations that are quite different from members of the students’ culture. Kramsch’s analysis of the two textbooks argues that intercultural competence always includes a responsibility for the teacher to provide multiple perspectives on events, and for the student to question the perspective of the textbook as cultural artifact.

In Chapter 3, Kecskes attempts to shed theoretical light on the notion of “interculture.” In his chapter, “Intercultures, Encyclopedic Knowledge and Cultural Models,” he discusses the nature of what he calls “intercultures” from a socio-cognitive perspective, presenting them as third spaces created from two kinds of knowledge: prior encyclopedic knowledge and knowledge emerging from the actual situational contexts in which communication takes place. Encyclopedic knowledge is attributed to cultural models that exist on a metalevel as cognitive frames, abstracted from cultural experiences. These are held to guide us in i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Language and Intercultural Communication From the Old Era to the New One
• Part I Theoretical Advancements
• 2 History and Memory in the Development of Intercultural Competence
• 3 Intercultures, Encyclopedic Knowledge, and Cultural Models
• 4 Cultural Linguistics and Intercultural Communication
• Part II New Technologies and Intercultural Communication
• 5 International Sociodigital Interaction What Politics of Interculturality?
• 6 Shaping Intercultural Competence? Creating a Virtual Space for the Development of Intercultural Communicative Competence
• 7 Nonverbal Behaviors and Cross-Cultural Communication in the New Era
• 8 “Digital Natives” and “Native Speakers” Competence in Computer-Mediated Communication
• 9 Facework in Intercultural E-mail Communication in the Academic Environment
• 10 Expert–Novice Orientations Native-Speaker Power and the Didactic Voice in Online Intercultural Interaction
• 11 Anglophones, Francophones, Telephones The Case of a Disputed Wikipedia Entry
• Part III Theoretical Advancements
• 12 Local Languages and Communication Challenges in the Multinational Workplace
• 13 “I Don't Know How to Speak, so I Just Stay Silent” Uncertainty Management among Chinese Immigrant Women Seeking Health Care in the United States
• 14 The Multilingual Teacher and the Multicultural Curriculum An Asian Example for Intercultural Communication in the New Era
• 15 Native or Intercultural Speakers? An Examination of Dyadic Conversations between Spanish- and English-Speaking Tandem Learners
• Editors and Contributors
• Author Index
• Subject Index