Articles
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West meets East: on the Necessity of local Pedagogies
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... [...] Read more
Telling the Truth about Culture: Intercultural Communication in Travel Writing
Abstract: 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... [...] Read more
Running head: Minority language survival
Abstract: 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... [...] Read more
International Trans-Editing: Typical Intercultural Communication Strategies at the BBC World Service Turkish Radio
Abstract: 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... [...] Read more
Uses of Mass Media for Adaptation Purposes: A Quantitative Study of Brazilian Immigrants in Los Angeles
Abstract: 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... [...] Read more
Host communication competence and locus of control of international students in the United States
Abstract: 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... [...] Read more
The blindspots and biases of intercultural communication studies: A discussion on episteme and doxa in a field
Abstract: 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.... [...] Read more