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In Germany, the efficiency of cultural diplomacy is ensured by the "separation of powers" approach: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as the official lead agency for foreign policy, holds the decision-making power, while leaving the concrete implementation to cultural intermediaries. This paper aims to explore Germany's cultural diplomacy strategies in China by analyzing the content of the public account operated by one of its main institutions in China, the German Cultural Center Beijing - Goethe-Institute. It combines qualitative and quantitative research methods and integrates the disciplinary perspectives of linguistics and intercultural communication. Our findings suggest that the Germany's cultural diplomacy strategies are characterized by preference, pluralism, interaction and individualism. These findings can also provide an optimizing path for China's own cultural institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In modern times, the expansion of intercultural relations and changes, the strengthening of globalization in all spheres of society, the reform of educational programs, the development of all kinds of speaking activities in foreign language studies. It is known from the history of German language teaching methods that pragmatic didactics in the field of foreign language teaching methods already existed in Germany in the early 1970s. However, many researchers have thought that the development of communication skills instead of didactics and that this activity is superior in language acquisition. The pragmadidactics purpose of establishing mutual communication relations in the teaching of the German language is one of the main tasks of the field we are studying. Mutual communication skills determine communication relations with German speakers. To develop communication skills, appropriate forms of application and automatic transmission of pragmatic knowledge are necessary. In this process, the transmission of participants' thoughts during communication creates a basis for the formation and development of language knowledge, skills and habits. The training is a type of activity that allows you to communicate in German and strengthen social relations. The basis of foreign language teaching is, among other skills, the creation and formation of social communication skills, social activities, relationships and interactions of people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In conversations between immigrants and officials, problems of understanding are often noticeable. About 280 recordings realised at the Argentine Aliens' Department and at several public authorities in Germany show that knowledge divergences regarding linguistic, cultural and institutional knowledge result in (sometimes grave) difficulties of understanding – even if the interactants speak the same mother tongue. The German–Argentine comparison provides the possibility to examine the role of language in intercultural communication more accurately because – in contrast to the situation in Germany – the majority of immigrants in Argentina speak the same mother tongue as the receiving country but they still hail from very different cultural areas. This shows that cultural contact cannot – as is often done in western approaches – be equated with language contact. Further, as the first results show, understanding problems seem to be not only a matter of ‘knowledge’ but also of the interactional management of social roles and discourse strategies. The interactants apply strategies of negotiation: attempts to level the relation between the interactants, attempts to constitute a hierarchical relation and attempts to reverse the hierarchical relation – sometimes with conflictuous consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper focuses on problems of learning and teaching via English as a lingua franca at a German university. An analysis of audio data from a course in engineering will give evidence of how university courses may be severely affected by intercultural and linguistic problems. It will be argued that – although participants from a variety of cultural backgrounds may be reasonably effective in communicating about subject matter in English – problems will arise when a larger variety of communicative functions is involved in instructional discourse, for example negotiating forms of cooperation and resolving conflicts. It is hypothesized that this situation may be detrimental for the implementation of innovative and learner-centered types of teaching arrangements in the international university. Against this background, suggestions will be made for reducing such problems by utilizing adequate training materials for university teachers and students who need to operate in ELF settings. These materials include activities for raising awareness of culture-related differences in the perception of teachers’ and learners’ roles in a university context, as well as a dictionary of phrases, which is organized in pragmatic categories and offers support for realizing relevant communicative functions in university teaching contexts. The paper also addresses some methodological issues, such as the need for interrelated sets of empirical data and problems of identifying ELF characteristics and specifics of intercultural communication in the pragmatic domain. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Hedging plays a significant role in both scientific writing proper and its popularized form. However, most research has concentrated on the former text type, while comparatively little attention has been paid to the phenomenon in popular science. The present study uses a corpus of English popular scientific articles, their German translations, and original German popular scientific articles to investigate the use of epistemic modal markers (such as might, could, perhaps), which represent a common form of hedging, as they serve to mark the speaker's uncertainty about the truth of a proposition. The analysis shows noteworthy differences in usage between English and German. The English texts make use of epistemic modal markers much more frequently than the German original texts. Markers expressing mere possibility (e.g., maybe) are particularly more frequent in English, while German rather uses markers of high probability (e.g., probably). These differences can be related to divergent communicative preferences, specifically to a preference for indirectness and addressee-orientation in English texts, contrasting with a preference for directness and content-orientedness in German. The German translated texts are situated inbetween English and German originals, i.e., they exhibit some degree of adaptation to German textual conventions as well as some degree of ''shining-through'' of the English conventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European University Viadrina located on the German-Polish border, with a high number of international students, was founded to promote the 'growing-together' of Europe. Despite those aims, it is becoming more evident that international institutions must develop special strategies to sensitize their members on an intercultural level and to encourage intercultural communication. The case of Viadrina University serves as example of how a course programme can be created in order to promote intercultural competence. One of the programme's main aims is to give students the possibility of experiencing, discovering and discussing the diversity of values and worldviews in special workshops. Today, the training programme, which at first had not been considered necessary by many university employees, has turned into a success story which can be transferred to other international academic institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]