Intercultural Communications

Communication studies have witnessed an intensified research focus on relational processes (e.g.,  dialogue, Ganesh&Zoller, 2012), relational structures (e.g., networks, Castells, 2012), and relational concepts (e.g., social capital, Kikuchi & Coleman, 2012). Curiously, coinciding with this relational turn is not only the proliferation of global communication tools, but also the globalization of communication scholarship. Again, this phenomenon has occurred in public relations (L’Etang, 2009; Sriramesh, 2012) and across communication studies (Calhoun, 2011). This study adopts a critical, interpretative approach using methodological relationalism as an analytical lens to explicate assumptions about “relationships” from various intellectual heritages. A series of 10 graduated assumptions is presented that spans from communication and relations to communication-as-relations. The study seeks to open conceptual space between the IND/COL divide and serve as a catalyst to explore further assumptions in other areas of contemporary communication studies that hold “relationship” as a central concept.

African Americans, who are descendants of slaves forcibly brought from Africa to America hundreds of years ago, and contemporary voluntary African migrants to the USA do not form a single “black community”. This statement contradicts the claims of many Black Nationalist movements from the nineteenth century onwards, which argued that all black people are “brothers and sisters” because they share common spirituality and have a common cause that demands their joint action all around the world. However, based on evidence collected in seven states in 2013 – 2015, African Americans and contemporary African migrants appear to have different historic memories of pre-slave trade and pre-colonial Africa. Furthermore, the two groups identify different events as key to its history. Many members of both groups do not feel that they share a common “black history”. To some extent, the idea of a shared history acts to unite Africans and African Americans as victims of long-lasting white domination. However, in the final analysis, the collective historic memory of both groups works more to separate them from each other by generating and supporting contradictory or even negative images of mutual perception. In general, the relations between African Americans and recent African migrants are characterized by simultaneous mutual attraction and repulsion of two magnets. While they understand that among all ethno-racial communities in the country, they, as well as African Caribbeans, are the closest to each other, myriads of differences cause mutual repulsion. This attraction-repulsion effect is, in significant part, due to the differences in historic memory of African Americans and recent African migrants in the USA.

This study presents an ethnographic approach to unpack the differences in digital media use, illustrating how these differences can be better understood as a negotiable quality of incessant action and interaction, rather than as a given
quality of social life mandated by the individualism/collectivism dichotomy. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with seven Taiwanese sojourners in the United States and five Americans in Taiwan, this study asked informants to retrospectively recount their sojourning experiences regarding the use of multimedia messaging services (MMS), which presently often involve smartphones. Taiwanese sojourners exhibited stronger family ties than their American counterparts. Instead of relying on collectivistic/individualistic traits as an explanatory
mechanism, this study identifies three themes from the life narratives of both groups of sojourners that could explain the observed cultural differences in the terrain of smartphone communication: first, the economic basis on which
sojourning was organized was asymmetric between the two groups; second, parents of the two groups had asymmetric knowledge of the sojourning destinations, and this impacted conversational repertoire; and third, the intersection of
gender and media constructions of sojourning destinations also shaped varying degrees of bonding. The larger asymmetric structural context at a macro-level may offer fertile ground for further theorization on cultural differences and
commonalities.

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature and definitions of culture and its relationship to language and cultural sensitivity in hospitality management services.


Design/methodology/approach
– The paper takes the form of a critical literature review followed by a phenomenological exploratory pilot study, using template analysis.


Findings
– Previous studies indicate that the more individuals understand and embrace notions of intercultural sensitivity, then the better they become at being able to recognise and discriminate between cultural differences. Furthermore, as a by-product, there is an increased appetite and tendency towards adopting cultural perspectives other than ones’ own. However, the operationalisation of this process encourages benchmarking along linear scales, which is problematic and over-simplifies the dynamic and fluid nature of effective cultural transmission. The paper’s findings suggest that rather than there being singular cultural and language constructs, there are cultures, which in places overlap, but elsewhere do not and therefore cannot be placed on universal scales; second, the critical success factor is less about linguistic literacy linked to vocabulary and explicit rational comprehension, and more about a pre-emptive cultural interpretive intelligence which identifies emotion and sentiment.


Research limitations/implications
– This is largely a conceptual paper, which, it is suggested, needs further empirical investigation – both longitudinally and on a larger scale.


Originality/value
– This perspective moves management, marketing and service delivery away from zero-sum games and transactional exchanges, whether financial, social or linguistic, towards collective wealth creation and empowerment – manifest in social cultural capital and the generation of tacit knowledge. The challenge that remains is how this process can be formalised and the tacit and implicit knowledge gained and created can be preserved.

The study investigated a range of characteristics of intercultural competence in young language learners in one Australian primary school. This paper explores students' expression of identity formation aligned with the act of speaking the target language, which the authors believe to be an expression of students' intercultural competence. Through the opportunities created and required by an immersion language pedagogy, the students perceive that their speaking ability is linked to their ability to participate, to learn, to belong and to change. These four functions are viewed as a series of increasingly personal stages of identity formation. Student perceptions describe their successful intercultural ability firstly to reflect and compare languages and cultures and secondly to negotiate an individual personal and cultural identity, constructed from their experience of spoken discourse. The important role

Laboratory activities should accurately portray the nature of science (NOS). In well-designed and well-conducted laboratories, students construct new meaningful concepts and generate “if...and...then...therefore” arguments and hypothetico- deductive inferences, managing “ideas that work extremely well at explaining the natural world in naturalistic terms we can understand, making accurate predictions, and guiding further empirical research”, in other words, experiencing the way science comes down to patterns that are naturalistic, testable, and always open to revision.

...we see a teacher investigating even more than teaching in some traditional sense of “transmitting knowledge”; this teacher always tends to be brief: He or she must constantly refrain from giving notions to students (that would often be answers to never-asked questions!); she has the key role to provoke, to challenge students, and to suggest to them activities for finding answers themselves; according with the “degree of openness” of the particular laboratory, he allows real choices; she has a facilitating style: rather than interrupting and correcting students, she helps to spread students’ good ideas and strategies in the classroom and to find new ones. Such a teacher’s work is renewed and enriched year after year by new and unexpected results. Of course, he must find solutions for an authentic and honest assessment, respecting the nature of the laboratory activity.

«Students need to be made aware that the scientific community, not public opinion polls, individual scientists, or small groups of scientists decide what is good science» (Michael P. Clough).

But while it is true that laboratory requires much of the teacher, we ought to say that laboratory can help the teacher to construct his own professional identity. So we advise teachers not to wait to become “highly skilled enough” to start using laboratory activities; on the contrary, they can use laboratory activities to construct their competence.

African Americans and contemporary African migrants to the USA do not form a single “Black community”. Their relations are characterized by simultaneous mutual attraction and repulsion. Based on field evidence, the article discusses the role played in it by the reflection in historic memory and place in mass consciousness of African Americans and African migrants of key events in Black American and African history: transatlantic slave trade, slavery, its abolition, and the Civil Rights Movement in the US, colonialism, anticolonial struggle, and the fall of apartheid regime in South Africa. It is shown that they see the key events of the past differently, and different events are seen as key by each group. Collective historic memory works more in the direction of separating the two groups from each other by generating and supporting contradictory or even negative images of mutual perception.

Telecollaboration involves the use of online technologies in the context of language teaching and learning (BELZ, 2007; O'DOWD, 2013). When different cultures come into contact, intercultural misunderstandings (BELZ, 2002, 2007; AGAR, 2006; O'DOWD, 2012; SOUZA, 2016) can emerge. This study aimed at discussing how the overcoming of an intercultural misunderstanding occurred in a Teletandem (TELLES, 2015a, 2015b) partnership, the specific telecollaborative context in this study, between a learner of English and a learner of Portuguese. For the analysis, data from telecollaborative sessions, a mediation session, experience reports, interviews, private messages on Facebook and reflective diaries were included. Data analysis showed that the dialogue with the "other" (KRAMSCH, 1993, 2005; HELM, 2016),- that is, between one of the participants and the teacher-mediator- favored the overcoming of the intercultural misunderstanding, which indicates that there is the need for the teacher-mediator to provide moments of reflection in cases of possible intercultural misunderstandings in telecollaborative contexts.

Komunikasi ada di mana-mana dan kapan saja, baik tatap muka ataupun bermedia, baik dari budaya yang sama maupun berbeda. Komunikasi antarbudaya (intercultural communication) sendiri merujuk pada komunikasi antara individu-individu yang latar belakang budayanya berbeda. Individu-individu ini tidak harus selalu berasal dari Negara yang berbeda, bukan pada rumpun, ras atau suku budaya, melainkan pada realitasnya bahwa setiap individu sudah berbeda budaya. Agama sebagai word view sendiri adalah salah satu unsure budaya tidak pernah kering menjadi kajian. Akan lebih menarik lagi bila persinggungan komunikasi dan agama yang berbeda (komunikasi antarbudaya) dalam sebuah bahtera rumah tangga dibahas secara tuntas yang tidak lain manifestasikan dalam adegium agama ageming aji. Gambaran besar besar itulah yang tertuang dalam buku ini. Buku alih rupa disertasi ini menarik untuk dimiliki dan dibaca sebagai referensi rujukan bagi mahasiswa maupun umum. Kupas tuntas teoritis dan fakta lapangan melalui penulisan yang mengalir tentu menjadi tawaran dari buku sejenisnya. (Mukti Ali, Komunikasi Antarbudaya dalam Tradisi Agama Jawa, Pustaka Ilmu, Yogyakarta, 2017)

Though Shakespeare is an Elizabethan playwright, his plays still resonate with our contemporary world. The parallels between Othello and the failure of intercultural communication and integration of Muslim Diaspora in western countries are strikingly identical. This paper explores how and why in Shakespeare's time and ours a multicultural mindset and culture have not succeeded to eradicate ethnocentrism, stereotype and fanaticism. Thus conflict, violence and misunderstanding between individuals belonging to different cultural and religious communities are still ravaging multicultural societies. It also aims to promote a humanistic perception of the other that celebrates difference and diversity rather than sameness and uniformity.

Intercultural Communication as an academic discipline originated in the United States in the years following the Second World War to help Americans who were going abroad in different capacities: private, official or for business purposes. Since then, the globalization process has accelerated. Technology has made it possible to communicate through the internet, and social media has made communication cheap and simple worldwide. The academic discipline of Intercultural Communication has developed accordingly. This chapter investigates the discipline by asking: What are the consequences of general global developments for intercultural communication in general and the academic field of Intercultural Communication in particular? This chapter analyzes three textbooks in Intercultural Communication to see how they view these global developments. The results point to some differences in their various approaches. Neuliep's book follows the traditional, positivistic academic tradition in Intercultural Communication with historic roots in the United States. Jandt's book is close to the same tradition but has a critical and more complex understanding of intercultural communication. Holliday's book builds on general social sciences and cultural studies, and consequently it has a view of culture and the communication process as a negotiation between individual actors and social structures, belonging to a social constructivist and critical cosmopolitan understanding of intercultural communication.

During the implementation of the EU-MADE4ll project syllabus, and the students’ mobility opportunities, we have held different types of workshops, useful for immediately applying and testing the acquired knowledge. This can be interesting for all the professionals who are interested and motivated to learn more about “new frontiers” of training, especially from the perspective of public commitment, for the inclusion (or reintegration) of the working people in the economy of the ’10s. We think of all those who deal with career coaching, traineeships, job orientation, professional training, HR training, and so on… The syllabus of the project may be of interest for who is looking for an opportunity to upgrade its training and / or consulting proposal, in the light of the need to train people to define more broadly their digital identity.

In the second year of the EU-MADE4ll project, five project partners (Aarhus University, University of Florence, University of Leeds, University of Messina and University of Rome, Tor Vergata) designed, planned and delivered a joint study programme for five different degree courses. Firstly, the basic concepts of multimodality, digital literacy and intercultural communication were introduced and taught in the five university contexts. This was followed by a series of workshops and practical exercises and tutorials were delivered to focus on five digital text types. Students were then asked to produce one of the five digital texts, plus a paper that helped them to motivate their selection for their final assignment. Students were paired with other students on the EU-MADE4LL platform to facilitate anonymous peer-assessment. Based on their results, the best achieving students had the opportunity to further practice their intercultural and digital skills in an international context. We i...

Attracting the best students into universities is a policy agenda driven by
the state and universities in Estonia and Denmark. While the policy of
internationalization of higher education (IoHE) in Estonia and Denmark
is well crafted in the policy and academic domains, the value additions
international graduates add to the learning environments and cultures
are hardly explored. This study aims at describing the value added
through IoHE in Estonia and Denmark. The study revealed that
international graduates bring diversity into the learning environment
which promotes teaching, learning and tolerance of other cultures

Multimodal digital communication is the main theme of this conference meant to attract multidisciplinary research on a wide range of issues from teaching and learning to analysing multimodal digital data appearing in multiple communication arenas.

Rome, Italy
University of “Tor Vergata”
20 – 22 June 2019

a-mode.eumade4ll.eu
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Keynote speakers:

Marina Bondi
Carey Jewitt
Rodney Jones
Gunther Kress and Jeff Bezemer
David Machin
Theo van Leeuwen
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A-MODE ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

Elisabetta Adami – University of Leeds, UK
Cristina Arizzi – University of Messina, Italy
Styliani Karatza – National and Kapodistrian University of Athens,
Greece, and University of Leeds, UK
Ivana Marenzi – L3S Research Center, Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany
Ilaria Moschini – University of Florence, Italy
Sandra Petroni – University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, Italy
Marc Rocca – Rocca Creative Thinking Limited, UK
Maria Grazia Sindoni – University of Messina, Italy

In the globalizing world, there is a growing interest in the problem of English as a means of interethnic communication and intercultural communication. Language is an attribute of social life; it is of great importance for the younger generation and young people for the purpose of cognition, upbringing, education and communication in the twenty-first century. Using the knowledge of the historical process that influenced the formation of English as a link in the study of phonetics, vocabulary and grammar will help students demonstrate a conscious perception of the structure of modern English, rooted in the depths of centuries. When teaching the language at school or university, it is necessary to develop skills and abilities of schoolchildren and students to observe, remember, identify language phenomena and establish historical links between them which contributes to a more thoughtful memorization of the phonetic, grammatical and lexical aspects of the formation of modern English. In the opinion of the authors, all this is an important factor in the consideration of language as a means of intercultural communication in English classes in both secondary and higher schools.

Culture or history of each club in Barclays Premiere League and its hooligan influence the name of hooligan. The purposes of this study is identifying linguistics form of the Hooligan Firm's name in football club of Barclays Premiere League and i s analyzing how the socio-cultural contexts relates to the Hooligan Firm's name in football club of Barclays Premiere League. This research uses Cultural Discourse Analysis (CuDA) as the grand design of analytical framework. CuDA concerns with analyzing of the impact of the culture to language. The type of qualitative method for this research are content analysis and documentation is used to collect the data. The results of this research shows the linguistic forms of Hooligan Firm's name are constructed by words, leading to nouns by inflectional and derivational suffixes, and phrases, leading to Head and Modifier. The cultural background of Hooligan Firm's name comes from the nickname of the club, the police rules, and the social conditions of the members. It deals with the matter of masculinity to get power among others.

Aquesta tesi estudia la construcció de la identitat acadèmica a través de l'aprenentatge de l'escriptura acadèmica en anglès com a llengua estrangera, en base a un marc teòric que recull aportacions del socioconstructivisme, la teoria de gèneres, la lingüística sistèmica-funcional i la teoria de l'activitat històricocultural.