Intercultural Communication

12 Key excerpts on "Intercultural Communication"

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  eBook - ePub

  Communicating with Asia

  Understanding people and customs

  • Harry Irwin(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Reaching agreement is not a necessary objective of communicating. Sharing meanings does not necessarily involve gaining agreement. When communicating is thought of as the sharing of meanings, what is meant is that each participant in the communication context becomes aware of the meanings about a matter or issue held by the other participant(s). While sharing meanings may bring about agreement it can just as readily and appropriately lead to disagreement. What is important is that communicating will lead to clarification and enhanced understanding.

  What, then, is Intercultural Communication? The same authors provide an extension of the above definition to define Intercultural Communication as a ‘symbolic, interpretive, transactional, contextual process in which people from different cultures create shared meanings’ (Lustig & Koester 1993, p. 51). This simple and straightforward definition places additional emphasis upon the importance of context to communicating by recognising that people involved in communicating may be from quite different cultural contexts.

  This book focuses upon one particular type of such Intercultural Communication. It is concerned about communicating across and beyond the social, political, historical and religious cultural boundaries that are associated with nations and with international communication; specifically it is concerned with communication involving Australians and people whose backgrounds and life experiences originate in the various nations of Asia. While this is the appropriate focus for approaching Intercultural Communication for the purposes of this book, it is recognised that the term ‘Intercultural Communication’ can equally well be applied to communication between people representing other types of cultural backgrounds. For example, different workplace cultures for managers and for shopfloor employees, and different socialisation cultures in childhood and adolescence for males and females lead to discussions and analyses of occupational Intercultural Communication and gender-based Intercultural Communication.

  Mention of these various forms of Intercultural Communication facilitates introduction of the idea of identity, and of the role of identity and identification in the process of communication. These are issues which will be discussed further, especially in Chapters 4 and 5

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  Intercultural Negotiations

  • Ian MacKenzie(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  The research agenda implicit in Bowe and Martin appears, in key respects, a traditional ‘applied linguistics’ one, even as the book struggles to move beyond earlier orthodoxies of that field. Why does it appear that way?

  Intercultural Communication research, at least in linguistics, emerged as a distinct sub-discipline during the 1980s and 1990s, largely out of contrastive analysis, error analysis, and interlanguage studies (Clyne, 1994; Bargiela-Chiappini, Nickerson and Planken, 2007). The field brings together a vocational, sometimes prescriptive strand with descriptive and explanatory approaches. The main starting point for projects has nevertheless remained rather like that of error analysis. Descriptive work identifies moments of breakdown or misunderstanding in contact encounters, then investigates co-variation in a given corpus between cultural characteristics and patterns of language use. Cross-cultural regularities are drawn out either as a basis for training more appropriate communicative behaviour (as judged against some accepted norm for a given cultural setting), or in order to foster greater awareness, and therefore increased mutual tolerance, among those communicating in intercultural situations.

  Communication in intercultural settings often takes place on a somewhat unequal footing, however. So research topics often examine interaction between immigrants and members of an indigenous population in societies with an acknowledged standard national language, or communication among workers in multinational companies which have adopted a corporate ‘lingua franca’ (usually English). In such cases, the language adopted for Intercultural Communication is effectively owned by one or other party in any interchange. Language use can be referred back to authoritative, standard forms and patterns. Reflecting this, Intercultural Communication studies are especially favoured in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) or Language for Specific Purposes (LSP), in vocational business communication training, and in acculturation programmes for minorities and refugees. The frame imposed on the concept of Intercultural Communication by this sphere of influence is effectively that of a problem to be addressed, rather than that of a neutral social phenomenon to be investigated, or even that of a possible source of creativity and communicative innovation to be encouraged.

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  Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence

  Revisited

  • Michael Byram, Prof. Michael Byram(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Multilingual Matters

    (Publisher)

  1Defining and Describing Intercultural Communicative Competence Introduction

  The assessment of an individual’s ability to communicate and interact across cultural boundaries with people of other social groups is facilitated by a detailed description of the process involved and definition of what is expected of the individual. It is an advantage to the assessor but also to both teacher and learner. All three can benefit from clarity and transparency (Council of Europe, 1993: 5) and agree upon the aims and purposes of the teaching, learning and assessment processes in which they are involved. It is important to remember, too, that their aims and purposes are determined in part by the societal contexts in which they find ­themselves – national, international and intranational – and in part by the preoccupations of institutions, which in turn reflect those of the societies in which they function.

  In this first chapter I shall begin to describe and define intercultural communicative competence (ICC) as it relates to foreign language teaching (FLT). This will involve building up a view of ICC from a base in existing FLT theory, and adding to it insights from other disciplines, in order to offer a model of ICC capable of informing discussion of teaching and assessment by FLT professionals. I shall, however, also consider how that model relates to some specific contexts, to illustrate the general need always to define models of ICC according to the requirements of the situations in which learners find themselves.1

  Communicating Across Linguistic and Cultural Boundaries and Frontiers 2

  Communicative competence

  For linguists and language teachers the term ‘competence’ is dominated by its use by Chomsky and Hymes, for both of whom competence is the idealised language ability of a speaker on the basis of which they perform language in a real world in real time, with all the constraints that this implies. This account of competence focuses on linguistic capabilities but the term has been more widely used in education to refer to other capabilities taught and learnt in other disciplines (Fleming, 2009). In the model of ICC developed here, language competence is one aspect complemented by others and a more encompassing definition is required. The following is useful for my purposes here3

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  Handbook of Interpersonal Communication

  • Gerd Antos, Eija Ventola, Gerd Antos, Eija Ventola(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Interpersonal communi-cation is here, to a large extent, seen and researched from the perspective of what is being said or written and how this is manifested in various generic forms, but at the same time attention is also given to other semiotic modes which interact with the linguistic modes. It is not concerned solely with the so-cial roles of interactants in groups nor with the types of media available nor with non-verbal behavior nor varying contextual frames for communication, but our main focus is on the actual linguistic manifestations (if we really want to have a comprehensive picture of what is actually going on in human interpersonal communication). For productive research purposes, we need an interdiscipli-nary approach with a strong linguistic focus. It is this linguistic perspective that the volume aims to offer to any researcher who may be interested in interper- Introduction: Interpersonal Communication – linguistic points of view 3 sonal communication, so that we can together successfully both analyze and in-terpret the complexities of this field. Thus, what linguistics has to offer to the other disciplines are aspects such as: – orientation to interaction seen primarily as processes that are realized lin-guistically – expertise on theorizing and analyzing cultural and situational contexts where linguistic processes are realized – expertise on handling language corpora – expertise on theorizing and analyzing interaction types as genres – orientation to an integrated view of linguistic and non-linguistic participant activities and of how interactants generate meanings – expertise on researching the successful management of the linguistic flow in interaction. In short, interpersonal communication is social action – dyadic or multiparty – in various social domains, and it is this unfolding inter-aspect of the communi-cative process that has interested social psychologists and sociologists.

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  Handbook of Intercultural Communication

  • Helga Kotthoff, Helen Spencer-Oatey, Helga Kotthoff, Helen Spencer-Oatey(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Discourse, cultural diversity and communication 13 2. Discourse, cultural diversity and communication: a linguistic anthropological perspective John J. Gumperz and Jenny Cook-Gumperz 1. Language difference and cultural relativity Anthropology’s critical contribution to Intercultural Communication is the in-sight that language differences affecting interpretation in everyday life are not just matters of semantics and grammar. Speaking and understanding also de-pend on the social situations in which verbal exchanges take place. Over the past four decades the developing field of linguistic anthropology has refined these initial insights into a theory of communicative practice that accounts for both universals of contexts and cultural differences in interpretation. The early post World War Two research on Intercultural Communication was bedeviled by the commonsense assumption that since language shapes the way we classi-fy our experiential worlds and therefore think, communicating across cultural boundaries becomes inherently problematic. Popular writings on this issue appear in many forms, from undergraduate term papers to political arguments for language and immigration policies and reflect a “language myth” of essen-tialized cultural difference that many scholars have attempted to argue against e.g. Agar (2002); Bauer and Trudgill (1998). While ideas akin to what we now call relativity have been debated at various times throughout history, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was not until the early part of the 20th century that the notion was systematized and integrated into the then prevailing empiricist academic tradition of linguistic and anthropological analysis of Boas, Sapir, Whorf.

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  Introducing Language and Intercultural Communication

  • Jane Jackson(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)
• 10 Be sensitive to the cultural beliefs, values, gender differences, and politeness norms that may underlie different styles of communication. Remember that all of us have been socialized to expect certain speech/communication styles and cultural scripts in particular situations although we may not always adhere to these norms.
• 11 Recognize your personal style of communicating and make an effort to determine how your communication partners are perceiving you. Effective Intercultural Communication requires a high level of self-awareness and listener sensitivity.
• 12 To further enhance intercultural relations, build up your repertoire of communication styles (e.g., familiarity with direct-indirect, formal-informal communication strategies). Adapting your communication style to put your interactant at ease may help you to create a positive impression and facilitate your communication.
• 13 Bear in mind that miscommunication may be due to language barriers rather than cultural difference (and vice versa).
While these strategies have been suggested with second language situations in mind, many may also enhance your interaction with people who share your first language but differ from you in terms of age, ethnicity, gender, religion, etc. As a sensitive and respectful intercultural communicator you can take steps to reduce the power gap and cultivate more equitable, satisfying relationships. (Throughout the text, more suggestions are offered to enhance intercultural relations; Chapter 11 examines core elements in intercultural [communicative] competence.)

Summary

Communication is a complex, dynamic process that entails the encoding and decoding of verbal and nonverbal messages within a particular cultural, physiological, sociorelational, and perceptual environment. As well as multiple dimensions of context, the relationship between culture and communication is complex and influenced by many factors (historical relations, gender, language, power, etc.). An understanding of the elements in the communication process and the potential impact of variations in speech/communication styles can help you to become a more effective, listener-sensitive, intercultural communicator. It can enhance your interpersonal, intercultural relationships and communication in second language situations.