Intercultural Communication

Asst. Lect. Huda Abd ALkareem Zhgair

Intercultural communication (IC) can be defined as communication where cultural and linguistic differences are perceived as relevant to the interaction by the participants or researchers involved (Zhu 2019, Baker 2022). In IC, participants make use of and negotiate between different cultural resources and languages in interaction, including intersecting cultural identities, communities, references, and meanings (e.g. nationality, ethnicity, class, profession, gender), at a range of scales from the local, to the national, and the global. Due to its focus on linguistic and cultural practices, language learning is inevitably an intercultural process, whether or not it is explicitly recognized in teaching. The intercultural dimensions of language learning become particularly important when the focus is on developing learners’ communicative competence since that communication is typically intercultural. Indeed, the idea of culture as part of language teaching has a long history. In the nineteenth century, languages were learnt primarily through works of literature to gain a better understanding of the culture of the target language community (Risager 2007). In the twentieth century, there was an emphasis on learning languages as a means of communicating across national cultural borders, often for economic or political advantage (Jenkins 2015). The rapid increase in globalization at the end of the previous century and during the first decades of this century has seen a focus on learning languages for global connections and intercultural communication.

This has been particularly true of English and ELT due to the role that the expansion of English language use has played in the processes of globalization (Moran Panero 2018). IC perspectives are at times used interchangeably with cross-cultural (CC) perspectives, and there are overlaps between them. However, a broad (and somewhat simplified) distinction can be made between IC and earlier CC perspectives that have been prevalent in ELT (Scollon et al. 2012; Baker 2022). In CC approaches, communicative practices of different groups are frequently compared at the national scale with differences identified, for instance comparing different greetings in Chinese and English. This has been criticized for presenting stereotyped and essentialist characterizations of culture through reducing individuals to representations of a national culture (Holliday 2011). In contrast, IC approaches investigate instances of interaction between individuals at a range of cultural levels. This is a crucial distinction because people in intercultural interactions typically communicate differently to how they would in intracultural (shared culture) scenarios. For example, English people may shake hands when meeting someone for the first time in a formal situation, and in a similar situation Thai people place their hands, palms together, in front of their face and bow their head in a wai. However, when a Thai person meets an English person, neither will expect a wai or a handshake: each realizes that their interlocutor may not be familiar with their greeting norms. Thus, a CC comparison would be unhelpful for predicting the flexibility that is usual in actual instances of intercultural communication. Nevertheless, even within IC perspectives the ‘who’, ‘how’, and ‘why’ of culture needs to be critically investigated to avoid stereotyping others. This includes acknowledging cultural groupings beyond the nation, such as ethnicity, gender, religion, and profession (Scollon et al.2012).

Culture and the intercultural are often tacked on as a ‘fifth skill’ (Kramsch 1993: 1) to be addressed only when other aspects of language and communication have been covered. Evidence suggests that teachers typically fail to teach culture or IC in a systematic or in-depth way (Young and Sachdev 2011). This is not surprising given the restricted time and resources many ELT teachers face and that few assessments include aspects of IC. Additionally, teaching materials frequently cover culture and the intercultural in a simplistic and stereotyped manner (Gray 2010). Furthermore, intercultural dimensions are often not part of pre-service teacher education.

 Nonetheless, there are now decades’ worth of research and theory suggesting a wide variety of approaches to applying IC in language classrooms (Risager 2007; Baker 2022 among many others). Shared features of these approaches include expanding communicative competence to incorporate ICC (intercultural communicative competence) and ICA (Intercultural awareness), and linked to this, replacing the native speaker with an intercultural speaker/citizen model as more appropriate and achievable for L2 learners. Considering all these reasons combined underscore the growing importance of IC in ELT and the need to incorporate it more deeply and systematically into teacher education, teaching materials, classroom practices, and assessment.