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The term ‘mediation’ has become central to intercultural language education, a fact that is evident from the attention given to mediation activities and strategies in the revised descriptors of the...

This paper explores linguistic and cultural complexity within immigration legal advice communication. Drawing from a linguistic ethnographic study, ethnographic and interactional data from two linked advice meetings about UK refugee family reunion processes are subject to deductive analysis using Risager’s model of the language-culture nexus, within which the intersection of language(s) and culture(s) in a communicative event is conceptualised as a nexus of linguistic, languacultural, discursive, and other (non-linguistic) cultural resources and practices. The paper operationalises this intercultural communication theory in a new and exploratory way to investigate how cultural complexity is manifest, and interactionally managed, at different levels of meaning.The substantive analysis shows how a range of divergent resources, brought in by the different participants, are drawn upon and externalised as communicative practices in both legal advice meetings. Understanding is negotiated interculturally at different levels of meaning – the linguistic, the languacultural, and the discursive – in contrasting ways in each meeting. Methodologically, the paper argues that a strength of Risager’s framework is that it supports a methodical and structured analysis of communicative events characterised by linguistic and cultural complexity, which can be linked to other discourse analytical approaches. The model’s complexity, and its foregrounding of verbal over other semiotic modes, are highlighted as challenges for the analyst.

This article explores the impact of the so-called ‘blanket exercise’, an interactive learning activity that engages individuals in rediscovering Canadian history and society through an Indigenous l...

The relationship between the polite and conventional nature of friendly language and the sincerity of the writer’s feelings is a central topic in linguistic and historical research on friendship in epistolary communication. This relationship can be understood in the context of the emotional values and conventionalised emotional practices that characterise the writer’s emotional community.The language of friendship has a significant role in the history of letter writing in religious communities. However, epistolary and emotional practices among religious groups in the modern era remain a rather unexplored filed of research. In this regard, the nineteenth century is of particular interest, as it saw the consolidation of sincerity as a central notion in European standards of letter writing.Bringing together historical pragmatics and the history of emotions, this paper describes the forms and functions of sincerity in the negotiation of friendships between nineteenth-century Catholic churchmen. The article analyses a corpus of letters in Italian and Spanish from the multilingual correspondence of European Benedictine missionaries in Australia between the 1850s and the 1890s. The results of the analysis show that sincerity and emotional self-disclosure, while dependent on the pragmatic conventions of letter writing, belonged to cross-linguistic cultural scripts typical of religious communities.

The book “Discourse Studies In Practice” is a compilation of articles on discourse, written by S. Chiper over fifteen years and published in Romania and abroad. The research of different topics has been done in the methodological framework of critical discourse analysis (CDA). This book aims at discourse researchers and students, and anyone interested in discourse and intercultural studies.

Previous studies suggest non-native speakers (NNSs) use cover strategies to achieve a positive public self-image despite their lack of comprehension when interacting with native speakers (N...

As digital interactions become more global, individuals who bring divergent practices ‘to the keyboard’ must interact with other participants who come to the digital space with different cultural norms and expectations. This study explores the interface between local expectations and global practice through emoji use in online gaming – a venue which brings people from around the globe together on a common ‘playing field’. Since emojis were originally designed to tap into universals in human experience and expression, they are a ready-made resource through which individuals can integrate their culture-based expectations with communicative norms that are rooted in the common denominators of the (global) digital environment. Using live chat data from the game streaming platform Twitch, this study examines emojis posted to the open chat room during game streams of one female and one male gamer. The analysis examines the ways that participants use these semiotic images to orient toward gaming communities of practice and claim identities within gaming groups. It also explores whether emoji use is affected by the gender of the streamer. Analysis indicates that participants in the man’s stream differ from participants woman’s stream in the ways they use emojis to claim community membership and employ emojis as phatic devices.

This paper will carry out a theoretical and empirical inquiry into the ways in which the ‘discourse of thirdness’ is constituted within the field of intercultural studies. It will firstly critically review the autochthonous conceptualisations of the Third Space and other metaphors of ‘thirdness’ in language education. It will then use corpus analysis techniques to analyse a collection of research papers from the preeminent journals in the field, in which the terms ‘Third Space’, ‘third place’ and ‘third culture’ occur. The paper will conclude by relating the empirical findings back to the autochthonous writings.

The study examines second language identities constructed in small stories around intercultural communication. It presents a detailed narrated-event and narrating-event analysis of small st...

With the number of international postgraduate students in UK universities steadily increasing, there is great interest in understanding how institutions can more effectively meet these students’ expectations and needs through programme-supported development of intercultural competence. This paper reports on a project that explored experiences and perceptions of the development of intercultural competence in a UK higher education context. Academic staff (N = 8) and international postgraduate students (N = 24), from a range of countries, were recruited for preliminary interviews (two staff from each of the four faculties), focus groups (students of these staff), and stimulated recall interviews (same staff). The project targeted tensions and issues occurring between the perspectives of participants. It focused on the performance and negotiation of identities in the ‘third space’ that emerged between participants using different cultural discourses. The findings suggest that, despite the inherent contradiction of comfort and the conflict of negotiation, efforts are made by both students and staff to create a ‘comfortable’ third space in which to negotiate learning. By this we mean an environment in which to negotiate learning where those present feel at ease with their own and others’ cultural identities and differences. This raises significant implications for policies and practices regarding the development of intercultural competence. Specifically, the university needs to build a better understanding of how to create a ‘sphere of interculturality’ in which international postgraduate learning can take place.

Metaphors are considered as instruments crucial for persuasion. However, while many studies and works have focused on their emotive, communicative, and persuasive effects, the argumentative dimension that represents the core of their “persuasiveness” is almost neglected. This paper addresses the problem of explaining how metaphors can communicate arguments, and how it is possible to reconstruct and justify them. To this purpose, a distinction is drawn between the arguments that are communicated metaphorically and interpreted based on relevance considerations, and the ones that are triggered implicitly by the use of a metaphorical expression. In both cases, metaphorical arguments are reconstructed through different patterns of argument, called argumentation schemes (Walton, Reed and Macagno 2008). However, while the purpose of a metaphorical sequence of discourse (called metaphorical move) can guide and justify the reconstruction of the argument that can sufficiently support the intended conclusion in a persuasive move, a more complex analysis is needed for analyzing the additional inferences that a metaphorical move can trigger. These inferences are claimed to represent part of the connotation of the metaphorical expression and can be captured through its most frequent collocations, determinable using some tools of the corpus linguistics.

The article discusses the problem of identifying a global intercultural discourse of communication participants, characterizes its parameters, and reviews strategies for its actualization. The purpose of the article is to build and justify a model of this discourse. The methods used in work include discourse analysis, modeling method (contrastive and comparative) analysis, transactional analysis, textual information analysis method, critical analysis, etc. Scientific results of the research: parameters of the global intercultural discourse are refined, its intercultural model is built, and discourses of the participants of intercultural communication are analyzed. The theoretical significance of the research lies in the development of a sample of global intercultural discourse that input in the theory of global discourse. The practical value of the work is that research results can be used both in the practice of intercultural communication and in the process of preparing monographs, textbooks, and training in the field of intercultural communication.

This paper problematizes the stereotypical view that leadership is culturally linked and underlines the significant role of subordinates in shaping leadership styles. Employing micro-analytic techn...

This article provides an ethnographic discourse analysis of an intercultural communication training course for tourism workers in Nepal, and investigates the communicative practices Nepali tour gui...

This article draws on data from an ethnographic account of the institutionalisation of ‘the intercultural’ within a large British university. The study finds that although the term ‘intercultural’ is frequently used in multiple forms, it is often aligned with the dominant discourses of the neoliberal university system in order to become an accepted part of the institution. A counter position, which I label ‘interculturality from below’, is taken by some social actors within the university who challenge essentialist and neoliberal approaches to the intercultural. This study is relevant to arguments which emphasise the need for a paradigm shift in the applications of the intercultural and it raises the question of whether a paradigm shift is possible within a neoliberal university system.

Effective communication is essential in developing rapport with patients, and many nursing roles such as patient assessment, education, and counselling consist only of dialogue. With increasing cultural diversity among nurses and patients in Australia, there are growing concerns relating to the potential for miscommunication, as differences in language and culture can cause misunderstandings which can have serious impacts on health outcomes and patient safety (Hamilton & Woodward-Kron, 2010). According to Grant and Luxford (2011)) there is little research into the way health professionals approach working with cultural difference or how this impacts on their everyday practice. Furthermore, there has been minimal examination of intercultural nurse–patient communication from a linguistic perspective. Applying linguistic frameworks to nursing practice can help nurses understand what is happening in their communication with patients, particularly where people from different cultures are interacting. This paper discusses intercultural nurse–patient communication and refers to theoretical frameworks from applied linguistics to explain how miscommunication may occur. It illustrates how such approaches will help to raise awareness of underlying causes and potentially lead to more effective communication skills, therapeutic relationships and therefore patient satisfaction and safety.

This essay revisits Wittgenstein’s work in relation to intercultural communication. Specifically, it considers how Wittgenstein’s philosophy relates to the analysis of cultural discourses as intercultural language games. The paper proposes a move beyond anti-essentialist interpretations of language games and towards the idea of cultures as family resemblance concepts in the context of Wittgenstein’s naturalism. The idea of organic form is proposed to distinguish this naturalism from that of the sciences. The possibility that Wittgenstein viewed languages and cultures as organic forms is a way to draw connections between his philosophy and more enigmatic, pessimistic views regarding culture and civilization. Together with the familiar philosophical concepts, it is argued that these views offer insights for intercultural communication research today.

This paper considers how, in the process of positioning that is implicit in every interaction, all of us employ multiple and often competing narratives when we talk about cultural identity and our relationships with new cultural environments. In interviews with newly arrived postgraduate students about their experience of travelling to study abroad, the students employ competing block and thread narratives. Block narratives represent an essentialist discourse of culture. As such, they are easily converted into cultural prejudice by blocking the possibility for understanding and sharing at the point of tolerating an Other who can never be like ‘us’. These are default narratives because of the way in which we are brought up in our societies within a global positioning and politics. Thread narratives instead support a critical cosmopolitan discourse of cultural travel and shared meanings across structural boundaries that act against cultural prejudice. Threads need to be nurtured as alternative forms...

In the highly multicultural workplace of today’s multinational corporations (MNCs), translating across different cultures becomes a crucial issue. But what precisely counts as culture in the global workplace of the MNC? What does it exactly mean to be able to translate across cultures under the regimes of evaluation adopted by MNCs? In this article, I consider these questions through a discussion of the corporate discourse of diversity management, in which the cultural diversity of the workforce is understood as a resource for maximizing profit. Based on a critical review of diversity management literature and a study on Korean managers working for non-Korean MNCs in Singapore, I first show how diversity management’s claim of openness and inclusivity actually works to reproduce unequal relations in the workplace. I then argue that attention to the politics of translation, where the ideological nature of evaluations of cultural (in)commensurability is highlighted, is needed for applied linguists’ engagement with language and communication in the multicultural workplace.

This theoretical paper adopts the point of view of the audience of subtitled films and outlines a theory of subtitles as communicative agents within the participation structures of film reception. Based on examples from three Swiss fiction films – Heidi (2015), Heimatland (2015) and Der Goalie bin ig (2014) – the following communicative effects are found and illustrated: uniformity, authorisation, foregrounding, aestheticisation, foreignisation. These effects are conceptualised in terms of Constitutive Communication theory and textual agency (Cooren. 2004. Textual agency: How texts do things in organizational settings. Organization 11(3). 373–393. doi:10.1177/1350508404041998), which describe that by communicating with audiences, subtitles animate into being other participants in film discourse and contribute to what viewers take away in terms of characters, stories, the cultural aspects they represent and the source culture(s) from which the text is perceived to communicate.

This article presents a case study that examines how an online social networking community is constituted through intercultural discourse on the part of one learner sojourning in the US. Using Byram’s model of intercultural communicative competence, this study examines the learner’s naturalistic communication in a social networking site (SNS). The qualitative analysis indicates that the learner acted upon the affordances of SNSs to reflect on her intercultural experiences and displayed evidence of intercultural understanding during her study abroad years. The learner’s intercultural knowledge, attitudes, and discovery are shown to be co-constructed by her and other members in the online discourse. This study indicates that computer-mediated communities like SNSs provide the learner with a space in which she documented her cultural experience and reflected on those experiences in real-time exchanges with multilingual, multicultural users. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

Internationalisation is high on the agenda of higher education institutions across the world. Previous research on national and local policies surrounding this phenomenon has identified different discourses of internationalisation which may have an effect on practices such as student mobility. In order to understand better the role of student mobility in practice, the article analyses responses to an inquiry about internationalisation to a group of academic staff involved in intercultural education from universities around the world. Informants, all members of the research network Cultnet, working at 28 different universities in 15 countries, describe internationalisation within their practice, and their understanding of the role which student mobility plays in relation to this. Data were collected through questionnaires and interviews over a period of six months. The findings locate student mobility within discourses of internationalisation. They also raise questions in relation to the need for an intercultural dialogue approach in internationalisation. We argue that institutions and their staff should be aware of the discursive field of internationalisation in HE, take a critical stance and analyse their own role in student mobility. How mobility fits within the field of intercultural education for incoming, outgoing and ´home´ students should be highlighted and clarified in internationalisation agendas. Keywords: student mobility, internationalisation, higher education, intercultural dialogue.

This article examines language trainers as language workers in an Austrian language education company. The study interrogates what the trainers’ discourses, ideologies and practices about the nature of their work are, and how these reside within the logic and discursive practices of their employer. A close analysis of interview, ethnographic and institutional data reveal that trainers get caught up between privileged and precarious working conditions. The findings emphasise that trainers identify shifting demands in language training that require them to act reflexively, empathetically and be able to connect the linguistic with the cultural and interpersonal. The results also suggest that the institutional discourse of the education company attempts an inclusive and emancipated diversity agenda but reproduces homogenous views of language, culture and the trainers’ work. This paper contributes to growing critical scholarship on the intersection of language, education and work in the globalised knowledge economy.

Mientras la investigación sobre las plataformas multimedia occidentales, como YouTube, es prolífica e interdisciplinaria, los portales asiáticos siguen siendo desconocidos. El presente trabajo explora este campo analizando los usos juveniles e interculturales de un sistema de visualización popular en Japón y China, conocido como «danmaku» o «danmu». Esta tecnología inserta comentarios dinámicos y contextualizados sobre un fotograma, con varias posibilidades tipográficas. Partiendo de un corpus de 1.590 comentarios sobre «El Ministerio del Tiempo», recogidos de una plataforma de «fandom» con millones de seguidores, este artículo analiza los temas que despiertan más interés entre los fans chinos. El análisis de contenido, que incorpora técnicas de «coding and counting» de las categorías con más intervenciones (n>16), se combina con un análisis del discurso multimodal (serie de TV, plataforma asiática y comentarios de usuarios). Los resultados muestran que los espectadores se interesan por el género cinematográfico (viaje del tiempo), los personajes, la trama, determinados contenidos socioculturales y la lengua española. Sus discusiones abordan cuestiones de interculturalidad, algunas cuestiones que son tabú en China y la cultura «fandom» en Asia. El estudio ilustra las potencialidades de participación, comunicación y aprendizaje en las redes sociales asiáticas, y supone una aportación interesante e innovadora al campo de la alfabetización mediática y digital, con varias sugerencias para fomentar la competencia intercultural con el uso de la cultura popular, While research on Western multimedia platforms, such as YouTube, is prolific and interdisciplinary, Asian portals remain unknown. We explore this field by analyzing the juvenile and intercultural uses of a popular visualization system in Japan and China, known as “danmaku” or “danmu”. This technology inserts dynamic and contextualized comments on a photogram, with several typographical possibilities. Based on a corpus of 1,590 comments on “The Ministry of Time,” collected from a fandom platform with millions of users, we analyzed the topics that arouse the most interest among Chinese fans. We combine content analysis, which incorporates coding and counting techniques of the categories with the most interventions (n>16), with multimodal discourse analysis (TV series, Asian platform and user comments). Results show that the viewers are most interested in the film genre (time travel), the characters, the plot, certain sociocultural contents, and the Spanish language. Their discussions address issues of interculturality, some topics that are taboo in China and the fandom culture in Asia. Our study illustrates the potential of participation, communication, and learning in Asian social media, and constitutes an interesting and innovative contribution to the field of media and digital literacy, with various suggestions to promote intercultural competence with the use of popular culture

Being a much-studied concept in the social and political sciences and cultural studies (

This paper, drawing on the notion of symbolic competence and insights from complexity theory, investigates the multilingual practices of university students in group discussions. The data analysis reveals that the protagonists’ language uses index the various ways in which their rehearsal of potential identities, language ideologies, histories, and cultural memories are realized in the ongoing discourse. The findings indicate that language choice is not dictated by pre-existing and permanent value assigned to the languages, but is influenced by the interlocutors’ subjective perceptions of the shifting dynamics within interactions. Furthermore, the findings show that multilingual speakers show ‘semiotic awareness’ and the ability to manipulate, shape and reconstruct their environment on different timelines and space scales. It is also suggested that, as globalization has led to more and more multilingual communication, it would be desirable for teachers and educators to develop students’ symbolic competence to make them aware of both communicative and intercultural competences, and to enable them exploit social categories, the symbolic power relations of different languages and the legitimacy of languages to shape multilingual settings.

This article reports on the peer socialization of gendered Mandarin practices between three American students and their Chinese roommates in a college dorm in China. Gender is often perceived to be a salient identity category among adult L2 learners overseas. Drawing on the language socialization framework (Ochs and Schieffelin 1984), this study focuses on how gender is constructed and indexed through language as the American students learn to use Mandarin sentence-final particles. Sentence-final particles constitute a unique repertoire to achieve affective work in Mandarin. They have further become a resource among China’s urban youth to enact a cute female speech style. In this case study, I employ a qualitative approach with an embedded quantitative component to examine the participants’ use of the particles over the course of one semester. The findings show how the American students become socialized into using these particles as gendered linguistic practices in the dorm conversations.

Objective Patient education is an important part of nurses’ roles; however the inconsistent quality of communication skills, including those of registered nurses (RNs) from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds, risk patient safety. Empowerment in patient education has been found to influence patients’ self-efficacy and participation in decision-making. Discourse analysis of a whole interaction is used in this paper to trace the consequences of patient education where empowering discourse is displayed by an RN from a CALD background. Methods Ethnographic techniques of participant observation and audio recordings of naturally occurring interactions between nurses from CALD backgrounds and their patients were conducted and analysed using interactional sociolinguistic (IS) and theme oriented discourse analytic approaches. Results The interactional consequences of the nurse’s empowering approach are readily observable in the data. The RN addresses the patient’s education needs through a respectful encounter that illustrates the patient’s active involvement. Conclusion Examining the interactional consequences of empowering discourse demonstrates its effectiveness, and illustrates how empowering behaviour can be integrated into patient education, thus offering an alternative to traditional approaches. Practical implications Greater awareness of how to use empowering discourse will offer an alternative and consistent approach that enables nurses to facilitate patient-centred education.

This special issue brings together papers with a different focus and different outlooks: translation and cognitive processing, intercultural impoliteness, transnationals and impressions at work, intercultural parenting manuals, video games and localisation. All are concerned with intercultural communication, in its manifestations and impacts in different contexts. All are interdisciplinary in their approach, in their own distinctive ways. These are defining features of this special issue of Multilingua, as they are of the journal’s aims. The volume has two interrelated goals: to promote synergies between disciplines with an overriding interest in the cross-linguistic study of language and to stimulate the interplay between them through reciprocal interrogation of methodologies and findings. It is also mindful of the impact agenda now vigorously pursued in research in most contexts, and intent on capitalizing on the consequent drive to interface theory and practice. The volume’s main sites of interrogation and interaction are cross- and intercultural pragmatics and translation, with contributions at the junction of socio-cognitive and interactional pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, linguistic typology, discourse analysis, translation studies, cultural studies.

In institutional settings of globalization, labelled languages are generally preferred over multilingual repertoires and mobile language resources. Drawing on linguistic-ethnographic analysis of the way English is treated as an invariable ‘ad hoc’ idiom in the Belgian asylum interview, this article demonstrates how institutional measures and routines relating to multilingualism fail to address the communicative needs and practices of the participants involved. I argue that by privileging the variety of the host institution as a means to monitor all incoming Englishes, the institution perpetuates traditional—though academically contested—centre-periphery categorizations of global Englishes. I proceed by discussing how the divergent potentialities of the speakers’ linguistic repertoires reflect a remarkable inversion of client-gatekeeper resources in the way the participants with the least linguistic resources in the interview process eventually have the power to act as arbiters of what is or is not institutionally relevant for the case.