Abstract
There is growing awareness that Western educational practices and language pedagogies cannot simply be exported to other parts of the world. The ethnocentricity of many teacher education projects that aim at introducing CLT to Asian societies have caused cultural conflicts and have led to the call for culturally appropriate methodologies. This paper presents an ethnographic analysis of three situations taken from two in-service teacher education courses in which cultural norms and identities were salient. It is argued that in the context of cross-cultural in-service courses it is important to identify possible culturally inappropriate procedures and ideas and locally introduce these aspects in the learning situation. This approach paves the way for ‘intercultural reciprocity’ (Coulby 2006), which will allow the course to evolve into a place from which C1 and C2 can be reflected upon without loss of face.
Keywords: intercultural education, teacher education, local pedagogies, discourse systems
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We receive descriptions of meetings between cultures from a wide range of sources; for example, from the aspiring empirical objectivity of Intercultural Communication to the more entertaining portrayals of travel writing. But when travel writers employ the principles of Intercultural Communication in their descriptions, does this bring their travel writing closer to the truth about culture? My paper takes up this question through an examination of subjectivity and objectivity in the descriptions of meetings between cultures in travel writing. The writers I discuss are all native speakers of English and the culture they describe is Modern Greece.
Keywords: Objectivity, subjectivity, culture, Intercultural Communication, travel writing, post-colonialism, memory, art, truth, Modern Greece.
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We compared French speaking and South Asian (SA) immigrant families having preschool children in an English speaking region in Canada, with regard to the parents’ attitudes towards minority language (ML) maintenance, ML use at home, and exposure of children to ML media. Parents in both groups had positive attitudes about language maintenance, however, SA parents were less hopeful that their children would retain their ML and pass it on to their next generations. SA parents made less effort to communicate with their children in the ML and provided less ML media for children at home, in comparison to their French counterparts. We discuss the results with respect to the relative position and utility of maintaining these minority languages in Canada and how these factors might influence parents’ language choices.
Key words: Language maintenance, Language shift, Minority languages.
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Whenever a piece of local news is transmitted to the global reader, it is not simply translated into another language, but becomes part of intercultural communication. The main aim in this paper is to investigate how international news stories written in English are prepared for Turkish readers. The comparative analysis of English and Turkish news stories from the BBC World Service’s websites shows that it involves a translating and an editing task, termed as "international trans-editing". This text analysis, along with an interview with the head of the BBC World Service Turkish Radio and participant observation conducted among their trans-editors, permit us to explore the peculiarities of this process and to identify some of its typical patterns.
Keywords: Trans-editing, radio, internet news, intercultural communication
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This research project used a survey to assess the impact of English- and Portuguese-language mass media on how Brazilian immigrants in the Los Angeles area adapt to their new environment. In addition to mass media use, the survey also took into account cultural preferences, language fluency, and demographics as possible predictors of cultural adaptation for Brazilian immigrants in a large and multicultural metropolitan area of the United States. Hypotheses were tested by using bivariate correlations to determine the relationships between the independent (language, media use, demographics) and dependent (cultural adaptation) variables. In addition, a discussion of intercultural communication and some characteristics of the Brazilian community are provided.
Keywords: Brazilians, immigration, United States, acculturation, adaptation, mass media
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A survey of 169 international students was conducted at a large southern research university to investigate the relationship between host communication competence and students’ locus of control. Results of correlation and multiple regressions revealed that international students’ host communication competence was positively influenced by the internal locus of control. The independent sample t test showed that female and European students scored significantly higher in host communication competence than male and non-European international students.
Keywords: international students, host communication competence, locus of control
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As with other evolving fields within the realms of science the ontological assumptions and epistemological aspirations of intercultural communication studies are matters of debate and disagreement. Differently put, the very point of take-off from which studies in this field are conducted is seldom scrutinized. This being said, this paper identifies and discusses a number of blindspots and biases of intercultural communication studies – e.g. the reluctance or inability to account for analytical ethnocentrism (‘home blindness’), heterocentrism (the unreflected and disproportionate focus on difference) or xenocentrism (the unreflected and disproportionate focus on ‘the other’). Additionally, normativism (the unreflected assumption that intercultural communication has desirable effects on people’s prejudices), cultural relativism versus absolutism, and particularism versus universalism are discussed. It is concluded that if the blindspots and biases of intercultural communication studies are overlooked, and thus the researcher is held as a cultural constant, the understanding of intercultural communication as interaction between two unavoidably and equally cultural interlocutors is deficient. Inspired by classical hermeneutics and discourse analysis it is therefore argued that intercultural communication studies researchers must declare their ontological assumptions and epistemological aspirations more actively and systematically.
Keywords: epistemology, ontology, analytical ethnocentrism, heterocentrism,
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