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This paper addresses the potential of online environments as spaces for young people to develop intercultural competences by studying how otherness is created online and how this holds potential for learning. While online communication is an increasing part of young peoples' lives, not much is known about how young people use their online social networks to connect with culturally diverse others and whether such interactions create opportunities for learning. Using social network analyses and discourse analyses of self-reports, we compared Turkish-Dutch, Moroccan-Dutch and native-Dutch youth regarding: 1) the geographical dispersion and ethnic diversity of their online social networks and 2) how they reported on their online interactions and the opportunities for global learning. Young people from these communities differed in how they connected online and how they reflected on interactions in which they were confronted with different perspectives. We suggest a re-examination of the notion of global learning, paying more attention to the highly varied experience of 'global' youths' perception of interactions with different others, as well as what the learning potential of 'going global' entails.

Adopting a quantitative approach, this paper highlights findings of an exploratory study on Hokaglish, initially describing it as a trilingual code-switching phenomenon involving Hokkien, Tagalog, and English in a Filipino-Chinese enclave in Binondo, Manila, the Philippines. Departing from the (socio)linguistic landscape of the archipelagic nation, the discussion eventually leads to a frequency-based description of this phenomenon. Preliminary findings suggest that, in Hokaglish, code-switching from Hokkien to English appears to be the most frequent code-switching combination among the six possible ones and that it is typically found in religious institutions. From the investigation, Hokaglish yielded more attestations of intrasentential codeswitching than intersentential ones in households particularly. Moreover, findings also indicate that switches in the word-level are very frequent and that morphological code-switching is virtually non-existent in Hokaglish conversations. The paper ends with a discussion that will more or less provide some justification for the findings. A list of Glossing abbreviations is included.

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 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.

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.

In transcultural and transnational communication settings, English learners have to be able to communicate with people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. For this reason, English as a foreign language (EFL) textbooks, for instance, not only promote Anglo-American and British cultures but also include both EFL learners' home and international cultures. The present discourse study looks at the cultural content of a nationally adopted EFL textbook in Indonesia. It particularly investigates multicultural values represented in the EFL textbook geared for senior high school students. Findings of the study reveal that four themes of multicultural values emerge from the textbook, such as: (1) respect for cultures of different ethnic and religious groups; (2) respect for cultures of indigenous people; (3) conflict avoidance and peace with all forms of life and nature; and (4) appreciation of creative cultural products. The implications of this textual study suggest that as English plays an increasingly important role as a global lingua franca, multicultural materials from outer and expanding circle countries need to be added to English language teaching (ELT) textbooks. Therefore, English teachers should creatively teach multicultural aspects and use multimodal materials to engage students in culturally laden language-learning tasks.

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.

Guided by critical discourse analysis, this study analyzes how ancient civilizations are constructed in high school history textbooks used in Quebec, Canada. The findings suggest that the narrative generally ignores 2-way intercultural exchanges. The narrative is also Eurocentric, silencing sub-Saharan Africa's contributions and nonmaterial influences of non-Western civilizations, such as ancient Near Eastern influences on the Judeo-Christian monotheistic tradition. Such depictions normalize a dominance paradigm that sanctions the supremacy of particular civilizations, religions, or groups. Students need to develop a reflective historical consciousness that is conducive to intergroup dynamics based on respect for diversity. Thus, in studying ancient civilizations, they should be encouraged to interrogate their own worldviews, explore the interdependence of human civilizations, and engage with omitted counternarratives, alternative chronologies, and periodization.

This article explores the appearance of new teacher roles within the Italian education discourse, in particular focusing on official and scholarly texts from 1990 to 2015. During the second half of this period, the conceptual borders of two distinct roles, the intercultural teacher and the cultural mediator, begin to blur so that all teachers are called to engage in mediation. The role of mediator is made up of practices and dispositions intended to create a bridge between non-Italian students and Italian schools. The collapse of the teacher and mediator roles creates a new discursive context in which the Italian teacher is positioned to reconstitute her/himself through the adoption of these new practices and dispositions, thus constituting a new subjectivity. The new subjectivity, "homo pontem," is in part an effect of political reasoning and the theorising of intercultural and citizenship education that has produced state-sponsored policies meant to manage immigrants in Italian schools. The Italian Ministry of Education first referred to intercultural education in 1990, marking a starting-off point for this study. Through a discourse analysis of ministerial documents and Italian scholarship, the overlapping of the roles of cultural mediator and intercultural teacher is tracked. The effect of this overlapping suggests the availability of new techniques of the self, with the Italian teacher called upon to engage in practices that facilitate non-Italian students' integration, foster dialogue between cultures, and protect a new Italian way of being in today's multicultural Italian nation-state.

This article is informed by van Lier's ecological approach to linguistics in considering the affordances Korean-born students perceived in using Korean or English language in an Aotearoa New Zealand high school setting. Here, I regard affordances as the students' perceptions of their languages as linguistic resources enabling them to act, or constraining them from acting. The data suggest transitioning to high school is a critical time when Korean students are perplexed at the loss of their primary school's invitational culture of learning through interaction. Their reduced repertoire of interactions has implications for these students as they develop and learn to use and live in their languages. There are broader implications for multicultural schools in Aotearoa New Zealand where curriculum rhetoric envisages higher-level interactivity within the school environment with benefits for learning, both social and academic. This article draws on ethnographic data from a large study and employs linguistic ethnography's finely grained techniques of discourse analysis.

In this article, a continuum of resistance and receptivity constitutes a framework for understanding a cosmopolitan orientation "on the ground." Such a continuum is based on an understanding of the effects of globalization, when it comes to individual people, as both containing a potential for an active interest in other ways of life, and a resistance toward others' values and ways of living triggered by a feeling of being forced into situations without one's own voluntarily choice. The notion of continuum implies that each individual occupies a different position depending on the situation and context, and that these positions can shift. In the conceptual use of cosmopolitanism in empirical studies, there is need for more developed and specified terms to be used as analytical tools for discerning if and when something may be considered as a possible cosmopolitan orientation. For this purpose, the four capacities for self-reflexivity, hospitality, intercultural dialogue and transactions of perspectives, are developed out of Delanty's understanding of critical cosmopolitanism. To be able to distinguish between institutionalized routine conversations and conversations that seem to engage the students in a more active cosmopolitan meaning making, the continuum of efferent and aesthetic-reflective experiences, taken from Rosenblatt's studies of reading, has been suggested. A preliminary analysis of data from an empirical research study focused on classroom conversations, and contextualized by an analysis of a curriculum concerning fundamental values, indicates that it is possible to discern different discursive actions of self-reflexivity and hospitality in classroom conversations, as well as a potential for intercultural dialogue.

The emerging methodology of ethnocinema fuses techniques from its ethnographic origins with its co-constitutive methods, and invites collaborators to creatively come together for mutual education and cultural transformation. Education as a site of the enactment and "politics of identity construction" continues to confront notions of authenticity/fallacy, hybridity/purity and a media-driven "fictive unity" in the ways we enact and teach culture (Souter, in Hall). Collaborative methods in educational practice, like ethnocinema, suggest that as notions of culture are changing so too must educational practices, both in classrooms and in research contexts. As global mobilities muddy the waters of articulable cultural values and identities, educational practices present an urgent imperative to engage in more dialogic teaching and learning--and more collaboratively generated research--to reduce alienation, generalisation and increase pedagogical border crossing. This article addresses the im/possibility and implications of moving beyond cultural identities in intercultural co-educational dialogue.

This research article investigates new developments in the representation of the intercultural component in textbooks for a service technical writing course. Through textual analysis, using quantitative and qualitative techniques, I report discourse analysis of 15 technical writing textbooks published during 1993-2006. The theoretical and practical elements of intercultural teaching have been expanded in recent years, but this progress is quite slow. This article provides some directions in which the textbooks can be revised. Such an analysis may be of interest to textbook writers and educators.

This paper reports a small-scale investigation into the differences in learning behaviour exhibited by members of an intercultural group undertaking an online course on educational enquiry in support of doctoral research in education. Differences in learning behaviour can be attributed in part to the different cultural and linguistic backgrounds of the participants. As virtual learning environments are seldom designed to accommodate cultural diversity, there is often a disconnection between the intended and the actual experiences of the participants. This study explores the characteristics of this disconnection. It is suggested that virtual learning environments should be designed to take account of the mutual transformation of both learner and environment in educational processes. Some technological developments that may lead to virtual learning environments becoming adaptive are described. However, it is emphasised that inclusivity will depend upon an adaptive dynamic in the virtual learning environment that is essentially social. (Contains 1 table and 3 figures.)

Interactive discourse structuring is used to guide listeners through on-going speech and has been shown to have a positive effect on lecture comprehension, particularly in L2 settings. As mobility increases in the academic world, there are more opportunities for lecture events characterized not only by linguistic/cultural diversity, but also by unfamiliarity between lecturers and audiences. In these situations, interactive discourse structuring may have an especially important role. This study compares interactive discourse structuring used by guest lecturers (both L1 and L2) versus L1 classroom lecturers. Using corpus methodology, interactive discourse structuring was found to be most frequent among L2 guest lecturers, least frequent among L1 guest lecturers, with L1 classroom lecturers falling in the middle. The results suggest that linguistic/cultural diversity has more influence on discourse structuring than participant unfamiliarity. In addition, the analysis revealed other trends, particularly the very wide range of vocabulary used in discourse structuring expressions by all speakers. The findings can be implemented towards developing more authentic academic listening materials, as well as guidelines for both native and non-native guest lecturers who interact with international audiences. (Contains 2 tables.)

Examination of the interactions of five teachers working with multiethnic classes of five and six year olds in the United Kingdom found that the teacher interacted less frequently with black than white children and also spent less time with black students discussing particular tasks. (21 references) (Author/CB)

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understandings of culture and multiculture are broad and deeply embedded in every day talk and practices. In an increasingly globalised world, how we understand and work with these terms affects how parents and their families experience health care services and the support intended by health care professionals. This is particularly important for parents who are new to Australia. In this paper we report on findings from an ethnographic study undertaken across two community child and family health nursing sites in South Australia. Using examples, we explore how child and family health nurses appear to understand and use constructs of culture and multiculture during everyday, intercultural communication with parents who are new to Australia and Australian health services. By analysing these understandings through postcolonial and feminist theories we found pervading evidence that neo-colonial constructs of a white western monoculture shaped intercultural communication practice. We conclude by reflecting on how these constructs might be addressed to improve intercultural communication in child and family health settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]