An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching 9781788928625

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An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching

LANGUAGES FOR INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION AND EDUCATION Series Editors: Michael Byram, University of Durham, UK and Anthony J. Liddicoat, University of Warwick, UK The overall aim of this series is to publish books which will ultimately inform learning and teaching, but whose primary focus is on the analysis of intercultural relationships, whether in textual form or in people’s experience. There will also be books which deal directly with pedagogy, with the relationships between language learning and cultural learning, between processes inside the classroom and beyond. They will all have in common a concern with the relationship between language and culture, and the development of intercultural communicative competence. All books in this series are externally peer-reviewed. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www​.multilingual​-matters​.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol, BS1 2AW, UK.

LANGUAGES FOR INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION AND EDUCATION: 36

An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching 2nd Edition

John Corbett

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Jackson

DOI https://doi.org/10.21832/CORBET8618 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Names: Corbett, John, author. Title: An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching/John Corbett. Description: 2nd edition. | Bristol, UK; Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Multilingual Matters, [2022] | Series: Languages for Intercultural Communication and Education: 36 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This is a thoroughly revised, updated and expanded edition of a practical introduction to intercultural education for teachers of English as a second language. This new edition addresses developments in the field since the publication of the 1st edition, including the impact of online resources for English language education”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021050240 (print) | LCCN 2021050241 (ebook) | ISBN 9781788928601 (paperback) | ISBN 9781788928618 (hardback) | ISBN 9781788928625 (pdf) | ISBN 9781788928632 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: English language—Study and teaching—Foreign speakers. | Intercultural communication. | Multicultural education. | Language and culture. Classification: LCC PE1128.A2 C6933 2022 (print) | LCC PE1128.A2 (ebook) | DDC 428/.0071—dc21 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021050240 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021050241 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-861-8 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-860-1 (pbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol, BS1 2AW, UK. USA: Ingram, Jackson, TN, USA. Website: www​.multilingual​-matters​.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https://www​.facebook​.com​/multilingualmatters Blog: www​.cha​nnel​view​publ​ications​.wordpress​.com Copyright © 2022 John Corbett. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound in the UK by Short Run Press Ltd.

For Maria Augusta Rodrigues Alves O problema de uma língua internacional é uma questão de arrependimento. Quando recorremos a essa forma de língua, não estamos, na verdade, à procura de nada de novo, mas daquilo que perdemos. The problem of an international language is a problem of remorse. When we seek such a language, we are seeking, indeed, not what will be new, but what we lost. Fernando Pessoa ‘Língua Internacional’ in A Língua Portuguesa (São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1997)

Contents

Foreword ix Preface to the Second Edition and Acknowledgements Image Credits

xi xiii

1 Linguistic and Ethnographic Perspectives on Culture

1

2 From Intercultural Communication to Literary, Media and Cultural Studies

27

3 Defining Intercultural Communicative Competence

41

4 Implementing an Intercultural Approach to ELT

65

5 Culture and Conversation

79

6 Developing an Ethnographic Frame of Mind

102

7 Interviewing Skills for the Intercultural Learner

125

8 Virtual Ethnographies: Intercultural Telecollaboration

151

9 Developing Visual Literacy

174

10 Using Literary, Media and Cultural Studies

203

11 Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence

235

12 Further Prospects for Intercultural Language Education

264

Appendix: Checklist of questions to promote visual literacy (see Chapter 9) 275 References 281 Index 298

vii

Foreword

Twenty years ago – roughly when the first edition of this book was published – the intellectual foundations of the field of intercultural language teaching were beginning to take shape; and this book has played a crucial role in bringing the field to maturity. With this second edition – and in its substantial additions – we can begin to see how the field has developed and changed, in no small part under its considerable influence. A fundamental premise of the first edition was that how language works, how we make sense in language, how we mean things to each other – all take place within specific contexts. And in these contexts, cultures are in play as habitual patterns of interaction, routine forms of social practice, recurrent uses of symbol, sedimented frameworks of value and belief. As a dense backdrop, culture is implicated in every instance of language in use. But if culture is a constant backdrop to the everyday use of language, how is it best to equip the learner with cultural knowledge – not just in terms of ‘knowing that...’, but also in terms of ‘knowing how to...’? For while any language as a code is finite, cultures are boundless and it is difficult to anticpate what features of context will be significant for communication – especially in intercultural contexts. The approach adopted by this book is to equip the learner with ways of analysing and interpreting culture but also to equip them with the ways of knowing how to negotiate the distance between their own culture and that of others. Fundamentally it provides the learner with methodologies for exploring cultural difference enabling them to explore their own culture as well as the target culture. For if we are to bridge the gap between our cultural origins and our destinations we need ways of observing, interpreting and understanding the cultures we encounter and the differences between them and our own. This remains a fundamental foundational and guiding framework of intercultural approaches to language teaching. Nonetheless, in certain important respects the field has evolved and changed in ways that were difficult to anticipate but that this edition now charts and delineates. Perhaps the most important change lies in the way that the concept of culture ix

x Foreword

itself has been fundamentally re-inflected under the pressures of rapid social change. Even 20 years ago cultures were often still conceptualised and comprehended in broadly national terms as the whole way of life of a people (e.g. the French, the Chinese, the Vietnamese or the Welsh). But even 20 years ago this simple heuristic of a homogeneous national people was becoming destabilised. Most obviously it led to over-generalisations, oversimplifications and – worst of all – could tip into stereotyping. Raymond Williams, one of the founding figures of what became known as cultural studies, famously commented that ‘culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’ (1983: 87). And the last two decades have if anything only seen the concept become all the more complex. Perhaps the major complication lies in the scaling down of its range of application. It is more likely now to refer not to whole societies (or nations) but to smaller social units, subaltern groups, institutions and organisations. The role of culture in the formation of identity has received extra attention and emphasis: in complex societies the emphasis falls increasingly on the way many of us must transition – or ‘cross’ – between one identity and another and between one kind of cultural space and another. All of this only serves to increase the relevance of An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching. Scaling down how we think about the domains of culture only serves to increase how important are its implications: ‘culture is ordinary’, but it is also universally relevant. At the same time – while culture was always a terrain of struggle – cultural divisions, especially, over the last decade, have if anything become quite deliberately accentuated. Culture becomes a foregrounded site of affiliation, rejection, explicit argument and contest. And this edition gives full recognition to these complexities, while remaining faithful to its founding insights. In particular, it takes the bold step of reflecting back on its own methods and methodologies, recognising that the classroom itself is a cultural context with its particular norms, values and forms of identity. One final dimension that emerges strongly in this new edition may be summed up as the digitalisation of language and culture. Linguistic exchange, language and language learning all now take place not simply along the long-established modalities of speech and writing but online across the multimodal spaces of the internet. To be intercultural in the digital age requires the skills and ability to negotiate cultural difference across diverse modalities. The new edition of An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching steers an admirably lucid and balanced course through the growing complexities of communication, culture, language and language learning in the digital age. Professor Martin Montgomery

Preface to the Second Edition and Acknowledgements

When I completed the first edition of this book in 2003, I wrote the following acknowledgements. The process of turning this volume into a finished product has been a long one. I am grateful to all the inspirational colleagues and students from my time living and teaching in Italy, Britain, Russia and Brazil, and to those I met elsewhere at seminars usually organised by Nick Wadham Smith of the British Council. A smaller number of scholars, colleagues and friends substantially influenced the final outcome; you will recognise yourselves in the pages that follow, and I am indebted to you all. I am also grateful to the Department of English Language at the University of Glasgow for sparing me for an academic session so that I could write the first full draft of the manuscript. Christian Kay, Alan Pulverness and Mike Byram generously read versions of the work in progress and made constructive comments. Alison Phipps spurred me to get the job done. Throughout, Augusta Alves has been a constant source of ideas, support and love – to her this work is dedicated. The errors that remain are, obviously, my own responsibility.

It has been an even longer process to complete a second edition and many more people have contributed to the development of my thinking on the subject of this book over the past two decades. To the names above, I must add Wendy Anderson, Andrea Assenti del Rio, María José Coperías-Aguilar, Hugo Dart, Beatriz Peña Dix, Manuela Guilherme, Prue Holmes, Clarissa Jordão, Li Li, Anthony Liddicoat, Bruno Lima, Peih-ying ‘Peggy’ Lu, Malcolm MacDonald and Martin Montgomery, the last of whom was kind enough to contribute a foreword to the first and second editions. Many others could be mentioned. I have particularly benefited from conversations with colleagues, friends and students in Macau, where I worked between 2011 and 2017, and, more recently, with fellow participants in the AHRC project, ‘Building an intercultural pedagogy for higher education in conditions of conflict and protracted crises: languages, identity, culture’. Anna Roderick of Multilingual Matters has xi

xii Preface to the Second Edition and Acknowledgements

been infinitely patient and encouraging. Augusta Alves has remained a constant support and continues to be a source of love and ideas – to her this work is rededicated. Two anonymous reviewers were kind enough to read the entire manuscript of this edition and they offered insightful and constructive comments and critiques. Notwithstanding their best efforts, errors and inadequacies no doubt remain and are very much my own. To counter the utopian optimism that is sometimes associated with intercultural language education, to the first and present edition of this book I added an epigram by the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, observing that the search for an international language is necessarily imbued with a sense not only of gain, but of loss. It is an item of faith in intercultural language studies that the encounter with otherness is enriching, but, as it transforms us, there is also, inevitably, loss – and we can witness, acknowledge and honour that fact, even as we step bravely into the exciting, uncertain future. The cover image chosen for the first edition showed one of Duane Hanson’s ironic, disturbingly hyper-real sculptures of stereotypical tourists, both brash and vulnerable. It is one of my favourite artworks, and, two decades ago, I thought it would be in keeping with the book’s theme of cultural exploration. For the second edition, I have replaced that image with a detail from Simon Patterson’s equally wonderful ‘The Great Bear’, which turns a familiar, iconic image, that of the London Underground map, into an autobiographical constellation of personal connections. The idea of the network, both intensely personal and recognisably social, seems to be appropriate to intercultural language education as it moves into the future.

Image Credits

Figure 9.2 “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (c.1558) by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1526/1530–1569) from the Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts, Brussels, Belgium / Public domain  180 Figure 9.3 Photo of Buddha sculpture at the house of the ‘Resident’ in Kediri, Indonesia, from the Tropenmuseum, part of the National Museum of World Cultures / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons​.org​/ licenses​/by​-sa​/3.0)  183 Figure 9.4 Coloured print of a Highlander and a black slave, smoking a pipe and taking snuff, possibly an advertisement for tobacco, c. 1790. © National Museums Scotland. Licensor: www​.scran​.ac​.uk.  185 Figure 9.5 Poster for Armenian and Syrian Relief Campaign c. 1918. National Archives at College Park, Maryland, USA / Public domain  187 Figure 9.6 Madonna and Child by Giovanni Bellini from the Bernasconi Collection, Castelvecchio Museum, Verona, Italy / CC BY-SA (https:// creativecommons​.org​/licenses​/by​-sa​/3.0)  188 Figures 9.7 & 9.8 Brazilian political campaign posters; photographs taken by the author  189 Figure 9.9 Photograph of Gendou Missile / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons​.org​/licenses​/by​-sa​/3.0)  194 Figure 9.10 Photograph of billboards in Causeway Bay, Yee Wo Street and Paterson Street, July 2020, by Lynuetyeang UV2002 / CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons​.org​/licenses​/by​-sa​/4.0)  200 Figure 9.11 Billboard advertisement in São Paulo for Casa do Pão de Queijo, photograph taken by the author.  201 Figure 10.2 Screenshot of frequencies of occurrence of ‘one nation conservatism’ in NOW from 2010-early 2020; from Davies, Mark. (2016-) xiii

xiv Image Credits

Corpus of News on the Web (NOW). Available online at https://www​ .english​-corpora​.org​/now/  215 Figure 10.3 Screenshot of Jô Soares interviewing Patrick Swayze on Jô Soares onze e meia (SBT, 1995) https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​ =i8GeH5oXIw8 (4’34”)  229

1 Linguistic and Ethnographic Perspectives on Culture

This book describes an approach to English language teaching (ELT) that puts at its centre the idea that speakers from diverse backgrounds negotiate different cultures as well as different languages. Moreover, the book argues that the exploration of familiar and unfamiliar cultures can be a driving force of English language education. While this is hardly a new approach to language education, it has never been uncontroversial. Part of the continuing controversy about this approach to language education is the fact that ‘culture’ itself is a much disputed and endlessly debated concept. The opening chapters therefore consider the ways in which culture has been understood by scholars in a number of academic disciplines from which English language educators have drawn inspiration. These disciplines include linguistics, communication studies, anthropology and literary, media and cultural studies – as well as some sub-disciplines within them, such as linguistic anthropology, ethnography and sociolinguistics. The purpose of the first two chapters in this book is to offer a brief summary of each of these disciplines. By doing so, I aim to alert the reader to some long-standing questions around ‘culture’ that language teachers who are interested in this approach need to address, and to suggest how the answers to these questions might shape practices in language education. The topics covered in the first chapter are: • The limitations of early ‘communicative’ models of language teaching. • The conceptualisation of culture in a range of linguistic theories that have influenced ELT. • The impact of anthropology and ethnography on language education. Some of the theoretical issues raised in the description of these ‘tributary’ disciplines and their subdisciplines might at a glance seem to be only of tangential interest to the language teacher, and so at the end of each section there are some open-ended questions for reflection that are designed to prompt readers to consider how the foregoing discussion is relevant to their own educational practices, and how their own (perhaps 1

2  An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching

unconscious) assumptions about culture and language teaching have been shaped by arguments within these disciplines. It is worth pausing here for a moment to consider a little further the reflective questions and their intent. The questions are formulated on the assumption that the reader will have some prior experience as either a language learner or a language teacher – or, in some chapters, as someone who has lived in one or more cultural context and is open to observing the phenomena and patterns of behaviour that characterise that context with fresh and critical eyes. Readers are thus invited to relate the content of this volume to their own experience and to test the claims in this volume against that experience. The ability to think reflectively and then shape one’s attitudes and behaviour accordingly, lies behind a number of educational approaches, including experiential learning, problembased learning and action learning (e.g. Schön, 1983; Sofo et al., 2010). The reflective questions are offered here, partly as a way of summarising and pinpointing (and, indeed, raising questions about) some of the key issues in this book as it develops. Some of the questions require only a few moments’ consideration, others presuppose, or imagine, an extended discussion amongst peers – either colleagues or fellow trainee teachers. Yet others are intended to prompt rather more elaborate thought experiments. Their shared aim is that readers rethink their own experience and beliefs in the light of the volume, perhaps recognising and affirming certain articles of faith that are embedded, consciously or unconsciously, in their educational philosophy, but perhaps challenging others. At the conclusion of Chapter 2, I offer a tentative working definition of culture that informs the approach that will then be described in the remainder of the book. The subsequent chapters aim to offer a sustained and coherent set of ways in which the exploration of cultures can inform aspects of ELT. What is an ‘Intercultural’ Approach to English Language Teaching?

Since at least the mid-to-late 1980s, many teachers and educationalists have been arguing for an ‘intercultural’ approach to language teaching. The pioneering advocates of an intercultural approach invited teachers to re-examine their most basic assumptions about what language is used for, and what a course in a second or foreign language should seek to achieve. From the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, and probably, for many, up until the present day, at the heart of ‘communicative’ language pedagogy was the concept of the ‘information gap’. To simplify a complex shift in pedagogical beliefs and practices, language educators began to turn away from the idea that a second language was acquired mainly by the manipulation of linguistic structures, in activities such as drills. Instead, educationalists argued that by setting up activities that required learners to bridge a series of information gaps, those learners would

Linguistic and Ethnographic Perspectives on Culture  3

‘naturally’ develop their knowledge and skills in the second language (e.g. Richards, J., 2006: 18). Ideally, by engaging with those activities, good learners would acquire a proficiency that would make them indistinguishable from ‘native’ speakers. This new view of language learning, as essentially a cognitive set of processes triggered by exposure to and engagement with the target language through a series of tasks, tended to underrate the role and value of culture. Towards the end of the 20th century, Stern (1992: 206) noted that, despite a sustained and consistent body of work, particularly in North America, that continued to draw attention to the importance of culture in language teaching, ‘the cultural component has remained difficult to accommodate in practice’. In fact, overtly ‘cultural’ content was often stripped from learning materials. Reviewing ELT in the 1970s and 1980s, Pulverness (1996) comments: English was seen as a means of communication which should not be bound to culturally-specific conditions of use, but should be easily transferable to any cultural setting. Authenticity was a key quality, but only insofar as it provided reliable models of language in use. Content was important as a source of motivation, but it was seen as equally important to avoid material which might be regarded as ‘culture bound’. Throughout the 1970s and much of the 1980s, syllabus design and materials writing were driven by needs analysis, and culture was subordinated to performance objectives. (Pulverness, 1996: 7)

As Pulverness observes, the anxiety about culture in language teaching, in the 1970s and 1980s, stemmed from different sources. An ostensibly ‘culture-free’ set of materials was easier for publishers to market internationally since it avoided the risk of appearing to promote or even impose anglocentric attitudes and values. Where ‘culture’ was evident (in references to, say, popular music, films or tourist sites), the rationale was to stimulate learners’ interest or recognition, but there was little sense that ‘learning culture’ was a central curricular objective. Reading or listening to texts about cultural phenomena, or writing and speaking about cultural topics, would simply be a way of activating or assessing language skills. One of the limitations of this attitude to culture was that ‘communicative’ language courses tended not to connect systematically with everyday reality, either the realities of learners’ own lives or the realities of the lives of those who spoke the target language. ‘Authentic’ cultural materials were exploited, as Pulverness says, as models and exemplars of language use but they were not necessarily used as educational content in their own right. From the mid-1980s on, the view of ‘culture’ as a set of topics changed radically. Intercultural language educators began to argue that culture was embodied not only in a set of products, from, say, pop music

4  An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching

to the plays of Shakespeare, but also in the experience of everyday life. It followed from this argument that the effective acquisition of a second language necessitated an understanding of the function of that language within the everyday experiences and feelings of its speakers. It further follows that if learners are truly to understand the function of a second language in the life of its speakers, they must be able to compare it with the function of their own language in their everyday life. To learn a second language is, therefore, to explore two languages, two worlds and the interaction between them. The exploration of the home language and English has become more relevant, and indeed urgent, as English has emerged as the global lingua franca of a digitally connected world. As English has developed as a lingua franca, the role of English language learners has also shifted from being aspiring ‘native’ speakers to being agents who might use all the linguistic resources at their disposal to mediate effectively between different languages and worlds (cf. May, 2014). Certainly, from the late 1980s, a series of educators (e.g. Byram, 1997b; Byram & Zarate, 1997; Corbett, 2003, 2010; Damen, 1987; Fantini, 1997; Guilherme, 2002; Kramsch, 1993) explored the implications of an intercultural approach to language teaching and learning. Many of the precepts of an intercultural approach were eventually enshrined in European and North American policy documents that have had a global impact, namely the Council of Europe’s Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) guidelines (Council of Europe, 2001; updated in North et al., 2018), and the National Council of State Supervisors for Languages and the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages’ Can-Do Statements for Intercultural Communication (NCSSFL-ACTFL, 2017). Because they are sophisticated statements that attempt to capture interculturality in ways that are relevant to language educators, these documents and their implications are discussed in some detail in Chapter  3, and their influence is evident throughout the present volume. They have, nevertheless, been subject to intense critical scrutiny and their limitations as expressions of interculturality will also be addressed. While such policy statements and their global reception might indicate that there has been a shift in the past two decades towards the mainstream adoption of an intercultural approach in language pedagogy, the reality, as ever, is much more complicated. Introducing a set of case studies on the use of the CEFR within and beyond Europe in the first decade after its publication, Byram and Parmenter (2012: 5) acknowledge that many teachers have had difficulty in assimilating the 375 pages of the 2001 CEFR guidelines and focus only on the proficiency scales, A1–C2. The difficulty in applying the CEFR guidelines in all their nuanced complexity has not been assuaged by the publication of a 230page Companion document (North et al., 2018). Perhaps as a response to the complexity of the CEFR, more succinct models have been proposed

Linguistic and Ethnographic Perspectives on Culture  5

for intercultural learning; for example, The Global People Competency Framework (Spencer-Oatey & Stadler, 2009) aims to indicate to teachers and learners the kinds of knowledge, skills and personal qualities conducive to ‘effective intercultural interaction’. Moreover, despite the numerous introductions to aspects of intercultural communication and language teaching that have been published since the first edition of this book in 2003 (e.g. Byram, 2008; Dasli & Díaz, 2016; Holliday, 2018; Jackson, 2019), and despite the availability of multi-author, state-of-theart surveys of the field (e.g. Jackson, 2014, 2020a), there remains a place for a volume that attempts to set out for teachers, clearly and concisely, the background and principles of an intercultural approach to ELT, and to indicate some accessible ways of implementing these principles in practice. That is the purpose of this revised and updated edition. It will be evident from the above that much of the work on intercultural approaches to second language education has been carried out in state schools and colleges, and that documents such as the CEFR and the NCSSFL-ACTFL ‘can-do’ statements are meant to guide state and public school practices. An intercultural approach perhaps remains less obviously relevant to ELT in the commercial sector. ‘Modern’ or ‘world’ language educators in state schools are normally required to formulate learning outcomes that explicitly embed the acquisition of languages in a broader humanistic curriculum that promotes cross-cultural understanding. Such goals are more likely to be part of a liberal, democratic, state-sponsored educational curriculum than a commercially driven one, or a curriculum in an authoritarian state. Even so, there are benefits for the commercial sector, and even in less politically liberal educational contexts, in adopting and adapting aspects of an intercultural approach. One obvious and thriving area is in language training for business or trade negotiations. The skills of observation, exploration, analysis and mediation that are addressed in the intercultural classroom give a coherent rationale for the teaching of the traditional ‘four skills’ of reading, writing, listening and speaking. Communicative, task-based language teaching has always demanded that classroom activities should have a purpose. An intercultural approach gives teachers and learners a clearly defined and consistent set of purposes: to develop the knowledge, attitudes and skills (linguistic and personal) that will enable individuals to explore and analyse new cultures and mediate between different cultural perspectives. While a fully developed intercultural approach to English teaching is still rare in most commercial language schools, and indeed in many state schools (cf. Wagner et  al., 2019), most English language teachers will nevertheless recognise in the contents of this book many activities that they already do. Notwithstanding any lingering anxieties about the use of explicitly ‘cultural’ content, most English teachers have always taken a personal interest in cultural activities and products, and their individual

6  An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching

experience of and interest in some of the ‘tributary disciplines’ that feed into intercultural language education, such as literary and media studies or anthropology, will no doubt have led them to adopt a number of the practices suggested in this volume. Indeed, once alerted to it, most language teachers will recognise the possibilities afforded by an intercultural approach as an extension of their current methods of teaching. The adoption of an intercultural approach does not necessarily mean replacing or undermining the advances made by task-based or learner-centred curricula (cf. Nunan, 1988, 2004; Willis, 1996; Willis & Willis, 2001, and the various contributions to Carter & Nunan, 2001). Rather, it seeks to build on these advances, and to channel them towards useful and realistic goals. ‘Native speaker proficiency’ has been rightly challenged as a realistic or even desirable outcome for language programmes (cf. Byram, 2009); a more practical goal for language learners is the acquisition of those skills involved in observing, interpreting and mediating in intercultural, multilingual settings. This book, then, recognises the wide diversity of contexts of ELT throughout the world, whether in commercial language schools, state schools and colleges, online or in private classes. Learners may be living in a context in which English is used as the main community language or in a context where English is simply a school subject; that is, they may be learning English either as a second or foreign language. The book consequently does not seek to prescribe a single, all-purpose approach that will meet all situations and requirements. Over the past decades, there has rightly been a suspicion of ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches to second language education. For example, while there may be good arguments to support the optimal exposure of learners to any target language, accusations of ‘linguistic imperialism’ have been levelled against those teachers who insist on ‘English only’ in the classroom, and there are understandable anxieties about the ethics of institutions that require competence in English as a prerequisite to access to education more broadly (cf. Pennycook, 1994, 1998; Phillipson, 1992; Shohamy, 2012). Critics argue that blanket insistence on ‘English through English’ or ‘English as a medium of instruction’ policies can encourage economic and educational dependence on textbooks and teachers from anglophone countries and it may exclude certain groups from legitimate access to education and job opportunities. It is the teacher’s responsibility, in part, to decide the degree to which to focus on the home and target languages and cultures – and this decision will be influenced by factors that will vary from class to class. The adoption of an intercultural approach cannot by itself aspire to equalise patterns of social and economic domination and subordination that characterise international and interpersonal relations. Nevertheless, its critically reflective stance should encourage teachers and learners to be aware of the roles that different languages play in society, and in their own lives. The intercultural element of this kind of second language

Linguistic and Ethnographic Perspectives on Culture  7

education also requires teachers and learners to attend to and respect the home culture and the home language. Learning materials should incorporate aspects of the home culture, and ‘non-native’ teachers of English should be particularly valued among the language education community for their ability to move between and among languages and cultures. This volume does not provide a series of ‘ready to use recipes’ for those wishing to adopt an intercultural approach to ELT. Those seeking a set of ready-made lesson plans are directed to resources such as Corbett (2010). The present volume seeks to offer, instead, a flexible but systematic explanation of the main principles of an intercultural approach to ELT, a brief ‘intellectual history’ of the main influences upon it and some practical examples of how to implement an intercultural approach in ways that are likely to complement readers’ current teaching practices. Intercultural language teaching is also mature enough now to have developed its own self-reflexive critical literature, and that is also acknowledged. To begin, however, we shall consider the main research disciplines whose treatment of ‘culture’ provides insights into intercultural language education. Questions for reflection

Before reading on, either think about the following questions or discuss them with your colleagues. • In your own view, what (if any) role does ‘culture’ have to play in the English language classroom or course? • What do you understand by ‘culture’? • What (if any) role does the learner’s home language and culture play in your English language classroom or course? Your and your colleagues’ attitudes to culture will in part, no doubt, be influenced by your exposure to different ideas about culture deriving from different intellectual disciplines. You might think about culture as the products of a given society or community (its songs, dances, stories, art) and/or as the dynamic attitudes and beliefs that result in such cultural products. You might see the home language and culture as irrelevant to the learning of English, or you might see them as enabling. The next sections begin our review of some of the ‘tributary disciplines’ that have impacted on intercultural language education. Tributary Disciplines

‘Culture’ is the object of study of a range of distinct intellectual disciplines, each of which conceptualises it in a rather different way. These conceptualisations can explain some of the emphases and, indeed, continuing critical debates within intercultural language education. The

8  An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching

main intellectual disciplines, and subdisciplines, that we will address in this and the following chapter are linguistics (including applied linguistics, sociolinguistics and discourse analysis), anthropology and ethnography, and communication studies, as well as critical pedagogy and cultural, literary and media studies. Each of these disciplines represents in itself a broad and contested domain of intellectual traditions and methodologies, and each alone might easily constitute an entire university programme. The characterisation of them given here, then, will necessarily be concise; however, they should be sufficient to illustrate different ways of understanding ‘culture’. From the perspective of an intercultural approach to ELT, they are described here as ‘tributary disciplines’ because each shapes the practices and concerns of intercultural classrooms and curricula. To understand their contributions to intercultural language education, with a focus on ELT, it is worth understanding some of the perspectives on culture found in these tributary disciplines, that is, in the various branches of linguistic, anthropological, communication and cultural studies that intercultural language educators regularly draw upon. The overview in the opening two chapters is thus intended to offer initial points of reference that should help readers navigate a complex set of discussions and sometimes heated debates. Many of the issues raised in the first two chapters are treated in greater depth in the remainder of the volume. Linguistics

ELT is generally considered a branch of applied linguistics; that is, in ELT, an understanding of the language system is not sought for its own sake, but in order to facilitate the more effective teaching of English to speakers of other languages. The scholarly discipline of linguistics ‘proper’ thus has a different set of objectives from that of linguists who are interested in promoting ELT. In fact, it would be a mistake to assume that even ‘pure’ linguists such as grammarians, discourse analysts, phoneticians and phonologists, all share a similar set of objectives. Given the diversity of their interests and approaches, linguists naturally disagree amongst themselves about the primary goals of linguistic investigation, and the methods of gathering and validating the evidence that forms the basis of their theories. For example, some linguists consider linguistics to be closely allied to psychology, in that the description of linguistic structures, rules and constraints is undertaken primarily to afford insights into the workings of the human mind. Such linguists consider native speaker intuitions about language to be the primary source of valid data. Another school of linguistics is more interested in how language varies according to the formation and interaction of social groups (whether categorised by class, age, gender, ethnicity, geographical location or profession); such linguists put less emphasis on a native speaker’s intuitions about

Linguistic and Ethnographic Perspectives on Culture  9

language, and more emphasis on gathering data from identifiable speech communities via fieldwork. Yet another branch of linguistics amasses vast digital data archives – or corpora – of written and spoken language and uses computer searches to identify patterns that would otherwise be unavailable to the intuition of any individual speaker, native or not. One of the main debates in different branches and traditions of linguistics concerns the nature and status of ‘culture’ and its relationship to language. This debate has given rise to different traditions in linguistics: formal linguistics, linguistic anthropology, sociolinguists and functional linguistics. Since all of them have a bearing on applied linguistics, we shall consider each, briefly, in turn. Formal Linguistics

International interest in how models of language learning and language description impact on language teaching predates the period conventionally given as the dawn of modern linguistics, that is the first decades of the 20th century. In the 1880s, the ‘Reform Movement’ already included numerous language educators, among them Hermann Klinghardt, Max Walter, Mary Brebner, Henry Sweet and Paul Passy, who sought to reshape modern language teaching in Europe by displacing translation from its central place in the language classroom and replacing it with more ‘direct’ methods of engagement with the target language, which included dictation, drilling and question-answer sequences (Howatt & Smith, 2002). Since that time, language education has drawn on a number of the disciplines that grew up in the 20th century, amongst them anthropology, psychology and linguistics, in a quest to find methods and approaches to language learning that are both effective and meet social and political goals. Language education has always followed developing trends in linguistics. One prominent tradition of linguistics, particularly popular in North America, has tended to abstract language from its social and cultural contexts. The formal tradition in modern linguistics follows Saussure (1916/1959) and Bloomfield (1933) in devising systematic procedures that break sentences down, constituent by constituent, until their smallest grammatical components, their ‘morphemes’, are discovered. Grammarians then explore and describe the relations between the constituents at the different hierarchical levels between morpheme and sentence. This descriptive project could be applied to any language, without explicit reference to the culture that produced it. Later, generative linguists who followed Chomsky (1957) reframed the primary goal of linguistic study: instead of describing, say, grammatical categories and the relations between grammatical constituents in any given language, they sought to formulate a set of abstract rules that would produce these structures, arguing that such rules are effectively models of human

10  An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching

linguistic knowledge. The object of Chomskyan linguistics was, then, to design a formal set of rules that would serve as a model of the knowledge that enabled an ‘idealised native speaker’ to produce all and only utterances in the language that were grammatically ‘correct’. Both Bloomfieldian and Chomskyan theories of language have influenced ELT theory and practice (see further, Howatt & Widdowson, 2004). The descriptive, structural linguistics of Bloomfield was combined with behavioural psychology to produce the audiolingual method in ELT: language acquisition was viewed as a process of combining and recombining sentence constituents via stimulus, response and reinforcement. The audiolingual curriculum was organised according to increasingly complex grammatical constructions, and learners were drilled in these constructions in the hope that they would form the habit of producing grammatically correct utterances. This method held sway from about the 1950s to the 1970s. Gradually, following Chomsky’s criticisms of both the behaviourist theory of learning and the structuralist theory of language, audiolingualism gave way to various ‘communicative’ approaches, which eventually became the preferred methods of language teaching from the 1980s to the present day. Like Chomsky’s ‘idealised native speaker’, the language learner would ‘naturally’ acquire the target language if exposed to it and if engaged in ‘authentic’ tasks that require comprehension and the production of the target language. First and second language acquisition were no longer seen as a process of habit formation resulting from stimulus and response, but as a setting and resetting of innate ‘parameters’ that shaped the generation of structures in one language as opposed to another. Formal and applied linguistic theory, thus, became more cognitively oriented and attention was directed towards how learners’ ‘interlanguage’ – the increasingly sophisticated linguistic system that was intermediate between non-speaker and native speaker – could be understood and its development supported (cf. Han & Tarone, 2014). To anyone who has experience of ELT, it should be clear how formal linguistics in the traditions of Bloomfield and Chomsky has made a deep impact on ways of teaching, first in audiolingualism and then in the various communicative approaches that followed it. The communicative approach was never as monolithic a method as audiolingualism was, and it has absorbed different formal linguistic influences. In particular, speech act theory, developed by Austin (1962) and Searle (1969), also influenced early communicative curricula. Speech act theory is a formal account of language as different types of action (e.g. statements, orders, promises, threats) and this theory underlies early communicative curricula that attempted to redefine language not only as a hierarchical set of increasingly complex grammatical constructions, but also as a taxonomy of utterances that, under certain conditions, express particular notions and achieve particular functions (e.g. Wilkins, 1976).

Linguistic and Ethnographic Perspectives on Culture  11

For our present purposes, it is sufficient to note that language teaching from the 1970s onwards was increasingly strongly influenced by Chomsky’s view of language as a universal cognitive faculty that allows all humans, regardless of their cultural background, to develop an internalised model of a language through exposure to it, particularly via engaged interaction with its speakers. Instead of doing repetitive language drills, as recommended by audiolingualism, learners have been encouraged to develop their language skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening) through tasks that involve interaction with ‘authentic’ written and spoken texts, that is, texts composed for purposes other than language learning per se. Although it might be supposed that interaction with ‘authentic’ texts might have encouraged cultural exploration, as Pulverness notes in the quotation cited above, the communicative approach tended to use ‘authentic’ texts as a pretext for the transfer of information between speakers, the realisation of transactional goals (e.g. purchasing commodities or requesting directions) or the exchange of opinions. In particular, information-gap activities became the heart of the archetypical task in the communicative classroom (e.g. Breen & Littlejohn, 2000; Nunan, 1989, 2004). Since formal linguists have, at least since Chomsky, tended to consider the acquisition of language as an environmentally triggered set of cognitive processes, cultural exploration was not considered essential to their theories of language. No matter what the culture the learner found himself or herself in, in normal circumstances, language would nevertheless be triggered. For example, in his popular account of language, Stephen Pinker (1994) wrote: Language is no more a cultural invention than is upright posture. It is not a manifestation of a general capacity to use symbols: a three-year old […] is a grammatical genius, but is quite incompetent at the visual arts, religious iconography, traffic signs, and other staples of the semiotics approach. (Pinker, 1994: 18–19)

From the perspective of a linguist such as Pinker, the interesting thing about language is not its cultural manifestations but the fact that it has been produced by a long process of biological evolution – it is a specifically human instinct that is neither more nor less remarkable than the instincts that allow bats to navigate at night or migratory birds to fly home (Pinker, 1994: 19). Pinker, like Chomsky before him, is fascinated by the organisation and development of language as a universal cognitive phenomenon. He is less interested in asking why a particular individual produces a certain utterance on a given occasion. Nevertheless, this question remains intriguing to others, since, for example, even a three-yearold will use language in part to construct individual and group identity, establish and negotiate beliefs and values and express attitudes (cf. Smith

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et al., 2013). Particular linguistic choices come imbued with cultural significance, in the broader sense, and so, for many linguists, the relationship of language and culture remains a valid area of investigation, and for intercultural language educators, it is a valid resource for language education. Questions for reflection

• Consider the kinds of activity that you might encourage learners to do in and out of class, e.g. drills, question-answer, tasks, projects and translating. Explain how these different activities can be related to descriptions, models and theories of (a) language and (b) learning. • Imagine that you are designing a language course that requires the explicit statement of intended learning outcomes. How would you state the desired linguistic outcomes of your course, and how would you state the desired cultural outcomes? Linguistic Anthropology

Not all linguists have been unconcerned with culture, even in North America. Anthropologists study the structure of communities and their cultures. Linguistic anthropology, which studies ‘the richness of communication in social life’ (Duranti, 2004: xiii), can trace its roots to the work of late 19th- and early-mid 20th-century scholars based in North America, particularly Franz Boas (1911), Edward Sapir (1921) and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956). Many of these scholars were initially motivated by a concern that many of the languages of Native Americans were rapidly disappearing, and they embarked on a programme to describe and record these languages before they were lost forever. The work of Boas and his colleagues on documenting Native American cultures and languages led to the concern with grammatical ‘discovery procedures’ that later helped to shape Bloomfieldian formal linguistics. However, a tension developed between the interests of the linguistic anthropologists and the formal linguists in North America. Pinker’s later dismissal (Pinker, 1994) of the importance of culture, noted above, can be understood at least partly in the context of a long-standing debate about the ‘Sapir–Whorf hypothesis’, the name given to an argument about the degree to which language determines or influences thought (Whorf, 1956). The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis considers the extent to which the forms of expression that are available in radically different languages to articulate everyday experiences determine how a speech community conceptualises, say, time, duration and completion in a particular way. This hypothesis originated in the observations of Whorf, whose study of certain Native American languages, most notably Hopi, suggested that the distinctive realisation of linguistic categories might result in quite different ways of perceiving and understanding the world. One later discussion in this

Linguistic and Ethnographic Perspectives on Culture  13

intellectual tradition compares the means of orientation of the Pirahã people of the Brazilian Amazon with that of Europeans: while Europeans orient themselves with reference to their bodies (i.e. Europeans might turn ‘left’ or ‘right’), the Pirahã orient themselves with reference to an external phenomenon, namely, the local river (i.e. they turn ‘upriver’ or ‘downriver’, either of which may be ‘left’ or ‘right’ depending on the context). Daniel Everett (2008), a North American who lived among the Pirahã and learned their language, observed: I had never found the words for left hand and right hand. The discovery of the Pirahãs’ use of the river in giving directions did explain, however, why when the Pirahãs visited towns with me, one of their first questions was ‘Where is the river?’ They needed to know how to orient themselves! (Everett, 2008: 216)

The question raised by the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is whether these different means of conceptualising and expressing the world effectively imprison us in particular ways of thinking. In certain passages, Whorf (e.g. 1956) seemed to argue that they do: We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has been organized in our minds – and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. (Whorf, 1956: 213)

Here, Whorf apparently argues that individuals perceive their reality through the organising categories of their native language. If two individuals have quite different native languages, then they will experience different realities. This is the ‘strong’ version of the hypothesis. However, it has long been pointed out that translation between radically different languages is possible. This simple fact suggests that we can imaginatively adapt to other perspectives and learn to think differently. Everett, after all, is eventually able to conceptualise how the Pirahã orient themselves. A ‘weaker’ version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis – that language influences but does not determine perception – remains popular among certain language educators, and, for example is cited in Fantini’s (1997) introductory essays to a series of ‘cultural lesson plans’. But even the weaker version of the hypothesis is dismissed by formal linguists such as Pinker (1994): People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all of these languages; presumably it has symbols for concepts, and

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arrangements of symbols that correspond to who did what to whom. (Pinker, 1994: 82)

It might be assumed, then, that formal and anthropological linguists hold incompatible views of language, yet a degree of rapprochement is perhaps possible. Developmental psychologists who are influenced by the Russian scholar Vygotsky (1934/1962: 149) argue that there is an ‘inner speech’, that is, a dynamic, shifting and contingent set of processes that mediate between thought and actual utterances. If this is so, we can bridge the apparent gap between Pinker’s universal ‘mentalese’ and the distinctive linguistic categorisations of different cultures. A mediating, but dynamic ‘inner speech’ would allow for thought to connect to speech in different ways, and also for individuals to reorient their ways of thinking in response to different categorisations. A modified version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis would therefore be that languages provide insight into cultural priorities rather than rigidly determined cognitive possibilities. Speech communities, such as the Pirahã or Western Europeans, transform mentalese (which includes abstract concepts of embodied direction) via ‘inner speech’ into languages that serve their cultural needs (e.g. upriver/on the right-hand side) and, in doing so, they orient themselves in different ways. Analyses of different languages by linguistic anthropologists thus become ways of investigating the categorising structures of other cultures, alternative ways of perceiving a shared world. This position, in fact, marks a return to that of Boas, who, as far back as 1911, discussed with speakers of Kwakiutl on Vancouver Island the modifications they would need to make to their own language in order to express generalisations. Every expression in Kwakiutl had to be anchored grammatically to a specific person, animal or thing, through the mandatory use of the possessive pronoun. Boas concluded that by omitting the possessive pronoun, Kwakiutl could express generalisations quite adequately, and its speakers could understand what was meant – they just found such abstractions unnecessary, and therefore unidiomatic. Boas (1911) concluded: It does not seem likely, therefore, that there is any direct relation between the culture of a tribe and the language that they speak, except in so far as the form of the language will be moulded by the state of the culture, but not in so far as a certain state of culture is conditioned by morphological traits of the language. (Boas, 1911: 63)

As linguistic anthropology developed to investigate how language is, as Boas puts it, ‘moulded by the state of the culture’, its practitioners began to expand into areas of interest that it shares with other types of linguist – multilingualism, code-switching and translanguaging, narrative and folk poetics, non-verbal communication and identity, to name a few (cf.

Linguistic and Ethnographic Perspectives on Culture  15

the essays in Duranti, 2004). Linguistic anthropology also gave rise to the specialised sub-field of communication studies, discussed separately in Chapter 2. Since culture is central to linguistic anthropology, its ideas and procedures are clearly relevant to intercultural language education. Until the 1980s, ELT was largely influenced by theoretical developments in formal linguistics and psychology: formal models of language (structural and then generative) were yoked to models of learning (behaviourist and then cognitive). From the 1980s on, intercultural language learning has also drawn on linguistic anthropological techniques and insights, particularly, as we shall see in the following section, those taken from ethnography. Questions for reflection

• What aspects of language do you think of as being universal and which are specific to particular cultures? For example, do all languages (to your knowledge) have categories such as nouns and verbs, number, gender and colour terms? • Are colour terms easily translated between languages? • How do you explain concepts such as mass and countable nouns to learners whose mother tongue does not have this distinction? Ethnography

Ethnography technically refers to an anthropologist’s description of a community and its culture through systematic observation. The ethnographer is usually someone who has lived in the midst of a community as a ‘participant observer’ over many months or even years. Ethnographers often give detailed descriptions of language behaviour within the community as part of a more general description of cultural practices. In recent years, ethnography has widened to encompass a variety of research techniques in media and cultural studies (see below, and the fuller discussions in Chapters 6 and 10), as well as in anthropology. Moreover, teachers, materials designers and learners of foreign languages have been urged to develop ethnographic skills (e.g. Holliday, 1994; Roberts et al., 2001). The development of ethnographic skills is, indeed, a fundamental part of the intercultural approach to language education and the uses of ethnography in intercultural teaching and learning are dealt with in much greater detail in Chapters 6–8. When language learners become ethnographers, they are trained to observe, question, collect data, analyse, interpret and describe. The desired outcome of such training is to equip learners to identify and explore what Agar (1994: 100–101) describes as ‘rich points’, that is, those expressions and their associated concepts in one language whose meaning seems problematical or opaque to an outsider (the learner) and

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which are typically disputed by insiders (members of the target community), even though they recognise the concept. One obvious ‘rich point’ across many cultures relates to status and naming. English has, at first sight, a relatively sparse lexical means of showing status, although until the 17th century, you and thou corresponded to the polite and informal vous and tu forms in French. Mandarin Chinese also has polite and informal means of addressing someone, nin (您) and ni (你), and it is generally deemed polite to address professionals by specifying their position, e.g. Li jiao shou (李教 授, ‘Professor Li’), Zhao, zong bian (赵总 编, ‘Editor Zhao’) and so on (cf. Hui et al., 2016). Different practices in the use of such honorifics across languages indicate different cultural attitudes towards the recognition and negotiation of status among interlocutors. The appropriate use of honorifics may initially be opaque to outsiders and even insiders might dispute aspects of honorific usage. For example, even insiders might debate at what point in a relationship one moves from vous/nin to tu/ni. The way in which status is acknowledged and respected through honorifics thus constitutes a ‘rich point’ and a useful point of departure for cultural exploration. The learner might interview speakers of different languages about types of formal and informal address and collect anecdotes about what happened when people used an inappropriate form. They would collate and describe the data and compare honorific usage in other cultures to that of English. Ethnographic research is sometimes described, half sardonically, as ‘loafing and lurking’, but the strategies used to observe, interpret and explain cultural behaviour are sophisticated, practical and at the core of the intercultural language curriculum. Chapter 6 goes into much greater detail on how this might be done. Questions for reflection

• Consider how a teacher might be addressed by a student, e.g. Professor Smith, Professor Jane/Jim, Teacher, Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ms Smith or simply Jane/Jim. Who or what governs the preferred choices in your teaching context? • If you have lived abroad, or in a new community, how long would you say it takes before you have achieved an insider’s understanding of its values and patterns of behaviour? Functional Linguistics

As we have seen, depending on the tradition of research into linguistics, ‘culture’ can be seen as either marginal or central to the discipline of linguistics. In formal linguistics, which, for much of the past century has been the dominant research tradition in North America, culture and even the study of meaning are sometimes considered largely irrelevant to language development, as such development is seen as a biological universal. No matter who you are or where you live, if you have normal

Linguistic and Ethnographic Perspectives on Culture  17

abilities you will learn at least one language, your ‘mother tongue’. The question for formal linguists is how to understand and model the cognitive processes that trigger the development of linguistic competence. Alternatively, linguists in other scholarly traditions relate language and habitual communicative patterns to sociocultural hierarchies or the behaviour of particular communities of practice. Sociolinguists and communication studies specialists, both of whom have anthropological leanings, research the correlations between language and culture (or culture and language, depending on which side of the equation their focus of interest lies). We consider their contributions to intercultural language education shortly. First, we turn to a further school of linguistics, prominent in Britain, Australia and other locations such as Brazil, Canada and Hong Kong, that has appealed directly to the concept of culture to provide explanations of linguistic patterns and behaviour. Known as ‘systemic functionalism’, this linguistic approach derives mainly from the work of the British linguist, Michael Halliday. Halliday’s work was, in turn, influenced by his compatriot, J.R. Firth, and Eastern Europeans such as the anthropologist, Bronisław Malinowski (cf. Butler, 1985). Systemic-functional models of language subsequently helped shape educational practices, particularly in Australia, and it is currently associated with researchers such as Suzanne Eggins, James Martin, Christian Matthiessen, Diane Slade and others (cf. Eggins, 1994). In systemic-functional linguistics, language is primarily considered not as a particular kind of knowledge possessed by an individual, but as a set of choices bestowed upon the speaker by his or her speech community. A speaker may choose, from a limited set of available expressions, the one deemed most appropriate to a particular situation; for example, he or she may choose to thank another person by using one of various expressions such as ta, thanks, thank you, thank you very much, thank you so much, thanking you for your kind consideration and so on. The choice will depend in part on the speaker’s perception of the situational factors, usually referred to as the ‘context of situation’. In any situation, the number of options available to a speaker is finite. The range of available options constitutes the ‘system’ at that point in the language. The systemic-functional linguist is interested in identifying the possible options available and in giving an explanation of why a particular choice is realised via a particular utterance or written stretch of text. The way that the context is characterised will determine whether the researcher adopts a mode of investigation known as ‘register analysis’ (context of situation) or ‘genre analysis’ (context of culture). Register Analysis

Register analysis was originally adopted by linguists wishing to account for the influence of the immediate situation upon the shape of a

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stretch of language, written or spoken. Three main situational variables are taken into consideration, usually referred to as the field, tenor and mode of discourse. These variables refer, respectively, to the topic of the discourse (field), the relationship between participants in the discourse (tenor) and the channel or type of discourse, for example whether it is a written newspaper editorial or a spoken conversation (mode). Together, the description of field, tenor and mode constitutes register analysis, which was initially developed from the 1960s through the 1990s (cf. Ghadessy, 1988, 1993; Halliday et  al., 1964; Halliday & Hasan, 1989). With the rise of corpus-informed language studies, a more quantitative version of register analysis, multidimensional analysis (MDA), has emerged, developed by Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad and others (e.g. Biber & Conrad, 2014, 2019). A simple example of register analysis in English would consider the many possible ways of expressing thanks listed above. The field would be the acknowledgment of gratitude for some kind of service rendered. Some expressions, like ta, obviously imply conversational speech (mode) and an informal relationship between speaker and hearer (tenor); others, like thanking you for your kind consideration, obviously imply formality (tenor) and written text (mode). The expressions thank you very/so much are not so clear cut: they are neither formal nor informal, nor obviously spoken or written. Still, by doing a careful analysis of a large corpus of written and spoken data, a multidimensional register analyst might draw upon statistical analyses to place such expressions on a cline that can involve dimensions such as ‘degree of emotional involvement’, ‘degree of conversationality’ and so on. The impact of register analysis on language teaching materials produced during the 1960s and 1970s can hardly be underestimated. This was the period in which ‘English for specific/special purposes’ (ESP) courses began to blossom, and register analysis gave materials writers and course designers a way of abstracting ‘the language of science’ or ‘the language of business’, from the seemingly inchoate mass of ‘general English’. Learners with ‘specific needs’ could now be taught those linguistic expressions that were deemed to be relevant to, say, a spoken business presentation or a written technical report. Ironically, the impact of register analysis and the rise of ESP gave credence to the idea that language could be described and taught without reference to a wider culture. If the vocabulary and grammar of a ‘typical’ communicative event, for example, a health professional taking a case history, could be described and taught, then a set of teaching materials and methods that were purely instrumental could be devised and implemented across the globe, regardless of local cultural conditions. As we shall see, this assumption is questionable. While register analysis has been and remains influential in language teaching, particularly in materials and course design, it is

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genre analysis that more directly addresses the issue of culture beyond the immediate situation. Genre Analysis

During the 1980s, it became clear to those working directly and indirectly with systemic-functional linguistics that there was a context beyond the immediate ‘context of situation’. Register analysis identified some relatively predictable features of specialised uses of English, but a consideration of the variables of field, tenor and mode does not in itself tell us why a text has been produced in the first place. In other words, a systemic-functional linguist might list the different means available in English to thank someone, and use field, tenor and mode to account for the speaker’s choice in any given situation – but this does not tell us why the act of thanking does or does not occur in a given culture. An understanding of the social purpose of a communicative event can also contribute to an explanation of why it takes the form it does. When considering the social purpose of a communicative event, we are putting it into ‘the context of culture’, and the process of relating linguistic forms to the culture that produces them came to be known as genre analysis. There are different ways of analysing genre (cf. Corbett, 2006b). In brief, within the main systemic-functional tradition, written texts or stretches of speech are broken down into goal-directed stages, the purpose of each of which is realised by particular linguistic exponents (e.g. Eggins, 1994; Hasan, 1984; Martin, 1985, 2012; Ventola, 1983). An often-used example is a recipe in a cookbook, the social purpose of which would be to pass on knowledge of how to prepare a dish. Accordingly, typical recipes fall into two obligatory stages, the list of ingredients and the instructions for cooking, in that order. The list would be realised as a set of noun phrases with quantities, and the instructions would be a sequence of imperatives, ordered chronologically. A related but distinct tradition, arising directly from the teaching of ESP, combines textual analysis with ethnographic practices (e.g. Bex, 1996; Bhatia, 1993, 2016; Candlin & Hyland, 1999; Hyland, 2000, 2004; Hyon, 2017; Swales, 1990, 2004). Genre analysts in this tradition seek information from expert members of those discourse communities that the generic texts serve about how these experts see the texts functioning in and for their own community. Typically, research scientists might be quizzed about the function of an article in a quality research journal versus an article for a popular scientific magazine – what purpose does each article serve for the discourse communities of research scientists and general readers (cf. Myers, 1990)? Genre analysts then describe how the generic texts are shaped to fulfil the purposes the discourse community requires or expects them to achieve. The main difference between this ‘applied linguistics’ approach and ‘pure’ systemic-functionalism is that

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the former approach takes not only the texts but also members of the communities that produce them as objects of research and sources of relevant data. Despite differences in methodology, both schools of genre analysis are concerned with why certain communicative events exist at all, and why spoken and written texts take the shape they do. Both schools attempt to answer this question by appealing to the cultural function of the communicative event. By focusing on the reasons why members of a given culture use language in different contexts, genre analysts seek to explain linguistic choices with reference to those purposes. Since genre analysis puts culture centre stage as the primary explanation of linguistic form, it has obvious implications for intercultural language education. Register and genre analysis are sensitive to shifts in the character of the communities that produce and consume different kinds of text, because these forms of analysis attend to the culturally constructed purposes of texts, and they monitor how these purposes, and the texts that realise them, might change over time. Questions for reflection

• Consider two communicative events with a similar field but different tenor and mode, e.g. a live television commentary on a soccer game versus a written report of the same game in a web fanzine. What kind of linguistic features are likely to characterise each communicative event? • What role do such texts (live commentary versus web fanzine) play in a given culture? • How does the cultural function of the text (e.g. as live commentary or as fanzine report) shape the form of the discourse? • To what extent might an interview with the author or producer of a text (a commentator or a fanzine contributor) give useful information to the person trying to understand the linguistic choices they have made? Critical Discourse Analysis

One branch of functional linguistics that has regularly employed systemic-functional analyses of texts is critical discourse analysis (CDA). CDA is relevant to any discussion of intercultural language education because it is frequently argued that a key component of an intercultural approach is critical awareness and critical thinking. This concern with education as a means of exposing power relations and transforming social conditions is shared by adherents of critical pedagogy (e.g. Dasli & Díaz, 2016; Guilherme, 2002; Melde, 1987; Pennycook, 2001; Phipps & Guilherme, 2004), to which we return in the following section. First, we focus on what CDA implies for our understanding of language and culture.

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In short, many educators argue that an intercultural approach to language education should not simply provide information about the target culture, and invite comparison with the home culture, but it should also provide learners with a set of skills that enable the critical evaluation of texts, products and behaviours associated with both the home and target culture. CDA holds out the promise of equipping learners with such skills as its proponents claim that it is a socially responsive mode of linguistic analysis, sensitive to the workings of power. Associated primarily with the work of Norman Fairclough (e.g. Fairclough, 1989, 1992, 2013; Poole, 2010), CDA attempts to come to a comprehensive understanding of how language is used by combining textual and sociological analyses alongside political critique. Perhaps Fairclough’s (2013) abiding methodological legacy is the adoption of a tripartite model of analysis of a communicative event: The approach I have adopted is based upon a three-dimensional conception of discourse, and correspondingly a three-dimensional method of discourse analysis. Discourse, and any specific instance of discursive practice, is seen as simultaneously (i) a language text, spoken or written, (ii) discourse practice (text production and text interpretation), (iii) sociocultural practice. (Fairclough, 2013: 132)

This ‘three-dimensional’ model of discourse usefully informs many of the interpretations of communicative events discussed later in this book, whether these events are written online exchanges, media texts, advertisements or casual conversations. In Chapter  5, for example, a casual conversation can be viewed as (i) spoken language, in the form of a sequence of conversational turns between participants; (ii) the realisation of one or more discourse practices, such as ‘small talk’, or conversational stories in the generic form of recounts, exempla, anecdotes and narratives (Eggins & Slade, 1997, 2005; Thornbury & Slade, 2006); and (iii) a sociocultural practice by which participants actively construct their personal identity and negotiate their status in structured communities such as the family, workplace or friendship groups. In Chapters 9 and 10, visual and cultural texts are also considered as semiotic forms, as discourse practices and as sociocultural practices, although at times the focus is more on one ‘dimension’ than the others. The model of discourse processing that will be discussed in Chapter  10 in relation to media texts also draws on an understanding of the institutional context (and technological resources) as well as on an understanding of the formal linguistic constituents of the texts themselves. CDA distinguishes itself from other types of formal and functional linguistic analysis primarily through the attention that is paid to the unequal distribution of power amongst participants in the construction

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of discourse. It is a matter of fact that some participants in discourse are more powerful than others, at least insofar as they have access to physical, social or cultural capital that their interlocutors do not enjoy. This inequality in access to resources is another factor that contributes to the shaping of discourses, and, indeed, CDA considers it the primary factor to be considered in the analysis of texts. In an authoritarian state, for example, the government usually has access to economic and technical resources that enable it to publish, broadcast and disseminate news stories from an official perspective. These resources are unavailable, at least to the same degree, to independent, freelance ‘citizen journalists’ who may also have to struggle against censorship. However, particularly in the age of web distribution, citizen journalists will have access to certain informal resources, too. Journalistic discourse in such societies will therefore be characterised by a dynamic tension between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ reporting, and there will be an ongoing attempt by non-state journalists to find available and innovative outlets for their reports and perspectives. In CDA, Fairclough draws upon various key concepts, including genre, orders of discourse and hegemony. He defines ‘genre’ in terms that are broadly similar to those of genre analysts (see above), as texts designed to fulfil socially ratified purposes, such as interviews or editorials in newspapers. The concept of ‘orders of discourse’ is adapted from the social theorist Michel Foucault (1981), and refers to the language associated with a particular field, or social domain, such as education, religion, marketing, sport and so forth. It is broadly similar to the concept of ‘field’ in register analysis, and orders of discourse might encompass numerous specific genres. However, there is, as ever with CDA, a focus on who has the power and resources to contribute to and shape the genres within an order of discourse. As we have seen, not everyone has an equal voice or equal rights in any communicative event. The concept of hegemony is crucial to CDA. It is taken originally from the writings of the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci (1971), who followed Marx in arguing that the governments of capitalist societies function to sustain the domination of the working class by a small, elite class. Governments, no matter what their political colour, preserve the interests of the elite class before those of the workers. Gramsci’s contribution to the debate was to argue that, in developed capitalist societies, the domination of the masses by the elites is not by coercion but by ongoing persuasion. The elites persuade the masses, largely through their control of the media, that their domination is actually in their best interests. Clearly, even reasonably stable societies exhibit strains and stresses, as the various factions within them contest the distribution of power, status and material resources. In Gramsci’s model, language – through which persuasion is accomplished and consent negotiated – becomes a key social issue. Language is the weapon of hegemonic societies, in which an

Linguistic and Ethnographic Perspectives on Culture  23

unequal distribution of resources is maintained by constant negotiation between dominant and resisting forces, each of which has unequal access to communicative resources. Of course, the global teaching of the English language, itself, is now a matter of critical debate. The state policies that enshrine English as a second language in many countries can be seen as a hegemonic practice that threatens non-anglophone cultures, and many critical voices within ELT have discussed this issue (e.g. Canagarajah, 1999; Jenkins, 2015; O’Regan, 2014; Pennycook, 1994, 1998; Phillipson, 1992; SkutnabbKangas, 2000). Advocates of English as a global lingua franca face reasonable accusations that the near monopoly that English currently enjoys in the world’s information-driven economies disenfranchises at least as many as it empowers, and possibly more. The arguments are complex, and it is not the function of this volume to explore them in detail. However, one of the hopes of the present volume is that by embedding ELT in an explicitly intercultural curriculum, the home language and the home culture of the learners (and equally of non-native teachers) will be valued in the classroom alongside the often glamorised target language, English. In other words, English teachers might, paradoxically perhaps, become agents in an, at least, qualified resistance to the global hegemony of English. Critical Pedagogy

An awareness of the workings of power in education and an ensuing activism towards the goal of social transformation characterise critical pedagogy. This is an educational philosophy that recognises that students and teachers are faced with structural inequalities in the resources they have access to, as they struggle for greater social equity in accessing material, educational and cultural capital – and is committed to abolishing those inequalities. For example, English learners may come from more or less privileged backgrounds. Critical pedagogy seeks to expose and address these inequalities, transforming learners into agents who understand the causes and manifestations of social injustice and are therefore moved to create a fairer society. Teachers who are influenced by critical pedagogy draw on the ideas of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1970/2005), who conceptualised adult literacy teaching as praxis. Praxis involves a critical reflection on the inequalities of the world that, in turn, acts as a precursor to the impulse to transform the structures that result in inequity (e.g. Freire, 1998: 52). Critical pedagogy also seeks to raise awareness of the impact of social issues that affect us all, such as climate change, the need for sustainability in resources, the causes and consequences of migration and political, economic and military conflict (e.g. Phipps & Guilherme, 2004). There is an intersection of all these ‘criticalities’ in the advocacy of ‘critical cultural awareness’ in intercultural language education. While

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the issues are multifaceted, and they will be revisited in detail later in this book, they might be summarised as follows: CDA is one possible way of raising learners’ awareness of the workings of power in society, and to alert them to their own social agency. Given that awareness, they may be encouraged to act to transform their own situation and to help make the world a fairer and more sustainable place. This all-too-brief summary naturally raises all sorts of legitimate questions and concerns about the role of the teacher as an advocate of one particular brand of political thinking over another. However, the basic precept of critical pedagogy is to equip learners to ‘read’ the workings of power in society, to assist them in understanding their own role in promoting or resisting inequalities and to encourage them to act in accordance with their transformed understanding. Questions for reflection

• Think of a communicative event and consider it from the ‘three dimensions’ of CDA. For example, take an EFL classroom discussion. Think about it as (i) a predictable form of spoken language, typically consisting of prompts, responses and feedback; (ii) a set of recognisable genres in which new language is either displayed or employed in learning tasks; and (iii) a socially embedded set of conventions within a commercial or state education context in which learners and teachers have a set of culturally expected roles, constraints and responsibilities. • How would you feel if participants started to subvert any of these expectations? For example, how would you respond if learners prompted each other, or publicly assessed the teacher’s performance? • What are your own views of the role of the teacher in a language class? Is it the responsibility of the teacher solely to support language development? What other responsibilities might a language teacher have? The opening chapter of this book has introduced a number of disciplines that have influenced, directly and indirectly, aspects of intercultural language education. The initial theme of this chapter has been concerned with the status and role of ‘culture’ in linguistics. We have seen that culture has a negligible role in formal linguistics, which has tended to see the acquisition of language as a biological universal. By contrast, culture has a central role in anthropological and functional linguistics, and their sub-disciplines. Scholars in the latter areas relate language practices to the construction of distinctive communities (distinguished by markers of identity, e.g. of gender, age, ethnicity, race, social class and profession), and think of communicative events as having predictable forms that are shaped by the purposes they serve for those communities. Critical

Linguistic and Ethnographic Perspectives on Culture  25

linguists note that these communities are characterised by unequal distributions of power and this fact also shapes the form that discourses take. Applied linguists – language educators – take the insights from such scholarship and attempt to apply them to the teaching and learning of languages. Critical educators see language education as part of a broader mission to transform society. Intercultural, Transcultural or Multicultural?

Critical pedagogy, with its sensitivity to social inequalities and its goal of transforming the impact of powerful elites upon the marginalised and oppressed in society, has a particular investment in the very concept of interculturality. Guilherme and Dietz (2014) summarise a lively debate on the shifting meanings of terms that are core to the purpose of the present volume, namely interculturality and interculturalism, transculturality and transculturalism, multiculturality and multiculturalism, not to mention multilingualism versus plurilingualism, ‘the intercultural’ and so on. Their discussion acknowledges that the ideological connotations of each expression are variable and subject to change from different perspectives and across different languages; for example, in certain parts of South America, interculturality (interculturalidad) is quite specifically associated with the movement of indigenous people to sustain and progress their inherited traditions in the face of colonial assumptions that originated in powerful nations characterised as the ‘Global North’. Elsewhere, especially in more anglophone contexts, these connotations are less evident. The picture is further complicated, particularly by apparent near-synonyms such as ‘multiculturality’ and ‘transculturality’. Guilherme and Dietz effectively tease out the strands of this complex terminological knot. In brief, they argue that multiculturality can be understood as the presence of different communities, characterised by divergent values, assumptions and beliefs, in the same geographical space; for example, the presence of indigenous, ethnic or migrant communities in cities or rural spaces. Diverse communities can, in principle, co-exist in multicultural societies without engaging in much interaction. Interculturality can be characterised as the relations between such diverse multicultural communities, whether or not they co-exist in the same geographical space. Transculturality is understood as the impact of intercultural relations on those who experience them; thus, exposure to intercultural relations can result in a process of ‘hybridisation’ or entry into what has been described as the ‘third space’. For Guilherme and Dietz (2014: 197), the distinction between the intercultural and the transcultural is encapsulated by the emphasis on cross-community relations versus the focus on how these relations transform the consciousness of individuals. The task of critical pedagogy is to structure these experiences in the service of greater social equity.

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While the present volume is labelled ‘an intercultural approach’ to ELT, its concerns spill over to the realm of the transcultural. The focus of this book is primarily to consider how to structure the relations between certain communities – here seen as comprising of learners of English – and other communities in the world, so that the learners’ ability to negotiate language and culture is enhanced, and, ideally, they should develop the resilience to cope with cultural hybridity. In other words, structured intercultural learning should have a transcultural outcome, beginning with the realisation that ‘everyone is someone else’s Other’ (Guilherme & Dietz, 2014: 197). So far, then, we have outlined some points of reference that should help readers who are new to the field to make sense of some of the issues and debates that have characterised intercultural language education. There are, however, numerous other relevant points of reference that the opening chapter has not covered: the distinctive discipline of communication studies, for example, or those disciplines that interpret cultural ‘products’, such as literature, the media and the meanings of diverse cultural practices. These topics are the subject of Chapter 2.

2 From Intercultural Communication to Literary, Media and Cultural Studies This chapter continues to survey the general concept of ‘culture’ as it relates to those academic disciplines that have influenced intercultural approaches to English language teaching (ELT). Chapter 1 ranged from formal and anthropological linguistics to critical pedagogy. The content of this chapter covers disciplines that are related to but distinct from the formal and functional linguistic disciplines that dominated language pedagogy for much of the 20th century. That is, it covers communication studies, and literary, media and cultural studies (CS). The purpose of the chapter is to broaden the scope of scholarly treatments of culture beyond different branches of linguistics and thus further inform the ways in which the intercultural turn in ELT has developed from the late 20th century into the 21st century. The key points addressed in this chapter are: • The conceptualisation of culture in communication studies. • The interpretive disciplines of literature, media and cultural studies. • A working definition of ‘culture’ in intercultural ELT. At the end of each section, there are again some open-ended, reflective questions that prompt readers to consider how the preceding discussion is relevant to their own educational practices and how their own assumptions about culture and language teaching might have been shaped, consciously or unconsciously, by arguments within the various disciplines. Intercultural Communication Studies

One important tributary discipline to intercultural language education is often conflated with it. Intercultural communication studies can be understood as an applied branch of linguistic anthropology, in that its practitioners make practical use of the insights of anthropologists like Edward T. Hall (1959, 1966). Hall was interested in how non-verbal communication and personal space varied across different cultures. As Martin et al. (2020) relate, in their account of the development of intercultural 27

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communication studies, in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a particular emphasis on study and exchange between Japanese and North American scholars, who developed and applied models of intercultural communication that sought to relate predictable patterns of behaviours to supposed value systems. In brief, research based on ethnographic observation, questionnaires and interviews suggested that cultural values systems vary along the following axes, sometimes referred to as ‘cultural dimensions’: • • • • •

collectivism versus individualism; degrees of power distance; the roles conventionally associated with males and females; whether social status is ‘achieved’ or ‘ascribed’; how polite interpersonal relations are established and maintained.

Trainees in intercultural communication are usually introduced to these systems of cultural difference and are expected to develop an understanding and tolerance of, indeed a respect for, other ways of being. Often this kind of training has had commercial goals; for example, in the 1970s, Condon and Yousef (1975) contrasted American and Japanese expectations about appropriate dress for business situations: At a recent meeting of U.S. and Japanese businessmen, where the Americans were attempting to sell real estate to Japanese developers, the overall deportment of the Americans was disconcerting; the backslapping first-name style of the U.S. team startled the Japanese hosts. But more important, it seemed, was the clothing: bright suits and white buck shoes. ‘Not one man has dressed here in a manner which inspired confidence’, a Japanese electronics executive complained. (Condon & Yousef, 1975: 138–139)

Problems in intercultural communication in situations like this were explained by the proposition that the Americans inclined towards an individualist ethos and favoured a low power distance between colleagues, while the Japanese businessmen favoured a collective ethos with a high difference in power relations between colleagues. Intercultural communications training in this tradition continues to draw on the anthropological assumption that behaviours (including linguistic behaviour) are related to attitudes, values and beliefs, and so they interpret such communicative misfires in relation to hidden, silent, non-verbal codes (flamboyant versus subdued clothing, expressive versus restrained non-verbal behaviour) as indicative of individualist versus collectivist orientations and a culture where different degrees of respect for personal space indicate different degrees of respect for status. The strengths and limitations of intercultural communications studies can be illustrated by work that follows pathways developed by one of

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the most prominent researchers into intercultural communication, Geert Hofstede (e.g. 1980, 1989, 1991). Hofstede conducted influential questionnaire-based research into cultural values or dimensions as reported by informants who worked in different countries for the same multinational corporation. His studies have been expanded and adapted by later researchers such as Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (1998) and Smith and Bond (1999). This branch of research seeks to determine how members of a corporation behave across different national cultures. For example, one questionnaire item used by Trompenaars and HampdenTurner (1998) focuses on attitudes to conflict: In your organisation, conflict: a) is controlled by the intervention of higher authority and often fostered by it to maintain power; b) is suppressed by reference to rules, procedures and definitions of responsibility; c) is resolved through full discussion of the merits of the work issues involved; d) is resolved by open and deep discussion of personal needs and the values involved. (Trompenaars & Hampden-Turner, 1998: 243) FitzGerald (2003: 21–30) assesses research into intercultural communication studies more extensively than is possible here, concluding that the formulations of cultural dimensions that such questionnaires evoke can indeed provide insight into broad patterns of group behaviour. She warns, however, that there are dangers of stereotyping, and of assuming that any given individual will conform to these patterns consistently. The biggest danger of such studies is their reification of culture: they conceptualise it as a static set of nationally determined patterns. Critics of this approach see culture as much more fluid, dynamic, contested and negotiated. We return to this concern in the ‘working definition’ of culture that concludes this chapter. Other branches of intercultural communication studies rely less on questionnaires, instead combining aspects of linguistic anthropology with sociolinguistics. Scollon and Scollon (2001), for instance, draw upon ethnography to describe professional communication in the East and West, and pragmatics and conversation analysis to analyse exemplars in their data. Their research into Asian and Western communication preferences addresses issues like politeness, inferential patterns in conversation, individualism and gender in what they call ‘discourse systems’, such as the Utilitarian Discourse System, the Gender Discourse System and the Generational Discourse System. A discourse system is made up of the interlinked elements of ‘forms of discourse’, ‘socialisation’, ‘face systems’ and ‘ideology’. The Utilitarian Discourse System, they argue, is characterised by forms of discourse that are distinguished by their clarity,

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brevity and sincerity; by an ideological set of assumptions that derive from 17th-century empiricism and Enlightenment rationalism; by a system of state schooling that socialised pupils into this way of thinking; and by a face system that privileges directness and egalitarianism between interlocutors, while denigrating showiness, social distance and the overt demonstration of superiority or rank (Scollon & Scollon, 2001: 109–134). While intercultural communications scholars often warn against the dangers of stereotyping, it is in the nature of this field of study to make cultural generalisations. For instance, in their discussion of differences in the expected sequence of elements in typical Chinese and English argumentative discourse, Scollon and Scollon (2001) conclude: The difference in discourse pattern leads the westerner to focus on the opening stages of the discourse as the most crucial while the Asian speaker will tend to look for the crucial points to occur somewhat later. (Scollon & Scollon, 2001: 2)

Intercultural language educators, while acknowledging the value and admitting the statistical reliability of many of the empirical studies conducted by researchers into intercultural communication, have often, as noted above, been acutely uncomfortable with broad, often geographical or nationality-based generalisations such as ‘American/Western speaker’ and ‘Chinese/Japanese/Asian speaker’. Rather than, say, labelling Asians and Westerners as, respectively, collectivist and individualist, intercultural language educators tend to acknowledge these cultural dimensions and discourse systems as representative of default values that people with either an Asian or a non-Asian upbringing might incline towards, often in different situations. While socialisation through family upbringing, schooling and professional experience might socialise members of particular groups into behaving, speaking and writing in generally predictable ways, there is no guarantee that any given individual in a given context will do so, and no imperative that he or she should. In their advanced workbook on intercultural communication, Holliday et  al. (2017) take a critical perspective on the traditions of intercultural communications studies. They organise the workbook around a series of readings and responses that are engaged with the themes of ‘identity’, ‘othering’ and ‘exploration’. This organisation invites readers to reflect on the social processes that lead someone to think of themselves as a member of one particular group or community, rather than another, and then to explore the implications for different kinds of interaction. Thus, rather than proposing grand, essentialising narratives of culture and discourse practices, the authors recommend a focus on how individuals affiliate with ‘small cultures’ that are ‘characterised, for example, by social class, disability, gender, sexuality, profession, personal interests, beliefs and value systems, and specific communication norms’ (Holliday

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et al., 2017: 73). Even so, a recurring anxiety about stereotyping pervades the readings and commentaries in the workbook, and the authors quote approvingly a useful aphorism coined by Scollon and Scollon (2001: 138): ‘Cultures do not talk to each other; individuals do’. The tributary discipline of intercultural communication studies, in sum, has many insights to offer intercultural language education, and the two fields are often in close dialogue with each other. However, there are differences in emphasis between them, with intercultural communication studies tending to assume that the individual’s discourse practices will, to some extent, at least, be shaped by his or her prior socialisation into a definable group, whether that is a ‘large culture’ or a ‘small culture’. Intercultural language education accepts this process of socialisation as a likelihood but it is also concerned with the development of knowledge, skills and personal qualities that will allow the individual to navigate such groups, and, by doing so, speakers will reconstitute their individual and group identities. Questions for reflection

• How would you identify yourself in terms of the ‘cultural dimensions’ of intercultural communication studies? • How consistently do you adhere to these values, or do they vary, for example in professional or domestic settings? Do your learners behave in such a way as to exhibit these cultural values consistently? • Identify ways in which people behave and speak that might be considered typical or atypical of the cultural dimensions. Literary, Media and Cultural Studies (CS)

As well as communication studies, anthropology, sociolinguistics and the various branches of functional linguistics, other scholarly disciplines lay claim to ‘culture’ as the object of their attention. Three other closely related fields have a particular relevance to intercultural ELT. Literary, media and cultural studies have a long history of addressing cultural issues directly through the interpretation of different kinds of cultural product: literary texts, media products and other forms of cultural practice. While there has been a long tradition of using literature and various forms of the media (e.g. newspapers, film, television and web-based resources) in the language classroom, the discipline of CS, which takes all forms of cultural practice as its object of interpretive study, has not been so visible. Even so, CS is sometimes linked to literary studies, particularly when the scope of literature is extended to more popular types of entertainment, such as graphic novels, computer game narratives and film and television adaptations of literary texts. However, it is perhaps misleading to associate literary and cultural studies too closely; indeed, CS has sometimes been criticised for its neglect of literature (cf. Kenneth Parker,

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cited in Montgomery, 1998: 4). What then is CS, what is its relationship to literary and media studies – and what might these three disciplines together contribute to intercultural language education? To answer this question, we might consider the historical evolution of the three disciplines. In Britain, CS developed out of a reaction against the then dominant university tradition of teaching English literature, a tradition that had developed in the latter half of the 19th century and was firmly embedded across the English-speaking world by the 1950s. This tradition had its seeds in Matthew Arnold’s (1960 [1869]) Culture and Anarchy, and in the early 20th century it was principally associated with influential literary critics such as T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, Q.D. Leavis and L.C. Knights. These scholars generally viewed literature as a storehouse of civilised values, and the appreciation of a defined ‘canon’ of ‘great’ literature in English was supposed by their adherents to be equivalent to the ability to discriminate between the sophisticated tastes of the minority (‘culture’) and the populist barbarism of the masses (‘anarchy’). Subsequent changes to this elitist view of literary scholarship in Britain were themselves the result of profound social changes, not least to the demographics of university education. In the years after World War II, there was an incursion of ‘grammar school boys’ into the hitherto elitist realm of English academia and, as some of these students graduated and took up teaching posts themselves, they began to re-evaluate their own educational experiences. In 1957, Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy was published. This book is partially a defence of the working-class culture of Hoggart’s youth, and although it regards some aspects of modern popular culture with distaste, it opened the way for an ongoing series of critiques of elite conceptions of ‘culture’ and, in particular, the narrowness of the ‘great tradition’ as defined by the reading lists of university courses in English literature. Later, Raymond Williams (1961), a younger contemporary of Hoggart, in a series of books and articles, particularly The Long Revolution (Williams, 1961), developed the thesis that ‘culture’ is far from being the preserve of a civilised minority, but is, in fact, ordinary. Williams (1961: 63) refers to culture as ‘a whole way of life’, a perspective clearly influenced by anthropology. In the 1960s, Williams’ writing contributed to the early development of media studies (e.g. Communications, 1962; Television: Technology and Cultural Form, 1974), and his work was crucial to the widening of academic interest beyond the traditional university literary canon. In 1964, under the directorship of Richard Hoggart, the pioneering Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Culture (CCC) was established. Particularly under the later directorship of Stuart Hall, the CCC further broadened the scope of CS to encompass ever more diverse aspects of popular culture, such as youth fashion (e.g. Hebdige, 1979), the dances of girls and young women (e.g. McRobbie, 1993) and family television

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viewing habits (e.g. Morley, 1986). Class, race, ethnicity and gender were at the heart of these analyses of ‘a whole way of life’. The work of the CCC inspired many others to adopt a theoretical methodology for describing and evaluating the cultural phenomena in which they were interested, a methodology based on Gramsci’s theory of hegemony (see Chapter  1); Barthes’ theory of semiology (e.g. Barthes, 1977; cf. Chapter 9 in this volume); and the principles of ethnography and participant observation (cf. Chapters 1, 6 and 7 of this book). It will be obvious that over the course of the past century and a half, the study of literature has broadened out to incorporate other media and the kinds of behaviour that characterise ‘a whole way of life’ for different social, gender, racial and ethnic groups. There also continues to be a considerable cross-fertilisation of ideas among literary, media and cultural studies and fields such as anthropology, sociology and discourse analysis. While traditional literary studies has expanded to encompass media and cultural studies, there has not, of course, been uncritical acceptance of the newer disciplines amongst scholars (cf. Aksikas et al., 2019; Montgomery, 1998; Turner, 2003). There has been a typically hegemonic power struggle within the domain of literary studies about the nature and purpose of the discipline: for example, scholars argue whether students should still be required to do traditional close reading of canonical texts, like Shakespeare’s plays and poems, or whether they should instead be encouraged, say, to analyse the way Shakespearian quotations are appropriated and recontextualised in Hollywood films such as The Last Action Hero, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Schindler’s List, American Pie and 10 Things I Hate About You (cf. Burt & Boose, 2004; Drakakis, 1997). The tensions between CS and literary studies are accessibly summarised by Culler (2011). One broad area of concern remains the ‘canon’ of texts which form the basis of study – in crude terms, should all students focus on a common core of valued texts, the ‘literary greats’ whose value in terms of cultural capital is reinforced by their membership of a recognised canon, or should they be free to roam widely among a plethora of popular literary forms, film and television genres, video game narratives and so on? Culler (2011) argues that the purpose of CS in the United States is different from that in Britain insofar as in the former, CS is primarily a resourceful, interdisciplinary, but still largely academic study of cultural practices (such as literary and media production) and cultural representations. In Britain, by contrast, the transformative political aspirations of CS align it with areas such as critical discourse analysis, although Culler (2011: 53–54) suggests that the opposition between an activist CS and a relatively acquiescent literary studies may be sentimental exaggeration. Even so, in the United States, the ongoing debate stirred up by Hirsch (1987; see also Hirsch et al., 1988), who proposed that all Americans should be exposed to ‘Core Knowledge’ as a corollary

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to their citizenship, and the critical responses to him (e.g. Murray, 1992; Yandell, 2017) demonstrate that even today neither the United States nor Britain is immune to sociopolitical questions of the kind that prompted the early development of CS in England (see further, Chapter  4). In short, the debate centres on the ways in which familiarity with particular cultural products bestows a certain kind of status on the individual and contributes to the formation of his or her identity. Because many learners are not necessarily studying the English language in order to demonstrate their affiliation with one or another presumed set of anglophone national cultural values (see further, Chapter 3), questions about the purposes and ideological implications of the use of literary, media and cultural products in ELT are commonly raised in the language teaching community. On a practical level, Byram (1997a) also gives a detailed critique of CS and its relationship to foreign language teaching, finding CS wanting in its lack of interest in teaching methods and learning styles across different educational contexts, a lack latterly addressed by the essays in Aksikas et al. (2019). Despite his reservations, Byram nevertheless acknowledges the potential value of CS to foreign language study in that it exists to invite critical cultural analysis, and so it prompts educators to consider the means by which language learners may be equipped to perform such analyses. Indeed, there is considerable evidence that literary, media and cultural studies have influenced ELT, at least indirectly. Over the past 50 years there has been an evident shift in approaches to literature in ELT, from engagement with canonical ‘great texts’ to ‘literature with a small “l”’ (e.g. Brumfit & Carter, 1986; Collie & Slater, 1987; Hall, 2015; Lazar, 1993; McRae, 1991; Paran, 2006). It is fair to argue that, in recent years, literature in ELT curricula has been exploited primarily for its value in motivating language development, and only to a lesser extent for its facility in promoting cultural exploration and critical awareness. However, it remains a rich resource for doing both. Similarly, the broadening of the canon in CS to include media studies and other forms of expression has been sporadically reflected in textbooks such as The Media (Edginton & Montgomery, 1996) and a number of ELT courses that engage with media and cultural studies (cf. Aguilar, 2003; Reid-Thomas et  al., 1998). These materials draw upon the task-based learning methods of ELT to engage with a range of issues familiar to students of CS; for instance, how are social categories like gender, youth, class, ethnicity and nationhood constructed and performed across different cultures?; and how are these social groups represented in literature, music, dance, advertising, film and television, news media and social media? By engaging with such materials, students are no longer simply ‘learning the language’, but they are also learning ways of viewing others and reviewing themselves. Literary, media and cultural studies are distinct from the other ‘tributary disciplines’ discussed so far in that there is a greater emphasis on

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the interpretation of ‘products’, such as literary texts, visual arts, media productions and diverse artistic performances. As with anthropology, sociolinguistics and functional linguistics, however, there is the assumption that the cultural products at stake are outcomes of sets of dynamic, negotiated community values that can be explored, interrogated, evaluated and, where appropriate, critiqued or celebrated. Questions for reflection

• What would you consider to be the 10 most ‘canonical’ texts in English literature? To what extent does your list include Black, Asian, female, working-class and living writers? Reflect on the criteria that you used to make your list. • A perennially popular topic in CS is youth culture. Reflect for a moment on your teenage years. Describe the fashions and musical tastes that were preferred by your peers. • Explain the role that fashion and musical tastes play in constructing, negotiating and affirming individual and group identity. • Discuss whether, in language courses, literature, media and cultural products should be used for cultural analysis as well as language development. Towards a Working Definition of ‘Culture’

At this point in the book, it should be clear why ‘culture’ is such a contested concept and why some scholars believe it is too vague to be useful in explaining anything, let alone language education. Indeed, in the second edition of his foundational monograph on Teaching and Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence, Byram (2021: 37, n. 10) refuses ‘to indulge in the almost ritual discussion of the problem of defining “culture”’. In a much earlier glossary, Keywords, ‘a vocabulary of culture and society’ that did attempt to give such a definition, Raymond Williams observed that: Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is so partly because of its intricate historical development, in several European languages, but mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought. (Williams, 1976: 76–77)

So far, we have attempted to unpack the concept of culture by showing how it has been treated in a number of distinct but related intellectual disciplines, from anthropology and functional linguistics to intercultural communication studies and literary, media and cultural studies. If they have anything in common, it is that they are all concerned with the

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construction and negotiation of individual identities in the context of a group or community, with the sharing and contesting of values, attitudes and perspectives on the world, and with the expression of these identities, values and debates through linguistic forms of expression and other meaningful types of behaviour. The cultural practices that perform ‘identity work’ may range from, say, preferred forms of dental hygiene (does the group have a preference for dental floss, toothbrushes and/or miswak?) to the appreciation of opera, whether Western or Chinese. A succinct theoretical description of culture as it is understood in the present volume is given by Witte and Harden (2015): Culture provides the subject with certain conceptual options for the design of the self and other – and at the same time excludes other options. In this respect, culture, as a generative and structuring context of construction, arranges and provides to the members of a cultural community the norms, values, schemata, and patterns for subjective and collective understanding, construction, (inter)action and emotion. These form the central parts of tacit cultural knowledge, and they are stabilised and substantiated in social conventions. As such, culture provides the categorical frame of a social and societal blueprint of reality (or realities) which all members of the cultural community harbour – albeit subjectively to different degrees. Although inherent in culture are constellations of conflict, difference, dynamism and mixing of influences, it provides the subject and the collective with a dynamic and coherent system of rules, explicit and implicit, which has been established by the group in a historical dimension in order to ensure their survival. (Witte & Harden, 2015: 4)

From this definition, it should be clear that the concept of ‘culture’ or ‘cultural community’ is not necessarily – or even primarily – related to nationality. ‘British’ culture, for example, is not just made up of English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh cultures but of multiple communities that cut across these national boundaries and are characterised by a range of factors, including age, gender, class, religious persuasion (or lack of it) and ethnicity as well as such characteristics as profession, leisure pursuits, artistic tastes, consumption of preferred foodstuffs and so on. While we certainly can and do talk about ‘Welsh culture’, we can also talk about ‘youth culture’ and the cultures of football fans, soap opera viewers, social media group members, the Deaf community, vegans and different academic disciplines. Each of these communities has evolved implicit and explicit beliefs, values and rules of behaviour that contribute to the ongoing survival of the group, at least as a recognisable group. Most of the recent work on intercultural approaches to language education has assumed an anthropological view of culture as encompassing an entire way of life. This perspective, and the key role of language

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alongside other symbolic practices in establishing and sustaining cultures, was in fact championed in at least one of the relatively early discussions of the communicative approach to language teaching (Loveday, 1981): [Culture] involves the implicit norms and conventions of a society, its methods of ‘going about doing things’, its historically transmitted but also adaptive and creative ethos, its symbols and its organisation of experience. (Loveday, 1981: 34)

The anthropological definition of culture and the role of communication presented by scholars such as Witte and Harden, and Loveday, encapsulate a number of the central concerns of an intercultural approach to English language education, and these concerns will reappear periodically in the subsequent chapters of this book. A society (or any cohesive group of individuals) constructs for itself a set of presuppositions and shared beliefs that it will come to regard as implicit knowledge or Lebenswelt, that is, ‘the common-sense area of reality which the attentive person takes unquestioningly for granted’ (Witte & Harden, 2015: 3). These beliefs explain the behaviour of the group members, and also account for the kinds of things they produce to celebrate, affirm or contest their common identity and values. The language of the group members, along with other ‘symbolic activities’, in turn serves to organise their experience and to construct and maintain group identity, distinctiveness and cohesion. However, we must always be aware that the norms, beliefs, practices and language of any group are not static but dynamic – the group members are forever negotiating and renegotiating their shared norms and values. Therefore, the ‘core’ beliefs – and the language that articulates them – will necessarily change over time. The ‘culture’ of a group can be understood as the relationship between these core beliefs and values shared by the group, and the patterns of behaviour, communication, language and art that the group produces, bearing in mind that the beliefs and values are constantly under negotiation within, and often outwith, the boundaries of the group. The typical foreign language learner is usually an individual who is positioned outside the target language group, looking in. Learners may or may not wish to adopt the practices, beliefs or world view of members of the target culture, but they should be able to acquire understanding of these practices and beliefs if they wish to better comprehend the language that the members of the target culture produce. It is this recognition that language is much more than the transfer of information – it is the dialogic assertion, negotiation, construction, reconstitution and maintenance of individual and group identity – that has led to the development of an intercultural approach to language education. Loveday’s insistence that culture is something that the individual both inherits and reshapes addresses one of the criticisms applied to the

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various branches of the tributary disciplines that we have surveyed. MacDonald and O’Regan (2012) worry that intercultural communication is ‘riven with dichotomies that reflect the epistemological and ontological assumptions of its diverse disciplinary origins’ observing that: […] ‘culture’ can be an explanatory concept that precedes the phenomena analysed by empirical research (a priori/deductive), or ‘culture’ can be performed by agents as an effect of communication (a fortiori/inductive). (MacDonald & O’Regan, 2012: 560)

Our focus as educators and researchers, in short, can be on ‘culture’ as a set of identity-forming resources that shape individual and group behaviour, or ‘culture’ as a set of performances through which individuals and groups constitute their identity. In practice the two are, as Loveday observes, not incompatible. After all, language is another phenomenon that the individual both inherits from the community and reshapes through his or her performance. A tentative, working definition of culture, then, for the purposes of intercultural language education as presented in this volume, is offered below. ‘Culture’ can be defined as a set of expressive material and cognitive resources that individuals and groups draw upon to constitute and reconstitute their multiple identities (e.g. a style of music, a brand of clothing or the concept of nationhood or good parenthood). As part of their socialisation, their upbringing and experience, individuals and groups are exposed to collective cultural practices and products that embody particular ways of being and thinking. Individuals and groups can, through their own performative practices and products, consciously or unconsciously affirm, adapt or challenge those ways of being and thinking. Effective intercultural communication requires an alertness to the ways that the performance of diverse cultural practices and the production and consumption of different cultural products can express alternative ways of being and thinking. It also requires an understanding that meanings are unstable and vary from context to context. This alertness and understanding is harnessed to the ends of more effective intercultural communication.

Having now indulged, as Byram (2021: 37, n. 10) might say, in the ‘ritual discussion of the problem of defining “culture”’, we now turn our attention to specific ways in which the tributary disciplines described in these opening two chapters inform intercultural language teaching and learning. Although any scholarly field is necessarily subject to critique, a relatively established consensus has emerged over the past four decades about the curricular aims of an intercultural approach to language

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education, and how these aims might be realised. One basic assumption must by now be evident: an intercultural approach to ELT goes beyond a focus only on language. Cultural exploration demands, as Stern (1992) rightly pointed out, a focus on people rather than language as such. To understand how a community uses language, it is necessary to understand the community – the dynamic system of its beliefs, values and dreams, and how its members negotiate and articulate them. While older language learning textbooks that invoked culture might have invited an uncritical celebration of the English-speaking world, more recent intercultural curricula suggest a more critical engagement. The home culture is also invoked and comes under scrutiny in the intercultural curriculum. Even so, practical considerations remain. Towards the end of the last century, Stern (1992) presciently identified some fundamental problems in implementing what he, three decades ago, simply called a ‘cultural syllabus’: In our view the following four issues have to be dealt with: (a) the vastness of the culture concept; (b) the problem of goal determination; (c) questions of syllabus design and the difficulty of according an appropriate place to culture in a predominantly language-oriented approach; (d) questions of teaching procedures and the difficulty of handling substantive subject matter in a mainly skill-oriented programme. (Stern, 1992: 207)

An intercultural approach to ELT acknowledges and seeks to address these issues. Certainly, if culture is indeed ‘a whole way of life’ then it is certainly a challenge to encapsulate the vastness of culture in a language syllabus, where time and the learners’ ability to express sophisticated concepts are typically restricted. However, from the interacting disciplinary traditions of linguistics and anthropology, alongside literary, media and cultural studies, we can identify key skills that promote the observation, interpretation, comparison and evaluation of texts and social practices that will help learners to make sense of target cultures as well as to rethink their own. To answer Stern’s first concern, we do not have to pre-package ‘the vastness of the culture concept’ in only one static way if our focus is on developing effective techniques for intercultural exploration and interpretation. Indeed, to address his second point, intercultural exploration and mediation become the central goals of the intercultural curriculum; they are what the learning of language is for. That said, his next two concerns, the issues of syllabus design and teaching methods, remain, and these will be addressed more fully in Chapters 3 and 4. In Chapter 3, we look more closely at the concept of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) and how models of ICC might inform the design and implementation of an intercultural curriculum.

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Questions for reflection

• Review the brief outlines given in the opening two chapters of this book, of formal and functional linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology, communication studies, and literary, media and cultural studies. To what extent do they share a common conception of ‘culture’ and to what extent are their concepts of culture different, or even incompatible? From your own further reading, consider how successfully these ‘tributary disciplines’ have moved from what MacDonald and O’Regan describe as an a priori to an a fortiori concept of culture. • Looking forward, how do you predict the discussions of culture in the ‘tributary disciplines’ will be applied to the practices of intercultural language teaching and learning in the remainder of this book?

3 Defining Intercultural Communicative Competence

Having reviewed the role of ‘culture’ across a number of key disciplines that inform intercultural language education, we now turn to the challenge of defining what might be meant by ‘intercultural communicative competence’ (ICC). Much of intercultural language education has been concerned with identifying linguistic repertoires, alongside other types of knowledge, skills and personal qualities, that individuals might have to call upon in order to be regarded as effective intercultural communicators. This is no trivial undertaking. The past two decades have seen critiques of a single overarching formulation of ICC and, indeed, there is now a rich and varied set of models of ICC that have been designed from different geographical, professional and research perspectives (see Deardoff, 2009). From the variety of models of ICC now available, it is clear that the varied conceptions of culture discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 result in different prisms through which to view the kinds of attitude, knowledge and skills that educators might wish learners to acquire. The intercultural speaker can be considered primarily as an observer, describer, interpreter, mediator, critic or, indeed, resilient survivor of different cultural experiences. There is not enough space in this chapter to review all the different approaches to ICC, and so the focus here will be to explain and discuss the principles behind ICC as it appears in two influential, transnational guides to intercultural language education, principally the Council of Europe’s Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) guidelines and the National Council of State Supervisors for Languages and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (NCSSFLACTFL) ‘can-do’ statements. These guidelines are reviewed, alongside two alternative models of ICC, one aimed at adult professionals and the other a national curriculum aimed at high school children in Brazilian state schools. The key questions addressed by this chapter are thus: • How has ICC been defined in two transnational curriculum guidelines, the CEFR and the NCSSFL-ACTFL ‘can-do’ statements? 41

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• How is ICC conceptualised in an alternative framework aimed at adult professionals, and in a national curriculum for high school pupils? • What has been the critical response to such documents? It must be acknowledged from the outset that both the CEFR and the NCSSFL-ACTFL documents have been subjected to criticism from within the intercultural language education community and beyond. The conclusion of this chapter addresses that criticism, which at its most extreme amounts to an outright rejection of any description of ICC that may be employed as the basis of a universalising, decontextualised assessment process. The issue of assessment of language and ICC is addressed separately in Chapter 11 of this book. While I acknowledge the potency of the critiques of standardised descriptions of ICC as not being adequately rooted in particular educational and historical contexts, I would also suggest that there is still a value in considering them. First, they have arisen out of extensive deliberations and consultations among multinational teams of experienced, professional educators and researchers about the goals of intercultural language education; the frameworks they offer are thus sophisticated and grounded in diverse experience. Secondly, there is a considerable appeal of documents such as the CEFR and the NCSSFL-ACTFL guidelines to those institutions that deliver education, both in the public and commercial sectors. It is unlikely that English language teaching (ELT) teachers will be able to avoid them, or documents like them. The following discussions, then, are aimed at providing support in the circumspect use of them. Intercultural Language Learning as Exploration and Mediation

All models of ICC share the conception of the learner as an explorer and mediator. This idea ultimately derives, as we have seen, from anthropology: the learner becomes an ethnographic participant-observer, learning how to interpret the cultural practices and products of the target speech community. Learners do not need to be immigrants or sojourners in an unfamiliar culture in order to be able to treat other language communities as sources of cultural knowledge and experience. If contact with the other language groups cannot be face to face, it can take place via the media (either the broadcast media or online, via social media), or it can be reconstructed through classroom scenarios. The curriculum can be organised to promote the acquisition of the target language by way of tasks that develop skills in observation, interpretation and the critical evaluation of cultural patterns of behaviour, including one’s own, with a view to supporting the process of mediation between divergent cultural values. For educators such as Claire Kramsch (1993, 2009; Kramsch & Uryu, 2020), the encounter between the learner and other cultures affords learners entry into hybrid, ‘third spaces’ from which the home culture and the target culture can be viewed, challenged and re-evaluated. In

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their explanation of the ‘third space’, Kramsch and Uryu (2020: 211) cite Bhabha (1994), who coined the phrase: [A] willingness to descend into that alien territory […] may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. To that end we should remember that it is the ‘inter’ – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. (Kramsch & Uryu, 2020: 211, cite Bhabha, 1994: 56, original emphases)

The process here described is the potential transformation of the willing language learner into a hybrid being, translating and negotiating between subject positions, and so creating new meanings in and across cultures. The learner ‘carries the burden of the meaning of culture’ by exploring the world view of the other and engaging in mediation. The world view of ‘the other’ for the learner of English is, of course, no longer necessarily the world view of the ‘native’ anglophone speaker. As English has become an international language, or lingua franca, intercultural exploration can take place between, say, North and South Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans and Australasians through the medium of English, always bearing in mind that the speakers of different varieties of English will bring their own world views along with them. The standard English of the ‘inner circle’ anglophone countries (cf. Kachru, 1986) may still function as a point of reference in most (but not all) ELT course books and works of reference, but in practice it is now accepted that most communication in English takes place among ‘non-native’ speakers of English (Jenkins, 2000, 2003, 2015; Kachru et al., 2006). To return to the quotation from Bhabha, with global digital communications, learners may easily ‘descend into alien territories’, guided by their teachers, and enter virtual third spaces that involve the negotiation of meaning with fellow learners from a variety of world views (see further, Chapter 8). The question remains, however, how we conceptualise the attitudes, knowledge and skills that learners will need to acquire in order to become effective explorers and mediators. The following sections review some of the major frameworks that seek to abstract from diverse experience some key features of these competences. Questions for reflection

Before reading on, either think about the following questions or discuss them with your colleagues. • Does learning a new language change your identity? What constitutes a ‘hybrid identity’ in your experience? Do you find that your language

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learners embrace the development of a new identity as an opportunity, or resist it as a threat? • Who do you think your learners are more likely to communicate regularly in English with – ‘native’ or fellow ‘non-native’ speakers? How does the answer to this question impact on what and how you teach? • The past quarter century has seen educators problematising the concept of the ‘native’ speaker in ELT (e.g. Davies, 2003). To what extent is the ‘native’ speaker an idealisation? Can you point to a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ example of a ‘native’ speaker? Is it possible for ‘non-native’ speakers to exceed the competence of certain ‘native’ speakers, for example in areas such as public speaking or academic writing? On what basis would such judgements be made? Intercultural Communicative Competence in the CEFR

Certainly, the most globally influential framework for defining ICC is the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment, which was initially developed by the Council of Europe in the 1990s. A draft version was circulated amongst various educators from 1996, and the CEFR was eventually published at the beginning of the new century (Council of Europe, 2001; see also Martyniuk, 2006). Although directed primarily at Europe, it has been influential well beyond. There can be few English language teachers in the world who are unaware of the meaning of levels ‘A1’ to ‘C2’. Seventeen years after its first publication, a Companion to the CEFR was published, revising and extending the framework (North et al., 2018). Together, the original CEFR and Companion guidelines remain immensely important for foreign language education in general, and intercultural language education in particular. That said, they are controversial, often misunderstood, and it has been argued that their precepts have only selectively been applied to language learning (e.g. Byram & Parmenter, 2012). To understand the model of ICC proposed in the CEFR and the Companion, it is helpful to know something about the history of the documents. Trim (2012) gives an account of its background from the perspective of one of its architects. It is, first of all, important to remember that the Council of Europe, the agency that developed the CEFR, is not primarily concerned with language education. The Council of Europe was established in 1949 as an intergovernmental agency, the aim of which is to safeguard human rights, the rule of law and parliamentary democracy amongst member institutions, among which can be counted any European state that formally accepts the council’s principles. The council is not part of the European Union; rather, its members need to subscribe to the European Cultural Convention, an agreement dating from 1954, which, among other things, commits member states to promoting the study of their own languages, and to the provision of facilities to study

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the languages of other member states. One key point to note about the CEFR, then, is that it is not designed primarily to foster the study of English alone, but rather it aimed to contribute to the harmonisation of curricula for the learning of all the major languages of the council’s member states. The CEFR, in fact, is the latest in a number of support and policy initiatives taken by the Council of Europe to support the teaching of European languages. Amongst the better known are The Threshold Level for Modern Language Learning in Schools (Ek, 1976), which applied the insights of sociolinguistics and speech act theory to the development of a standardised communicative syllabus for the major European languages. The user of the Threshold Level could be confident that a set of meanings (or ‘notions’) taught at one stage in a French curriculum would be taught at a similar stage in an English, German, Spanish or Dutch syllabus. Ek and Alexander (1980) designed the Threshold Level with particular reference to the teaching of English, with the result that the Threshold Level was widely used in the development of communicative language curricula in ELT. It was followed by the more advanced Waystage and Vantage Levels in the 1980s and 1990s (cf. Ek & Trim, 1998a, 1998b, 2001). The CEFR, then, and the subsequent Companion, represent a continuation of the Council of Europe’s interest in promoting language education primarily for social and political ends. Not surprisingly, the CEFR is more than a document that seeks to enhance linguistic competence; it explicitly seeks to uphold social and cultural values that are relevant in a political context that is characterised by the co-existence of a plurality of languages. The original CEFR document expresses these values succinctly, right from the start (Council of Europe, 2001): As a social agent, each individual forms relationships with a widening cluster of overlapping social groups, which together define identity. In an intercultural approach, it is a central objective of language education to promote the favourable development of the learner’s whole personality and sense of identity in response to the enriching experience of otherness in language and culture. It must be left to teachers and the learners themselves to reintegrate the many parts into a healthily developing whole. (Council of Europe, 2001: 1, emphasis added)

The competences that the CEFR goes on to describe, then, are not purely linguistic; rather, they apply to ‘the whole human being’. They combine linguistic and psychological elements, communicative resources alongside personal qualities like curiosity and openness. As such, the scope of the CEFR extends well beyond earlier Council of Europe guidelines on the harmonisation of language curricula, which sought simply to identify and grade those expressive resources required to accomplish specific

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communicative functions and articulate certain notions. The competences described in the CEFR assume that language is a means by which learners will co-construct their individual identity in interaction with overlapping social groups, interactions that will offer ‘enriching experiences of otherness’ (Council of Europe, 2001). The role of the teacher is to facilitate these interactions and thus support the learners to develop both their linguistic skills and their unique personalities in a ‘healthy’, holistic manner. The model of ICC described in the CEFR and its Companion is intricate. The CEFR runs to 260  pages of detailed text, to which the 2018 Companion, with its expansions and revisions, adds a further 230 pages. The present discussion is based on the model of ICC that informs the CEFR and the later Companion, and that was developed over time by, among others, Michael Byram, Carol Morgan and Geneviève Zarate (e.g. Byram, 1997b; Byram et  al., 1994; Byram & Zarate, 1997). Their model of ICC is presented as a combination of different kinds of skill and types of knowledge (savoirs), some of which are specifically linguistic and communicative, and some of which are broader in scope. Since the publication of the CEFR, the definitions of knowledge and skill have been further refined, but in essence there remain five types of knowledge and skill that make up ICC in the terms of the CEFR (see Byram, 2008: 230–233 or Wagner et al., 2019: 14–20 for a succinct summary). The five competences identified by Byram are (1) Knowledge (savoirs): Of social groups and their products and practices in one’s own and in one’s interlocutor’s country, and of the general processes of societal and individual interaction. (2) Skills of discovery and interaction (savoir apprendre/faire): Ability to acquire new knowledge of a culture and cultural practices and the ability to operate knowledge, attitudes and skills under the constraints of real-time communication and interaction. (3) Skills of interpreting and relating (savoir comprendre): Ability to interpret a document or event from another culture, to explain it and relate it to documents or events from one’s own culture. (4) Attitudes (savoir être): Curiosity and openness, readiness to suspend disbelief about other cultures and belief about one’s own. (5) Critical cultural awareness/political education (savoir s’engager): Ability to evaluate critically and on the basis of explicit criteria, perspectives, practices and products in one’s own and other cultures and countries. These competences are wide-ranging and capable of being adapted to different and changing circumstances, such as the development of digital communications, a wholly new area of communication that has grown exponentially since the publication of the original CEFR in 2001. A more detailed discussion of each of the five savoirs is given below.

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Knowledge (savoirs)

While intercultural curricula have striven to be about more than ‘facts’, it is indisputable that knowledge of certain facts can sometimes help learners navigate other cultures. It is therefore legitimate to teach and learn information about the historical and contemporary relationships between communities, and how political, economic and cultural relations have been realised. Often, this information is couched in geographical or national terms: learners of English might, for example, be taught something about the political institutions of other countries, or about iconic historical and cultural figures (e.g. from entertainment, sports or history) who act as a point of reference for members of other communities. The key question for the curriculum or materials designer to ask is: ‘what kinds of knowledge characterise members of the target community or communities?’. The possible answers to this question (however tentative) will help the curriculum or materials designer to select some of the facts that will be useful or interesting to teach a given set of students. In different educational contexts, of course, the groups who make up the target community or communities, that is, the salient ‘other’, will differ, though it is likely that one of the main targets for learners of English will remain anglophone communities. The exploration of different kinds of factual knowledge will yield some insights into possible misunderstandings between interlocutors. For example, knowledge about the preferred social media amongst Chinese and American teenagers in the early decades of the 21st century should help interlocutors make sense of questions or requests like ‘Could you send me a WhatsApp?’ and ‘WeChat me’. While, as Stern (1992) acknowledged, cultural knowledge is vast in its scope (see Chapter  1), teachers can predict and select some of the factual information that might well be useful or interesting for particular learners to acquire; e.g. the (in)tolerance of silence in different speech communities, the avoidance of eye contact in certain situations or the different responses to overlapping conversational turns across various cultures (see further, Chapter 5). Knowledge can also be tailored to the likely needs or interests of particular learners. In courses on English for medical purposes, for example, learners might be presented with factual knowledge of how ‘professionals’ and ‘patients’ are imagined in different cultures, how their relationships are articulated in different approaches to health care (e.g. are doctors presented as professionals who ‘engineer compliance’ or ‘negotiate a mutually acceptable health strategy’?), and they might explore the role and status of complementary medicine amongst different groups (cf. Lu & Corbett, 2012b). There are various ways in which the teacher can present relevant knowledge, e.g. through a systematic and planned, or impromptu, set of ‘cultural asides’, through reading or listening texts (including multimedia), or through project work in which learners are given particular topics to research and

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share. However learners may be exposed to relevant cultural knowledge, the focus should be on providing learners with information that will serve effective interaction. This might but does not necessarily include knowledge about religious institutions, social taboos, conventions governing hospitality, attitudes to gender or other social relationships, or levels of formality in hierarchical social structures at work or in the home. Skills of discovery and interaction (savoir apprendre/faire)

Since no single course can supply the full range of information or content required to be an effective intercultural speaker, any intercultural language course should equip students to find things out for themselves, through their own discoveries and interactions. Here, the most relevant tributary disciplines are those related to ethnography – learners can be trained in the kinds of skill that researchers into unfamiliar communities might be expected to acquire: they might be taught, for example, how to observe and interpret social behaviour (their own and that of others), and they can be taught how to elicit knowledge through the formulation of questions and the inferential analysis of responses (see Chapters 6 and 7). One key form of knowledge is knowledge of how interaction occurs. Byram (2008) argues that: Awareness that one is a product of one’s own socialisation is a precondition for understanding one’s reactions to otherness. Similarly, awareness of how one’s ‘natural’ ways of interacting with other people are the ‘naturalised’ product of socialisation, and how parallel but different modes of interaction can be expected in other cultures, is part of the knowledge an intercultural speaker needs. (Byram, 2008: 232)

Chapter 5 of this volume elaborates on this issue by focusing on conversational English. Drawing on conversational and discourse analysis, the chapter first considers how anglophone speech communities socialise their members, in part through the telling of conversational stories. These stories might easily be the focus of classes in spoken English interaction; however, they can also lead to a comparative perspective whereby ‘different modes of interaction’ that are prevalent locally can be assessed and, where relevant, contrasted with those modes of interaction that characterise particular anglophone communities, bearing in mind that not all anglophone communities will be characterised by identical patterns of interaction. Skills of relating and interpreting (savoir comprendre)

The effective intercultural speaker will also have the ability to ‘read’ texts and behaviour, from a semiotic perspective that is sensitive

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to ethnocentric bias. For example, they will be aware that non-verbal communication and its meanings differ across cultures (cf. Chapter  2). Some people, for instance, will kiss on meeting and when taking leave of each other. The cultural significance of a kiss differs across cultures, and so an interculturally competent learner will be able to appreciate that differences in meaning will occur, relate unfamiliar behavioural or communicative patterns to his or her own behaviour and interpret the significance of communicative events in the target culture. Non-verbal communication is subject to change over time as well as geographical space. For example, during the novel coronavirus epidemic of 2020–2022, many previously tactile greeters and leave-takers were encouraged to adopt alternative non-verbal means of showing affection or respect. In this context, new and alternative forms of greeting (e.g. ‘the elbow bump’ and the namaste) emerged as a response to health concerns. The key skills involved in relating and interpreting verbal and nonverbal codes are semiotic – learners need to be exposed to different ways of making meaning, so that they can become competent in identifying those differences, relating them to their past experience and interpreting them accordingly. The adept intercultural speaker will not only be able to identify different ways of meaning but will also be able to explain any resulting misunderstanding or communicative misfires among interlocutors from different backgrounds. Indeed, mediation has moved to centre stage, in the Companion to the CEFR, as one of the main roles adopted by the intercultural language learner, and it can be argued that, in the Companion, the competent ‘intercultural mediator’ has replaced the mythical ‘native speaker’ as the aspirational goal of language learning. Corbett (2021) surveys different ways of conceiving mediation and discusses the complexities of its treatment in the revised and expanded CEFR scales. In the present volume, Chapters 7 and 8 are the most relevant to the development of this particular savoir, while its assessment is treated in Chapter 11. Attitudes (savoir être)

Attitudes, such as curiosity, openness and respect, are personal qualities that go beyond linguistic behaviour, though there are, of course, linguistic ways of expressing, for example, curiosity or respectfulness. It is not easy to teach curiosity and openness, and some teachers will argue that this is not the language educator’s responsibility. Moreover, some teachers might argue that learners are either open and curious, or they are not. Learners (especially, perhaps, teens and adults) cannot be taught to be what they are not disposed to be. Even so, in an intercultural approach to English teaching, the teacher’s role includes designing activities and situations whereby the learner might, as the opening page of the CEFR suggests, be ‘enriched’ by experiencing otherness in language and culture.

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Through their engagement with learning activities, learners are expected to develop an interest in otherness, a willingness to question their own presuppositions in interaction with otherness and a tolerance for the potential discomfort involved in the growth that comes with engaging with otherness. There are different ways of providing learners with opportunities to develop savoir être through supported encounters with otherness, including sojourns, or periods of residence in another culture (cf. Jackson, 2020b). For those unable to travel physically to other cultures, there is the possibility of engaging with someone from another country and reporting on that encounter (e.g. Méndez García, 2017) or participating in an online intercultural exchange (e.g. Corbett et  al., forthcoming; Lima & Dart, 2019; O’Dowd, 2007). Chapter  8 looks in some detail at the challenges and issues of using writing as a mode of intercultural exploration in telecollaborative exchanges, and how this activity may or may not shape the kinds of attitude privileged in models of ICC. Critical cultural awareness/political education (savoir s’engager)

As noted in Chapter 1, the inclusion of the word ‘critical’ in phrases such as ‘critical discourse analysis’ or ‘critical pedagogy’ suggests an awareness of the roles of power, agency and ideology in shaping communication and educational processes. The application of ‘critical’ to ‘cultural awareness’ also suggests that learners should be taught to recognise the values and ideological perspectives encoded in various documents in the target language, and that they learn to mediate between different perspectives. The ultimate objective of critical cultural awareness is to bestow upon learners the knowledge and skills required to make informed decisions about their actions and behaviour that will transform their lives, and the lives of others, for the better. This quality is possibly best captured in the Brazilian Portuguese expression, conscientização, coined by Paulo Freire and elaborated extensively (e.g. Freire, 1980) to capture a complex interweaving of social, political and personal awareness and a predisposition to action. Guilherme (2002), Osler and Starkey (2005) and Byram (2008) draw on this concept to extend intercultural language education in the direction of citizenship education, though there is, naturally, a lively debate about how ‘citizenship’ might be conceptualised (see Lu & Corbett, 2012a). For Guilherme (2002: 209), for example, critical intercultural citizenship involves engaging learners in education for democracy and human rights, while recognising the complexities and contradictions inherent in those aims, and for Byram (2008: 207) intercultural citizenship involves developing skills for working constructively with others (of whatever political complexion) to achieve commonly agreed aims.

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No individual chapter in the present volume addresses savoir s’engager directly; however, critical reflection and self-reflection permeate many of the following chapters. Chapter  5 invites learners to think of conversation as both a collaborative and a competitive speech genre, in which interlocutors have implicit rights and responsibilities; Chapters 6 and 7 invite learners to observe and evaluate unfamiliar cultures critically; Chapter 8 considers the challenges of bringing learners of different backgrounds together via a digital platform to achieve a common set of goals; and Chapters 9 and 10 suggest ways of promoting critical analysis of multimodal discourses. There is an assumption that these skills will enable learners to understand their own communicative and cultural behaviour in some depth, and therefore act in a sensitive and informed manner with respect to the others with whom they engage. The five savoirs, or components of ICC that are set out in the CEFR and subsequent related documents are all complex, and to some degree they all remain controversial, despite the widespread influence of this policy statement. In the CEFR, they inform a number of descriptors that set out to define levels of achievement in different areas of language use, from the lowest, A1, to the highest, C2. These descriptors are further discussed in Chapter  11, which addresses the assessment of ICC, but they bear some similarity to the ‘can-do’ statements described below. Although they might appear comprehensive and authoritative, the savoirs, as they are defined and elaborated in the CEFR and Companion are not the only way of modelling ICC. Some alternative approaches are discussed in the next sections. Questions for reflection

• If you have previously come across the CEFR in your teaching, explain your understanding of it. • Describe the kind of individuals and groups that you – and your learners – imagine interacting with through English. • Describe the kinds of skills that would be useful in discovering the values, attitudes and beliefs of the local community in an unfamiliar environment. • Describe the greeting conventions in cultures with which you are familiar. How predictable are they? • Discuss whether it is the responsibility of the language instructor to teach ‘curiosity’ and ‘openness’. • What does ‘critical global citizenship’ mean to you? The NCSSFL-ACTFL ‘Can-Do’ Statements

While the CEFR still represents the most exhaustive and sophisticated single model of ICC, there are other reference documents that

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language educators can turn to for inspiration. We consider three alternative models here, in part to destabilise any sense of monolithic authority that discussion of the CEFR alone might imply. The contention of the present volume is that such models are useful, but that they need to be understood and adapted to different contexts. This contention is far from incompatible with the aims of the models themselves: they usually aim to guide rather than prescribe. One alternative to the CEFR has been devised by the ACTFL, a voluntary organisation founded in 1967 with the aim of promoting and supporting the teaching and learning of modern or ‘world’ languages across all levels of proficiency. It publishes guidance and advice, primarily for language teachers in the United States, amongst which are a series of ‘can-do’ statements that were produced in collaboration with the NCSSFL, an organisation that likewise promotes policies and practices in support of language education in America. The ‘can-do’ statements are intended as a user-friendly statement of intended language learning outcomes that support teachers and learners alike in setting goals, and monitoring learner progress through five levels: Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, Superior and Distinguished. Each ‘cando’ statement is organised as follows: • A set of proficiency benchmarks identify key features of language performance (context, text type and function) in three modes of communication (interpretive, interpersonal and presentational) to describe the learner’s progress. The benchmarks are used to set goals and monitor progress. • A set of performance indicators specify aspects of language that are involved in reaching the benchmark. They represent steps towards attaining the benchmark and can be used in unit design. • A set of examples illustrate language performance in a variety of contexts, academic or social, and inform classroom practices and output in lessons. Similarities between the CEFR and the ‘can-do’ statements are not accidental. Those who were involved in developing the NCSSFLACTFL ‘can-do’ statements on intercultural communication drew upon the expertise of the educators who designed the CEFR (Byram, 1997b; Byram et  al., 2002) as well as others such as Bennett et  al. (2003), Deardoff (2006) and Fantini (2007), all of whom represent a transatlantic consensus that: […] developing Intercultural Communicative Competence is a complex, non-linear process built from an accumulation of cultural knowledge, practices and social encounters experienced within a variety of cultural contexts. An apt metaphor is a mosaic whose total image is an

Defining Intercultural Communicative Competence  53

assemblage of smaller, unique pieces. Each intercultural experience provides an opportunity for interpretation, discovery, interaction and reflection that motivates learners’ curiosity and leads to awareness of self and others. (NCSSFL-ACTFL, 2017)

Some ‘can-do’ statements illustrating intercultural communication at an Intermediate level of proficiency are given in Table  3.1 (adapted from NCSSFL-ACTFL, 2017). Further guidance on how to use the ‘can-do’ statements is given in a statement on the crucial role of reflection in the acquisition of ICC (NCSSFL-ACTFL, 2017). A three-step procedure for reflection is recommended: (i) An introduction to the topic at issue in the target language. (ii) A deeper reflection outside class, which at the earlier stages might be in the learner’s first language, and later in the target language. (iii) A follow up (e.g. presentation or essay) in class in the target language. For example, at Intermediate level, learners might compare certain cultural products (e.g. historical monuments and the values they commemorate or celebrate) and consider how they would interact with members of the target culture in those locations (e.g. by discussing how to dress appropriately). In an ELT classroom, information about a landmark and its significance might be presented in English, and the learners would be asked to follow this up with research outside the class, which might in the early stages be undertaken in the learners’ first language. Thus, information about a historical home associated with a political leader (e.g. Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello or Winston Churchill’s Blenheim Palace) might be presented in class. Learners are then asked to do further research on the site, the famous inhabitant and the values they might represent for American or British culture. The learners would be asked to reflect on whether the homes of historical political leaders of their home culture are open to the public, and what values these homes and leaders represent for those who visit the sites. (It should be noted from the outset that neither Thomas Jefferson nor Winston Churchill is an uncontroversial historical figure, so visitors’ views on their legacy might well diverge.) The learners may well undertake this reflection in their first language, but they then can be required to summarise and report back on their findings in English. The interaction phase of this activity would be to consider what to say and how to behave appropriately at a historical site such as Monticello or Blenheim. Issues around appropriate dress, volume of voice, use of mobile phones, etc., might be the topic of class debate and role play. Even from this illustration, it should be evident that the NCSSFLACTFL ‘can-do’ statements can easily be correlated with elements of the various savoirs that inform the CEFR. Knowledge about historical sites

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Table 3.1 NCSSFL-ACTFL ‘can-do’ statement for intercultural communication (Intermediate) Investigate Investigate products and practices to understand cultural perspectives

Proficiency benchmark In my own and other cultures I can make comparisons between products and practices to help me understand perspectives. Performance indicators

Interact Interact with others in and from another culture

Products

In my own and other cultures I can compare products related to everyday life and personal interests and studies.

Practices

In my own and other cultures I can compare practices related to everyday life and personal interests.

Proficiency benchmark I can interact at a functional level in some familiar contexts. Performance indicators Language

I can converse with peers from the target culture in familiar situations at school, work, or play, and show interest in basic cultural similarities and differences.

Behaviour

I can recognise that significant differences in behaviors exist among cultures, use appropriate learned behaviors and avoid major social blunders.

Examples linking investigation and interaction Investigate: In my own and other cultures I can compare how and why houses, buildings and towns affect lifestyles. Interact: I can use learned behaviors when visiting someone’s home or business and notice when I make a cultural mistake. Investigate: In my own and other cultures I can compare events and beliefs that drive the creation of a monument or the popularity of a landmark. Interact: I can show respect when visiting a historical site by dressing appropriately, adjusting the volume of my voice, and acting with consideration for others. Investigate: In my own and other cultures I can compare school/learning environments and determine what is valued. Interact: I can meet with an advisor in the target culture and to select courses that match my preferences and academic goals.

would represent potentially useful information about facts, people and values that have a wide currency in the target culture (savoirs). The process of reflection invokes the cultural comparison of values and behaviours that underlie ‘skills of interpreting and relating’ – what do historical sites mean in the home and target culture? Observational and ethnographic ‘skills of discovery and interaction’ would be invoked by considering and debating how visitors behave at historic sites more generally: what dress, behaviour and questions are considered appropriate and inappropriate and by whom? Critical cultural awareness can be raised by considering some of the contradictions that are likely to be involved in the celebration of any historical figure or site. Jefferson’s ownership of slaves is evident in Monticello, for example, and the opulence of Blenheim raises questions about Britain’s class

Defining Intercultural Communicative Competence  55

system and the tension between privilege and democratic populism. Finally, there is space in the reflection for the learner to express – or even develop – an attitude (savoir être) towards the content of the class. Is there any reason for the learner to feel a connection with or even an interest in a foreign historical site? Can an analogous historical figure or site in the learner’s home country forge a possible connection? Why do historical sites such as Blenheim and Monticello attract tourists from other countries? How do locals and nonlocals relate to them? There is, then, a similar set of educational assumptions underlying the CEFR and the NCSSFL-ACTFL ‘can-do’ statements. They both assume that language education should be embedded in a broader exploration of identity, values and behaviour, and so there should be an explicit and systematic means of addressing skills of cultural exploration, interpretation and evaluation alongside instruction in language. The formulation of the ‘can-do’ statements, as a whole, however, seeks to ground proficiency benchmarks that, out of context, can appear vague and abstract (e.g. ‘In my own and other cultures I can make comparisons between products and practices to help me understand perspectives’). These benchmarks are anchored in performance indicators and concrete examples that help teachers and learners to make sense of them. Differences between the CEFR and the NCSSFL-ACTFL guidelines are largely to do with emphasis and presentation. As we have seen, the CEFR is part of a European political project to promote democracy and human rights through the harmonisation of curricula that operationalise a values-based language policy. The NCSSFL-ACTFL statements are designed to prepare American learners of ‘world languages’ to travel globally, using their ICC to understand unfamiliar social practices, and to equip them to behave sensitively and respectfully when abroad, for instance by attending to the volume of their voices in public spaces of historical significance. These differences, though relatively slight, should be sufficient to provoke consideration of the role of ICC for different groups of learners: here, whether the development of ICC is envisioned as part of the learners’ socialisation into a multilingual polity, or as part of the skill set they take when embarking on a journey into unfamiliar territories. Questions for reflection

Consider again the Intermediate level benchmark ‘can-do’ statements for investigation and interaction shown in Table  3.1: ‘In my own and other cultures I can make comparisons between products and practices to help me understand perspectives’ and ‘I can interact at a functional level in some familiar contexts’. • From your own experience of teaching, what kind of ‘performance indicators’ (products and practices) would satisfy those benchmarks?

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• Look again at Table  3.1 and consider which of the illustrative examples that ‘link investigation and interaction’ would be relevant to your teaching situation. Can you think of alternative examples of your own? • Search on the web for the full set of NCSSFL-ACTFL ‘can-do’ statements for intercultural communication.1 Compare the benchmark statements, performance indicators and exemplars for the different levels, Novice to Distinguished. Where would you place your own learners on this scale? What kind of learning activities would help them to move up the scale? Alternative Models of ICC (1): Brazil’s BNCC

While major anglophone and transnational policy frameworks and policy documents that seek to define ICC are globally influential, they are not the only models available to English language teachers. Non-­ anglophone national agencies have also devised guidelines on ICC in ELT, and alternative models have been devised for specific purposes, such as working in multinational teams. While specific models of ICC share some characteristics with the CEFR and NCSSFL-ACTFL ‘can-do’ statements, not least because their developers will have been familiar with those projects, they nevertheless respond to local conditions and particular learner needs. Here, to illustrate slightly different approaches to ICC, we briefly consider two such models, one aimed at state or public school teachers in Brazil and the other developed for multinational business teams. The Brazilian BNCC (Base Nacional Comum Curricular, Ministério da Educação, 2017) is a document running to over 600 pages that aims to inform state school educators of the basic competences expected across the diverse school subjects taught at infant, primary and middle-school levels (i.e. Ensino Infantil, Ensino Fundamental and Ensino Médio). In 2019, English became, for the first time, a compulsory state school subject in Brazil from the sixth to the ninth grades, on the grounds that English is now unarguably a global lingua franca. It is specifically in the context of teaching English as a lingua franca that intercultural competence (‘the Intercultural Dimension’) has been singled out as one of the key competences to be addressed: The proposal to have a strand addressing the Intercultural Dimension arises from the understanding that cultures, especially in contemporary society, are in a continuous process of interaction and (re)construction. Accordingly, different groups of people, with different interests, agendas and linguistic and cultural repertoires, will experience, in their contacts and interactional flows, processes that constitute open and plural identities. This is the situation regarding English as a lingua franca, and in this context, learning English implies the problematisation of the different

Defining Intercultural Communicative Competence  57

roles of the English language itself in the world, its values, its scope and its effects on the relationships between different individuals and communities, both in contemporary society and in a historical perspective. In this sense, the treatment of English as a lingua franca imposes challenges and new priorities for teaching, including the intensification of reflections on the relations between language, identity and culture, and the development of intercultural competence. (Ministério da Educação, 2017: 245, my translation)

As with the CEFR and NCSSFL-ACTFL guidelines, there is a clear recognition in the BNCC that language education goes beyond the acquisition of linguistic features, and that it addresses issues of identity and values. Consequently, these issues figure as an integral part of the content of the English language curriculum. The BNCC framework for the teaching of English from Grades  6 to 9 identifies explicit topics to be addressed at each stage. The summary in Table 3.2 is based on my translation of the relevant components of the BNCC. While some of the themes and content of the intercultural dimension of the BNCC compare with those of the ‘can-do’ statements, for example in the formation of a ‘cultural repertoire’, which also echoes the CEFR’s savoirs, the perspective of the BNCC on ICC again differs in its emphases. There is, for example, a pragmatic recognition of the instrumental role of English as a global lingua franca in science, economics and politics. There is a critical concern with the role of English both in the world and in Brazilian society. There is also a critical concern with prejudices, stereotypes and inequalities associated with social variation in language use, and a focus on the building of self-esteem through the construction of a ‘global identity’ associated with English use. These concerns can again be related to the CEFR savoirs, particularly that of critical cultural awareness, but there is also a distinctive character to this framework, in the explicit acknowledgment of the impact of English as a lingua franca and in the particular desire to problematise the impact of globalised English on both the local community and the individual learner. In short, the BNCC is illustrative of an attempt to mould the presumed components of intercultural competence into a form that has local and national relevance. Alternative Models of ICC (2): Warwick University’s ‘Global People Competency’ Framework

If the BNCC shows how one non-European state school system engages with ICC for high school pupils, the University of Warwick’s ‘Global People Competency Framework’ (Spencer-Oatey & Stadler, 2009) illustrates an approach designed for adult learners in the

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Table 3.2 Summary of the Intercultural Dimension in the BNCC Grade/ Intercultural Dimension year Reflection on aspects related to the interaction between cultures (of the students and those related to other English speakers), in order to favour friendly relations, respect, the resolution of conflicts and the positive appreciation of diversity among peoples.

6

7

8

9

Theme

Content

The English language in the world

Countries that have Investigate the reach of English in the the English language world: as a mother tongue and/or official as their mother (first or second language). tongue and/or official language.

The English language in the everyday life of Brazilian society/ communities

The presence of the English language in everyday life.

The English language in the world

Countries that have Analyse the reach of the English language the English language and its contexts of use in the globalised as their mother world. tongue and/or official language.

Intercultural communication

Linguistic variation

Explore ways of speaking in English, refuting prejudices and recognising linguistic variation as a natural phenomenon of languages. Recognise linguistic variation as a manifestation of ways of thinking and expressing the world.

Cultural products

Construction of an artistic-cultural repertoire

Build a cultural repertoire through contact with artistic and cultural events related to the English language (visual and visual arts, literature, music, cinema, dance, festivities, among others), valuing the diversity between cultures.

Intercultural communication

Impact of cultural factors on communication

Investigate how expressions, gestures and behaviours are interpreted in terms of cultural aspects. Examine factors that may impede understanding between people of different cultures who speak the English language.

The English language in the world

The expansion of the Discuss the expansion of the English English language: language around the world, owing to historical context. colonisation in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania. The English language Analyse the importance of the English and its role in language for the development of science scientific, economic (production, dissemination and discussion and political of new knowledge), economics and politics exchange. on the world stage.

Intercultural communication

Construction of identities in the globalised world.

Source: Based on Ministério da Educação (2017).

Skills

Identify the presence of the English language in Brazilian society/community (words, expressions, support and spheres of circulation and consumption) and its significance. Evaluate, problematising cultural elements/ products from English-speaking countries, appropriated by Brazilian society/ community.

Discuss intercultural communication through the English language as a mechanism for self-esteem and the construction of identities in the globalised world.

Defining Intercultural Communicative Competence  59

multinational workplace. This framework is based on four ‘clusters’ of competences, namely (i) knowledge and ideas; (ii) communication; (iii) relationships; and (iv) personal qualities and dispositions. While these competences might again seem to echo aspects of the CEFR and NCSSFL-ACTFL ‘can-do’ statements, the Global People descriptors, like the BNCC guidelines, are directed towards a specific set of learners, namely those working in multinational teams. A British–Chinese joint venture to develop e-learning is used in this framework to illustrate the competences in action. The Global People framework is summarised in Table 3.3 (i–iv). Elements of the other models of ICC are easily discernible in this tabular overview of the Global People framework; other aspects are particular to this framework, and it might be argued that some of them are self-contradictory. All the frameworks acknowledge the importance of knowledge; here, the globally competent worker is expected to use ethnographic and research skills to elicit the kind of knowledge that will support synergistic problem-solving. The CEFR’s concern with attitudes (savoir-être) is expanded from confidence, openness and respect for others to encompass a more explicit set of qualities including ‘spirit of adventure’. Some of these characteristics obviously exist in tension; for example, while the ‘globally competent’ worker possesses clearly defined personal values, he or she is also expected to be at ease with differing values held by others. If these values are incompatible, obviously, there might well be conflict. The NCSSFL-ACTFL ‘can-do’ statements are also paralleled by the globally competent workers’ ability to compare communication patterns across cultures and choose a mode of communication that is appropriate to the context – as an interculturally competent American tourist might dress appropriately when visiting a historic site overseas, the globally competent professional attends to the norms of etiquette expected in business meetings that take place in a hierarchical or egalitarian workplace. The instrumental purpose of the Global People Competency Framework also shapes the character and description of some of the skills: while a worker in a multicultural team might tone down his or her accent or dialect to facilitate colleagues’ comprehension, the learner in the BNCC framework will explore language prejudice more critically as a mechanism of social inclusion or exclusion. The various frameworks and models shown above are sufficient to demonstrate that all models of ICC necessarily vary according to the aims of the agency that commissioned the framework and the presumed nature of the learners themselves. The set of savoirs proposed by the CEFR aims to instil in a wide range of language learners, young and old, a set of competences that will incline them to be curious about and respect the language and values of their European neighbours, thus promoting a sense of shared plurilingual

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Table 3.3 Overview of the University of Warwick’s ‘Global People Competences Framework’ (i) Knowledge and ideas Information gathering

Awareness of the need to gather information about unfamiliar cultures and interest in doing so. Uses a range of strategies to gather relevant information, including research, observation and questioning.

New thinking

Open to new ideas and seeks new insights and ways of understanding. Challenges conventional thinking. Regularly updates and modifies thinking in the light of new evidence.

Goal orientation

Interested in other people’s goals and seeks to find out about them. Maintains a focus on own goals and does not compromise too easily. Willing to find a balance between own goals and those of others.

Synergistic solutions

Shares and seeks transparency about different perspectives on a problem. Facilitates the integration of different approaches to the solution of a problem. Stimulates creative and synergistic solutions and procedures.

(ii) Communication Communication management

Attends to the choice of working language(s). Chooses mode of communication appropriate to purpose. Establishes suitable communicative networks and establishes protocols. Takes active steps to resolve communication problems.

Language learning

Motivated to learn and use other languages and invests time and effort in doing so. Confident in ability to pick up and use foreign language(s) and willing to experiment in their use.

Language adjustment

Adapts use of language to the proficiency of the recipient(s) in order to maximise comprehensibility. Attends to and adjusts where necessary aspects such as speed, frequency and length of pauses, complexity of grammar and vocabulary, use of idioms, use of local accent/dialect.

Active listening

Listens attentively and signals that listening is taking place via feedback Regularly checks and clarifies meaning of important expressions to ensure common understanding Notices potential miscommunication and negotiates meanings until common understanding is achieved.

Attuning

Adept at observing indirect signals of meaning, e.g. intonation, and nonverbal communication, and inferring their significance. Proactively attends to non-verbal signals, seeking to make meanings explicit. Learns to interpret indirect signals of meaning across different cultures.

Building of shared knowledge and mutual trust

Discloses and elicits background information needed for mutual understanding and meaningful negotiation. Uses explicit discourse markers to structure and highlight important information, alongside support such as visual or written aids. Makes own intentions and goals explicit by explaining what is wanted and why.

Stylistic flexibility

Pays attention to different communicative styles, e.g. formal/informal, expressive/restrained. Builds a repertoire of styles used sensitively according to purpose, context and audience.

(iii) Relationships Welcoming strangers

Displays interest in people with different experiences and backgrounds. Proactively meets and greets new people. Builds a wide and diverse network of friends and professional acquaintances. (Continued )

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Table 3.3 (Continued ) Rapport building

Displays warmth and friendliness when building relationships. Builds connections on a personal as well as a professional basis. Shows care and concern for the welfare of others.

Sensitivity to social/ professional context

Attends to the role of hierarchy and power relations in influencing behaviour. Understands how status and roles operate in different contexts and the rights and obligations associated with them. Understands how decisions are made in different contexts.

Interpersonal attentiveness

Pays attention to personal sensitivities and avoids others ‘losing face’. Encourages people by complimenting them appropriately.

(iv) Personal qualities and dispositions Spirit of adventure

Seeks out variety, change and stimulation in his/her life. Avoids safe and predictable environments. Pushes self beyond comfort zone in order to learn and grow.

Self-awareness Aware that own behaviour may seem strange or unacceptable to others. Sensitive to how own communication and behaviour are perceived by others. Acceptance

Positively accepts behaviour and ideas that are very different to his/her own. Accepts people as they are and does not try to change them. At ease with those who hold different views or values. Looks for the best in others and forgives any ‘blunders’ quickly and easily.

Flexibility

Willing to learn a wide range of behaviour and communicative patterns. Adapts to other people’s behaviour/communication in order to make them feel more comfortable. Experiments with different ways of behaving and communicating, to find those that are most acceptable and successful. Adapts behaviour and modifies judgements to suit circumstances.

Inner purpose

Guided by a well-defined set of values and beliefs. Possesses personal toughness that enables maintenance of a sense of focus in difficult situations. Self-disciplined and self-reliant. Can provide a clear sense of direction for self and others.

Coping

Possesses well-developed methods of dealing with stress, e.g. uses humour to relieve tension, builds a local support network, manages negative emotions, looks for something good in whatever is happening.

Resilience

Ready to risk making social mistakes Not easily embarrassed by social gaffes. Has sufficient self-confidence to handle criticism and negative feedback. Has optimistic outlook and bounces back quickly after setbacks.

identity. The NCSSFL-ACTFL ‘can-do’ statements are designed primarily to allow migrants or tourists, young and old, to attend to the cultural differences they will encounter in their travels to and from the United States, and adapt their behaviour and communication patterns accordingly. The BNCC framework, designed for Brazilian state school children, attends to the impact of global English on their local identity and agency, and the Global People Competency Framework sets out a set of communication patterns and behaviours that will enable adult professionals in multicultural teams to bond and problem-solve effectively, despite potential differences in values, beliefs or personal goals. There can be no all-encompassing, universal model of

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ICC; each model is necessarily sensitive to the values proposed by the developers and the nature of the learners who are to be taught. Questions for reflection

• Consider your own teaching situation. Discuss whether the models of ICC suggested by the CEFR and NCSSFL-ACTFL documents described earlier are relevant to your teaching. • Beyond Europe and the United States, how might alternative models of ICC be developed to respond to local contexts, needs and concerns? • If you teach adult professionals, would a model like the ‘Global People Competency Framework’ more easily or usefully guide your materials and curriculum development? Discuss the reasons for your decision. Critical Responses to ICC Models

In a field that encourages critical thinking, it is not surprising that frameworks of ICC have been challenged on a number of grounds. The following are illustrative of some of the challenges to particular ICC frameworks. Risager (2007) argues that the CEFR approach to ICC, as expressed via Byram’s savoirs, makes the mistake of associating cultures too closely with nations. Given that the goal of the CEFR was to bind European nations into a harmonious democratic unity, this association of culture with nation is perhaps understandable. However, Risager (2007: 171) rightly observes that cultures are not necessarily national and argues for a ‘transnational’ approach to culture, focusing on three ‘dimensions’ of what she calls ‘languaculture/linguaculture’, namely, the ‘semantic and pragmatic dimension’, the ‘poetic dimension’ and the ‘identity dimension’. The linguacultural dimensions of semantics, pragmatics and identity can largely be addressed through the frameworks discussed above, so long as we accept that cultures transcend national boundaries. We can easily conceive of phenomena such as transnational ‘youth culture’, the cultures of the healthy and sick, the professional cultures of different working contexts, the cultures of leisure-based groups such as quilt makers and mountain bikers and so on. One aspect of linguaculture that ICC frameworks tend to under-represent, as Risager usefully observes, is the poetic dimension, the creative playfulness that language users engage in to generate meanings and construct social bonds. One way of noticing the difference is to ask learners to write a description of their favourite local place as (a) a prose paragraph or (b) a poem, and then share it with their classmates. Poems often elicit a more favourable and engaged response from readers, in part because adept learners will utilise the structural resources of the language (phonology, spelling, grammatical parallelism) to write the poem in an interesting

Defining Intercultural Communicative Competence  63

way, and readers will also assume a greater personal investment in the text by the author. While Risager stresses that cultures should be thought of as transnational, other critiques question the very usefulness of the concept of culture to language education. In a review of different approaches to ICC and its assessment, Dervin (2010) raises a number of issues that the teacher who wishes to develop ICC might well take into consideration. He observes that educators have the worrying tendency to treat cultures as if they were themselves individuals (e.g. ‘the learner encounters a foreign culture’) thus masking what is actually happening (i.e. the learner encounters another individual who may have been shaped by different ways of thinking, in a particular context that may be more or less unfamiliar). He also notes that educators tend to present learners and their interlocutors as if they are monocultural and have a static, single identity, whereas in reality we assume different identities according to context and they are dynamic and changeable. Dervin points out, following Tania Ogay (2000: 53), that neither learners nor their interlocutors alone are responsible for making meaning in any interaction, and so, rather than intercultural competence, we might focus on ‘intercultural dynamics’, thus acknowledging that the making of meaning is collaborative. We return to the co-construction of meaning and identity in Chapter 5. The most serious challenges to ICC frameworks address their use as a basis for assessment, an issue that, for example, the ‘can-do’ statements acknowledge in their caution that the framework is best used for goalsetting and monitoring, or formative rather than summative assessment. The complex issues around the use of ICC models for learner assessment are addressed in some detail in Chapter  11. For now, it is sufficient to note that teachers who decide to adopt an intercultural approach to ELT have a range of possible models of ICC at their disposal. Many of the descriptors in the various frameworks are, as we have observed, formulated at a high level of abstraction or generality, and so it remains the teacher’s responsibility to decide how to put them into operation. How exactly, for example, might a teacher encourage learners to interpret documents from another culture (CEFR), compare the perspectives embodied in products or practices from another culture (‘can-do’ statements), address the impact of English on the local community (BNCC) or find an acceptable balance between the goals of others and oneself (Global People)? The answer to that question leads us from the description of learning outcomes or goals, to that of methods. Questions for reflection

• Models of ICC that attempt to identify normative attitudes, skills and behaviour (e.g. resilience, curiosity and self-esteem) have been subject

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to considerable criticism. Discuss the strengths and limitations of such models. • An early criticism of models of ICC was that they were based on conceptions of culture as national. Discuss the ways in which current models of ICC do or do not avoid such criticism. • To what extent do current or prevalent models of ICC treat culture as if it were a person? Note (1) See https://www​.actfl​.org​/resources​/ncssfl​-actfl​-can​-do​-statements

4 Implementing an Intercultural Approach to ELT

Having reviewed the definitions and roles of ‘culture’ in disciplines that inform intercultural language education, and having discussed models of intercultural communicative competence (ICC), this chapter focuses more directly on the implementation of intercultural approaches to English language teaching (ELT). It first reviews potential reasons for implementing an intercultural approach, namely the enculturation and acculturation of learners, and the development of their competences as cultural explorers and mediators. The chapter concludes by summarising how intercultural aims can be integrated with the intended language outcomes of task-based learning. The key questions addressed by this chapter are: • Why adopt an intercultural approach to ELT? • How can intercultural goals be integrated with task-based language activities? Can Communicative Competence be Culture-Free?

Chapters  1 and 2 argued that, despite the fact that communicative language teaching in the latter decades of the 20th century was strongly influenced by sociolinguists and ethnographers such as Dell Hymes, the notion of ‘culture’ was nevertheless relatively marginalised in ELT. Hymes (1972: 278) made the case for ‘rules of use, without which rules of grammar would be useless’, thus, apparently, prioritising the development of skills for understanding how language is used across cultures. However, communicative competence in ELT instead focused initially on correlating rules of grammar with a set of transactional ‘notions and functions’, most elaborately expressed in Leech and Svartvik’s (1975) A Communicative Grammar of English, which organises grammatical features into conceptual categories such as ‘amount or quantity’ or ‘condition and contrast’. These kinds of description of grammar in use became the basis for notional-functional syllabuses (Wilkins, 1972, 1976) promoted by the Council of Europe. 65

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The typical classroom tasks for teaching these notions and functions were ‘information gap’ or ‘information transfer’ activities (e.g. Morrow & Johnson, 1981). Thus, learners were involved in doing things like asking directions, expressing quantities, measuring volumes, describing cyclical and linear processes and so on. In a common procedure, after the language had been presented and practised in guided activities, one learner would be given access to information that was withheld from a classmate. Then, in pairs or groups, the learners would exchange the information to achieve a goal. Information gap activities were intended to ensure ‘authentic’ or ‘genuine’ communication, which, it was assumed, would ‘naturally’ trigger language acquisition. By the time of David Nunan’s (1989) Designing Tasks for the Communicative Classroom, the communicative task had been expanded and analysed into constituent parts, including the goal of the task, the type of activity involved, the input given to the learners, the roles the learners were expected to adopt during the task, the role of the teacher and the classroom setting. Tasks were also graded according to levels of difficulty. These kinds of communicative tasks still emphasised transactions; language was still seen primarily as a means of getting things done. The transactional focus can be seen from an example that Nunan gives of a communicative task from a popular textbook: Goal: Input: Activity:

Exchanging personal information Questionnaire on sleeping habits (i) Reading questionnaire (ii)  Asking and answering questions about sleeping habits Teacher role: Monitor and facilitator Learner role: Conversational partner Setting: Classroom/pair-work (Maley & Moulding, 1981: 3; discussed in Nunan, 1989: 11)

This is a perfectly satisfactory communicative task that sets up an information gap activity whereby learners exchange personal information about their sleeping habits; however, no consideration is given as to why learners might wish to exchange this kind of information. Personal information about sleeping habits is simply exchanged as a routine learning task designed to promote language acquisition. There is no sense of when or where it would be culturally appropriate or even desirable to engage in this kind of information exchange. That language is a means of exchanging information is not an unreasonable view, and it is one that was particularly acceptable to the commercially driven ELT industry that was growing globally during the 1970s and 1980s, often in cultures that were understandably suspicious

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of or even hostile to certain Western, anglophone cultural values. A focus on the expression of universal notions (like time or distance) and transactional language functions (such as service encounters) also made sense to international ELT publishers, who could promote the purely instrumental value of their coursebooks across a range of cultures and contexts. Even so, as early as 1981, the sociolinguist, Leo Loveday (1981), was warning against the ‘de-culturalization’ of ELT: […] L2 teaching should not blindly follow the extreme utilitarianism of the Zeitgeist and reduce communicative competence to the mere acquisition of skills. Perhaps this is all that is needed for English as an international medium, but I doubt it, because the cultural background of the L2 speakers of English will still be present in their communicative activity, if this consists of more than booking into a hotel or answering business letters or writing scientific reports, and even these will involve cultural presuppositions. (Loveday, 1981: 123)

Loveday’s point that even the most routine transactions still involve cultural presuppositions rings true. For example, when I was living in Moscow in the late 1980s, I found it difficult, soon after arriving, to purchase half a dozen eggs in a local shop, not only because of my poor grasp of Russian, but also because, as I later learned, the shopkeeper was accustomed to selling eggs in multiples of 10. Obviously, many good language teachers and textbook writers will always have prepared learners to cope with unfamiliar cultural presuppositions by introducing useful information during their lessons. Stern (1992: 224) calls this kind of ad hoc introduction of useful information ‘cultural asides’, and the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) would classify the content of such asides under ‘factual knowledge’ (savoirs). A good teacher of Russian might simply have pointed out to a learner, like me, that Russians do not use imperial measures. But Stern, as we have seen, also voiced concern about the sheer vastness of the cultural knowledge required to cope with the fine detail of everyday life in a foreign environment. How could a teacher have predicted my very specific need? One possible reason for the continued marginalisation of culture in communicative language teaching was exactly this: having acknowledged the importance of culture, its pervasiveness and scale, educators were seldom in a position to offer systematic ways of coping with it. Loveday (1981) addresses this challenge by drawing on sociolinguistics and communication studies to provide examples of cross-cultural differences in styles of interaction; for example, he compares how long periods of silence are interpreted in Native American, West Indian and Quaker communities. He identifies broad ‘framing and symbolising patterns’ (Loveday, 1981: 65–100) that raise the learner’s awareness of different types of spoken and written genres, non-verbal communication and

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visual symbols, but he still does not provide a coherent approach to integrating knowledge of these patterns into the language curriculum. The problem of what to include and exclude in an intercultural curriculum remains: clearly, it is impossible to inform any learner about everything they might need to know about the target culture, from the number of eggs normally bought on a shopping trip to if, whom, when and how to kiss when greeting or taking one’s leave of a new or older acquaintance. As we saw in Chapter  3, one way of addressing this problem is by developing curricula specifically to teach ICC, conceptualised in part as a set of personal qualities that prime the learner to expect difference, and to cope with, respect and even enjoy difference when it is encountered. While ICC might well include factual knowledge, it is expected that the learner who has a highly developed ICC will also possess the skills necessary to find out information by himself or herself. An intercultural approach to ELT, then, moves beyond a sense of communicative competence as a set of purely linguistic skills that correlate grammatical descriptions to a set of notions and functions, and towards intercultural communicative competence, understood not only as a reservoir of linguistic knowledge but also as a set of personal qualities and forms of knowledge that allow the language learner to navigate cultural difference and mediate between different world views. As noted at the end of Chapter 3, the advocacy of ICC as a goal of language education demands critical scrutiny. Byram (2003) states the issue succinctly: To posit intercultural competence as one of the aims of language teaching is to be prescriptive. To be interculturally competent is to think and act in morally desirable ways, and to set intercultural competence as an aim of language teaching is to prescribe the ways in which people ought to act. (Byram, 2003: 9)

The issue of who or what prescribes ‘moral desirability’ and how the capacity to act morally might be evaluated is contentious (see Chapter 11 for a fuller discussion of this issue in the context of assessment). However, the debates around ICC are useful in that they illuminate critical questions about the kind of societies in which we wish to live. The debate also sheds light on the different reasons why we might wish to learn and teach languages in the first place. Questions for reflection

• Have you ever offered ‘cultural asides’ to your learners? In your view, what makes a piece of information about other cultures useful or interesting to your particular learners? • Consider an ELT textbook – or textbooks – with which you are familiar. What is the concept of culture adopted, implicitly or

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explicitly, by the textbook(s)? What are the strengths and limitations of this conceptualisation? Language Learning as Enculturation: The ‘Cultural Literacy’ Debate

One long-standing argument for integrating culture of a particular kind into the language curriculum is ‘enculturation’, the aspiration to assimilate the learner into a target culture. There is a pervasive attitude amongst many educationalists that young people, of whatever social and linguistic background, should be inducted into a ‘common culture’ consisting of facts and myths that bind individuals into a national community. As we saw in Chapter 2, this view has its origins in the critical work of Matthew Arnold (1869), and a more recent proponent is E.D. Hirsch, whose writings include Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Hirsch, 1987) and The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (Hirsch et  al., 1988). While Arnold saw elite culture as a bulwark against the barbarism of the masses, Hirsch proposes that familiarity with particular cultural products functions as a passport to acceptance into mainstream American society, which he portrays as a kind of club: Getting one’s membership is not tied to class or race. Membership is automatic if one learns the background information and the linguistic conventions that are needed to read, write, and speak effectively. (Hirsch et al., 1988: 22)

In the 2002 edition of The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, entries giving the learner access to shared American culture include explanations of cultural icons such as the Greek hero, Odysseus, and events such as Kwanzaa, a celebration of African-American culture created in 1966. The view that membership of a particular national community should be ratified by demonstrating one’s knowledge of ‘background information and linguistic conventions’ is also currently evident in national citizenship tests that assess language and familiarity with a set of facts that arguably function as a symbolic marker of a new identity (cf. Lu & Corbett, 2012a). As Walters (1992: 4) observes, however, the idea that linguistic, class and racial inequalities can be erased by offering learners access to a store of common knowledge is disingenuous at best, misleading at worst. Access to resources and the opportunities offered by any society is fundamentally affected by social factors such as class, race, ethnicity, gender and geographical origin. As we also saw in Chapter 2, scholars in literary and cultural studies since the 1950s have challenged the argument that elite, usually Eurocentric, culture is uniquely qualified to serve as a universal repository of civilised values (cf. Hall & Whannel, 1964; Hoggart, 1957; Thompson, 1963; Williams, 1997/1958). This topic is revisited in Chapter 10.

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The cultural literacy debate is relevant to intercultural language education insofar as both proponents of cultural literacy and intercultural language educators see some factual knowledge of the other’s culture (savoirs) as a desirable goal of language education. There is, however, a difference in the conception of why such knowledge is desirable. In many ELT curricula, there has often been the unspoken assumption that the ideal goal for learners is to be indistinguishable from a ‘native’ speaker, in particular an educated ‘native’ speaker who is well versed in the cultural products and values of the elite group in an anglophone society. This may also, in fact, be the conscious or subliminal goal of individual learners. However, others may resist this social positioning as a diminution or even a betrayal of their own cultural identity, or they may see it as an irrelevance to their personal goals in learning the second language (L2). The contributions to a set of essays edited by Murray (1992) explicitly set out to challenge the assimilationist assumptions of cultural literacy, instead presenting an alternative vision that conceives of diversity as a ‘resource’ in the ELT classroom. Rather than suppressing diversity in favour of a homogenised elite culture, Murray and her fellow contributors recommend the development of learning activities that explore and celebrate difference. This involves teachers first finding out about the learners’ consumption and production of diverse cultural products – associated with ethnic culture, class culture or professional culture – through questionnaires that target specific topic areas. The findings are then used to develop classroom materials that address diversity. For example, Vasquez’ (1992) investigation into literacy events in a Mexicano community in the United States noted the rich range of uses of both English and Spanish in the home: such events included listening to the advice of community workers, getting the latest news and gossip from the local baker, listening to tales told by the older generation and engaging in prolonged, cross-generational bilingual discussions about the behaviour of characters in popular Mexican soap operas. Finding out about how different languages complement each other in the home situation of migrant families can lead to more effective interventions that extend the learners’ use of English while continuing to value other languages used by the community. There is a danger in critiquing the cultural literacy agenda to the extent of adopting the position that ‘elite culture’ should be actively excluded from the ELT curriculum. Canonical literature, music, art and philosophy can be a rich source of learning materials, and many learners may be motivated by the very challenge of developing their English to the point at which they can explore them in depth. One value of a common culture is indeed the pleasure of having shared points of reference for discussion amongst like minds. However, other learners may find ‘elite culture’ less motivating, or irrelevant to their own concerns. Chapter 10 in this volume considers literary, media and cultural studies from a broader

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perspective than that taken by advocates of cultural literacy, that is, a perspective that embraces the home as well as the target community, and popular as well as elite cultural products. To summarise: intercultural language education advocates knowledge about the target culture (savoirs) which can be thought of as a form of cultural literacy, in that the teacher or materials designer has to decide what cultural facts the learners ‘need to know’. In multilingual and multicultural classrooms, particularly in the United States but also in Britain (cf. Yandell, 2017), the proposed imposition of a narrowly defined concept of ‘cultural literacy’ has been countered by a call to celebrate diversity (Murray, 1992). The advocacy of the dissemination of a common core of culturally valued knowledge applies mainly to English as a second language (ESL) settings (that is, where learners are long-term immigrants into anglophone communities) but it can be extended to those settings where learners who share a single first language (L1) are studying English as a foreign language, that is, where English is not the language of the immediate community. Cultural literacy in narrow terms is about membership of a bounded national community: symbolic affiliation is offered or denied, apparently on the basis of knowledge of a common core of facts, and the linguistic ability to express them. The teaching of cultural ‘facts’ serves, in this view, the process of the learners’ enculturation. However, in reality, the resources and opportunities that come with full membership of the community may not actually be on offer. The celebration of diversity, on the other hand, is principally about acknowledging that learners are already proficient users of language and inheritors of a rich home culture, broadly conceived. Extending learners’ proficiency in English should not entail denial of their home language or culture, but rather their current proficiency as language users and their current status as cultural beings can serve as a springboard for their further education in the L2. Questions for reflection

• In your view, what cultural knowledge should every learner of English ‘need to know’? The American Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (Hirsch et al., 2002) suggests that the culturally literate should know about the Bible, folklore, literature in English, the fine arts, world and American history and geography, amongst other topics. Do you agree? Give reasons for your response. • The UK citizenship test also expects applicants to have a knowledge of UK history, religion, customs and traditions, sports, leisure activities and places of interest to visit (https://lifeintheuktests​.co​.uk​/study​ -guide/). Discuss which of these topics might or might not be relevant to your learners, whether or not they are resident in the UK.

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Language Learning as Acculturation

If enculturation presupposes that the learner aspires to be absorbed wholly into the new language and culture, then acculturation refers to the process whereby learners seek to adapt to and function within another culture, while maintaining aspects of their own identity (cf. Byram et al., 1994: 7). Enculturation and acculturation can be considered a set of points along a continuum: learners can be fully assimilated (enculturation) or alternatively they might find themselves integrated into the new culture while retaining their identity, or they might be marginalised by the other culture, or totally alienated from it (cf. Berry, 1980, 2003). Psychologists have developed frameworks to account for the processes of adaptation that immigrants into a new culture go through, arguing for systematic strategies or phases of accommodation that individuals and groups tend to experience when immersed in a new culture. Intergroup accommodation will depend on the prevailing social environment that immigrants find themselves in, as well as the attitudes of the immigrants themselves. The immigrant might, for example, engage in face-to-face communication with members of the host culture, actively seek to understand the new culture via various media products and imagine different kinds of contact between the self and others (cf. Giles et  al., 2012). Immigrants or learners who engage in such communicative activities might experience stress, adaptation and growth as they orient themselves to the new cultural context (Kim, 2012). Acculturation assumes personal change but without ultimate loss of identity. The goal of acculturation is, for Stern (1992: 218), to develop a ‘bicultural’ learner, that is, one who acquires ‘a general sociocultural competence … certain sociocultural skills, or … specifically socioculturally appropriate behaviour’. The bicultural learner can switch between ‘selves’, modifying his or her language and behaviour to the immediate cultural context as appropriate. This kind of conceptualisation of the role of addressing culture in language education is characteristic of an ESL tradition in North America that is focused on the harmonious integration of immigrants into American society. As Valdes (1986: vii) suggested, ‘Once people… recognize that they are, truly, products of their own cultures, they are better prepared and more willing to look at the behaviour of persons from other cultures and accept them non-judgmentally’. The development of a concept of ICC in Europe has not been so centred on integrative acculturation or biculturalism as possible goals. Byram and Golubeva (2020) contrast the state of being bilingual (i.e. the ability to switch languages according to context while keeping identifications between speech communities separate) with that of being intercultural (i.e. having the capacity to understand, interpret for and mediate between members of two distinct speech communities). For Byram, Golubeva and others, being intercultural demands different kinds of knowledge and skill from those acquired solely through acculturation. While being bilingual and bicultural involves

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switching between language and value systems, being intercultural implies an ability to mediate between languages and value systems for the benefit not only of oneself but also of others. The acquisition of ICC need not necessarily be directed towards enculturation or acculturation, but towards exploration and mediation. Chapter 3 reviewed some of the major frameworks that seek to define the competences required to be effective intercultural communicators – explorers and mediators – across different languages. So far in this chapter, we have discussed why these competences might be developed by different learners. We turn now to how these competences might inform language activities. Questions for reflection

• Explain your understanding of the relationship, if there is one, between competence in one or more languages and a sense of personal identity. • Discuss whether it is the responsibility of the language teacher to support learners who are struggling to cope with an engagement with ‘otherness’ prompted by exposure to an unfamiliar language or culture. • To what extent do you agree or disagree with Valdes’ proposition, quoted above, that ‘Once people … recognize that they are, truly, products of their own cultures, they are better prepared and more willing to look at the behaviour of persons from other cultures and accept them non-judgmentally’? Designing Tasks to Develop ICC

Over the past half century, a general consensus has developed on how a foreign language might be taught and learned. Most language teachers are now trained to design and implement learning tasks, which are the basis of most classroom procedures. Task-based learning grew out of ‘communicative language teaching’ (e.g. Nunan, 1989, 2004), which is itself based on the proposition that language learning happens most effectively when learners are using the language to accomplish something that is meaningful to them. As noted earlier in this chapter, Nunan (1989: 10–11) offered a simple but powerful model of the communicative task (Figure 4.1) that breaks it down into six components that should be specified for any given learning unit. Let us consider these components briefly in turn. Goals

Goals refer to the pedagogical purpose of the task. The teacher or materials designer will reflect on what kinds of goals the task is intended to achieve; namely, what aspect of ICC is being addressed, and what language goals are necessary to achieve it? For example, the following goals might be set for a learning unit:

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Goal

Input

Activities

Learners’ role

TASK

Teacher’s role

Settings

Figure 4.1   The elements of the communicative task (Nunan, 1989: 10–11)

• To increase learners’ understanding of how interaction works, specifically, of how casual conversation constructs and maintains group identity; to raise awareness of how an individual’s status in a group is negotiated through conversational storytelling; to observe the different roles played by males and females in conversational interaction in different culture. Language learning goals would include providing learners with the linguistic resources to participate in different kinds of conversational genre in English (see Chapter 5). • To equip learners with the skills of discovery and interaction by inviting them to observe, describe and evaluate patterns of behaviour in a certain cultural group, e.g. a particular youth subculture, a professional business or academic culture or a leisure-based culture such as Scottish country dancing. Language learning goals would include acquisition of the skills involved in written description and evaluation, questioning and the interpretation of responses to questions (see Chapters 6 and 7). • To stimulate curiosity about and a positive, informed attitude towards other cultures, specifically by facilitating participation in an online intercultural exchange with learners from other countries. Language learning goals include the formulation of opening exchanges, descriptions, encouraging invitations and evaluative responses and follow-up questions (see Chapter 8). • To develop the skills of relating and interpreting, as well as critical cultural awareness, by inviting learners to explore the cultural messages conveyed by visual images or literary, media and cultural products. Language learning goals would include the development of the skills involved in listening, describing, interpreting and evaluating (see Chapters 9 and 10). In communicative language curricula the goals would be purely linguistic, though the language taught would focus on the expression of particular concepts and the repertoire required to be able to perform given functions. In an intercultural approach, there is a combination of linguistic goals and those that address the personal qualities involved in ICC, such as openness, curiosity, empathy or resilience. In any given

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educational context, the goals selected will depend upon variable factors; for example, who the learners are, how much access they have to the target cultures (e.g. via exchange visits, media and digital communications), and the level of the learners’ participation in the target cultures (e.g. whether they are learning mainly for educational purposes, tourism, business, immigration or personal interest). Input

‘Input’ refers to any stimulus provided by the teacher or materials designer for the accomplishment of the task. The input may be a written or spoken text for discussion, or a visual image for interpretation and evaluation, or a media text for analysis. In communicative language teaching, in the 1980s and 1990s, there was a prolonged debate about the ‘authenticity’ of both materials and activities; for example, a newspaper article might be considered to be an ‘authentic’ text, in that it was not written primarily for language learning purposes; but cutting that article up so that learners might reassemble it would not be considered an ‘authentic’ activity, insofar as ‘jigsaw reading’ is not something normally done with a newspaper. A considerable amount of ink was spilled in discussions about the authenticity of texts and activities, with purists arguing that both text and activity should be ‘authentic’ for learning to occur, while others argued that ‘inauthentic’ activities, like ‘jigsaw reading’, were legitimate if they were shown to result in learning (cf. Widdowson, 1998). In the intercultural classroom, the terms of this familiar debate shift. Materials still tend to be ‘authentic’ in the sense that they are not specifically designed for language learning, but these materials are not necessarily used in the same way as members of the target culture might use them. Informational materials might, of course, simply be used to impart factual knowledge about the target community – about, for example, how members of the community greet each other, or a historical site that the learner might visit, or the background to a company that the learner is going to work with, or how English developed as a global language. Alternatively, the input might function primarily as evidence of the implicit cultural values of the target community. Thus, an L2 newspaper article or an advertisement might be used alongside an L1 newspaper article or advertisement as part of an exploration of how different communities construct news values or represent a given social group. These activities are not necessarily ones that members of the target community will regularly engage in, and so intercultural tasks might be considered ‘inauthentic’ in that they usually involve more interpretation than the typical target community member would normally give to the text. In this respect, the learner is again becoming an intercultural mediator rather than a simulacrum of a mythical, authentic, ‘native’ speaker.

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Thus, not all input in the intercultural classroom needs to be ‘authentic’. The input may be constructed by the teacher to achieve selected intercultural or linguistic goals. For example, to develop skills of discovery and interaction, the teacher might provide or collaborate in the construction of a specially designed observation schedule, or a protocol for conducting an interview or a debate. Broadening the potential input in the intercultural classroom to include L1 as well as L2 texts, for example in the contrasting of newspaper articles across cultures, has implications for the teacher. Bilingual or plurilingual teachers will be at an advantage over monolingual colleagues. Certainly, in a classroom environment that favours plurilingualism and translanguaging, the English teacher is encouraged to be open to the use of inputs in a variety of languages as part of intercultural exploration. The monolingual English teacher can draw on the linguistic resources of the learners to support such activities. Activities

The activity is what the learner actually does in the classroom, or outside it, as the core part of the learning process. It might involve reading, listening to or watching something in the target language, or participating in a role play, or collaborating in solving a problem posed by the teacher. Learners might collect and share information through class presentations or group work, and they might be required to evaluate and discuss their different observations and findings. Having observed cultural behaviours in action, they might be invited to reconstruct that behaviour in simulations or by writing parallel texts. In short, a wide range of communicative activities can be designed to promote language enhancement alongside the development of ICC. Many of these activities are illustrated in the following chapters. Learners’ role

The learner’s role describes what he or she is expected to do before, during and after the main activity. The role will vary from activity to activity, and from stage to stage within each task. In the early stages, the learners are likely to need considerable support, or ‘scaffolding’, from the teacher, who will be expected to provide language models and guidelines for the tasks. Later, as learners become more linguistically and interculturally competent, they may take greater responsibility for their learning, negotiating an agenda with the teacher, initiating tasks themselves, and contributing more actively in the construction and implementation of an intercultural curriculum. Ideally, the teacher over time guides the learners to greater autonomy in the learning process.

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Teacher’s role

In the early stages of a course, or in the process of the development of a group of learners, it will be primarily the teacher’s responsibility to set the agenda, to provide materials for the tasks and to suggest how the materials might be used to develop ICC, and to provide modes of assessment. In later stages, the role of the teacher might shift to that of facilitator or negotiator, and perhaps mediator between the interests of the learners and those of the institution. As learners become more skilled and confident, the teacher’s role becomes more of a guide and adviser, rather than initiator and authority. The varying roles of the teacher and learners can themselves be a topic of intercultural exploration. In different cultures, or even within the same school, college or university, the teacher–learner relationship differs. In some educational contexts, the teacher is expected (by all parties) to be a distant figure of authority; in others, he or she is expected to be a friendlier guide and mentor. Some intercultural language educators favour a negotiated syllabus from the outset (cf. Jong, 1996: 71–90), arguing that learners benefit from being encouraged to identify for themselves the goals of a task, to reflect on where their own interests intersect with that of the institution (or fail to) and to articulate why and how their own aspirations (if they differ from those stated by the curriculum) would satisfy the educational demands of the institution. That said, in most educational contexts, learners negotiate from a relatively powerless position. Even so, if they can argue rationally that their own interests address the stated learning outcomes, they may benefit from being permitted by the teacher or the institution to align their individual desires and aspirations with the standardised demands of the curriculum. Settings

Intercultural tasks, like other language learning tasks, allow for a range of settings, from individual work, or pair and group work, to whole-class activities. Ideally, settings should vary throughout a course so that learners can benefit from different peer interactions, as well as the opportunity to think and reflect by themselves. Variety is also important in catering to different learning styles. Johns (1992: 197) contends that ‘we should encourage diverse students to do what works for them, whether it is theoretically correct at this point or not’. Even so, allowing for a range of settings in a varied series of tasks will have the advantage of satisfying most learners at some stage, while also training them in what most teachers see as useful strategies of co-operation as well as individual development. As the Global People Competency Framework suggests (Spencer-Oatey & Stadler, 2009), there can be benefits from trying out different settings, and straying beyond one’s comfort zone, in order to learn and grow.

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Questions for reflection

• Look again at the communicative activity described at the beginning of this chapter in which learners are asked to exchange information about their sleeping habits (Maley & Moulding, 1981: 3). Explain how this activity might be adapted to become more of an intercultural learning activity, e.g. by adapting the goals. Are there any contexts that you can think of when sleeping habits among learners might vary and when those differences might cause misunderstanding? • Think of a language learning task with which you are familiar, and analyse it into its various components: goal, input, activities, learner and teacher roles, and settings. Look particularly at the goals and distinguish between goals that enhance language, and those that enhance ICC. Attending to the components of the learning task identified above can be extremely useful in helping teachers and materials designers ground the more abstract principles of ICC in classroom practice. The key difference between a ‘simple’ language learning task and an ‘intercultural’ language learning task lies in the articulation of goals. The learner should ideally be as aware as the teacher of the pedagogical aims of the intercultural tasks – how the task contributes to the development both of linguistic and intercultural communicative competence. As the CEFR, the National Council of State Supervisors for Languages and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (NCSSFL-ACTFL), Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC) and the Global People Competency frameworks (among others) suggest, this means that learners should have the opportunity to reflect upon the cultural behaviour highlighted in the task, and to refine their own simulations of this behaviour (if appropriate) once it has been reflected upon. In other words, learning tasks should systematically offer opportunities for reflection, and types of activity should be recycled throughout a course if learners are to benefit fully from them. Chapters 1–4 have established the general context of an intercultural approach to ELT, by offering, first, an overview of how ‘culture’ is conceptualised in the main academic disciplines that inform intercultural language education, followed by a summary of diverse models of ICC, and a general sense of how ICC might be taught in the language classroom. The next chapters consider in more detail how aspects of ICC might be learned and taught. The remaining chapters draw largely on the model of ICC presented in the CEFR; however, it will be clear from the present chapter that this model should be adapted to local educational conditions.

5 Culture and Conversation

The next few chapters integrate intercultural learning with the more traditional English language teaching (ELT) concern with language skills. That is, we focus on some of the linguistic skills and language repertoires that are necessary to develop intercultural communicative competence. To begin, the present chapter turns to the topic of teaching and learning conversational English and argues that the performance of casual conversation is quintessentially cultural. It addresses the following issues: • The role of conversation in developing intercultural communicative competence. • The difference between transactional and interactional talk. • Genres of conversational storytelling in English. • The design of activities to teach conversational interaction. • From role plays to observation: understanding conversation across cultures. With respect to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) model of intercultural communicative competence, conversation is perhaps the most central of the skills of discovery and interaction (savoir apprendre/faire). Participating in conversational behaviour is key to interacting with others and constructing, through that interaction, an individual and group identity. Conversation and Intercultural Communication

If we think of all the reasons why we use spoken language during the course of a day, from the time of waking to the time of sleeping, we can quickly come up with a list of reasons for speaking. Sometimes speech is transactional, that is, it is message oriented, involving the transfer of information to accomplish some goal, such as requesting something, buying or selling goods, instructing someone or describing something to achieve a purpose. Transactional speech remains the focus of communicative language activities that require learners to bridge an ‘information 79

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gap’ (see Chapter  4). At other times, however, speech is interactional: interactional speech is social in nature, and includes greetings, compliments, jokes and stories – what we call ‘casual conversation’ or ‘chat’. In language education, for many years, the transactional function of speech was privileged over its interactional function. For example, in the late 1990s, Penny Ur (1996) set out her view: The way interactional talk is carried out in different languages is very culture-linked, and it is difficult to explain the conventions that govern it in a foreign language; it is dubious therefore whether it is worth investing very much effort in teaching and practising them. My own opinion is that given general language proficiency, and a knowledge of the more obvious courtesy conventions, most learners will be able to cope adequately with interactional speech on the basis of their own cultural knowledge and common sense. (Ur, 1996: 131)

Since this was written, there has been more accessible and applied research into the cultural conventions underlying interactional conversation (e.g. Eggins & Slade, 1997; Thornbury & Slade, 2006), and it is now clear that teachers are able to give more detailed, practical guidance to learners wishing to develop interactional conversational skills. It is also clear that an understanding of interactional conversation is an important aspect of intercultural communicative competence and that the development of effective conversational skills demands more than common sense. Conversational skills address several of the intercultural savoirs: they are involved in knowledge about how interaction occurs (savoir apprendre/faire) and, crucially, interactional conversation is an important means of expressing, negotiating and exploring attitudes (savoir être). Through interactional conversation, we co-construct our identities with our interlocutors. Thornbury and Slade (2006) go so far as to argue for the central importance of interactional conversation to all communication practices: The centrality of conversation to human discourse owes to the fact that it is the primary location for the enactment of social values and relationships. Through talk we establish, maintain and modify our social identities. (Thornbury & Slade, 2006: 1)

While interactional conversation is now seen to be central to the construction of social identity, methods of teaching it, as Penny Ur rightly observed, are not immediately evident. Most English language courses include the kind of ‘small talk’ that characterises formulaic social exchanges: these tend to be short, evenly balanced turns that often involve what are called ‘adjacency pairs’ (e.g. Cook, 1989: 53–54). One

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speaker will perform an action that has a limited number of conventional responses, such as greeting + greeting, question + answer, offer + acceptance/refusal, blame + denial/admission and so on. These formulae are relatively easy to teach. However, more challenging are those interactional sequences in which one speaker will ‘take the floor’ and tell a story, during which time the other speaker or speakers will listen and make minimal or limited responses. These conversational stories are the main means by which social and cultural identities are negotiated, and they are worth considering in detail. Conversational Stories

The description given here of conversational story genres is based largely on the functional and applied linguistic research of Eggins and Slade (1997) and Thornbury and Slade (2006), which in turn is based, in part, on a tradition of sociolinguistic studies of conversational patterns and discourse structures going back to Labov and Waletzky (1967). According to Eggins and Slade (1997), there are four main genres of conversational story, which can be summarised as follows: • • • •

Recount: Things happened. Exemplum: Things happened, and I/we should learn from them. Anecdote: Things happened, and I had an emotional response. Narrative: Things happened, and they were complicated, and I was perhaps emotional about them and there was a resolution from which we might learn.

From a language teaching perspective, each of these types of story demands particular linguistic and performative resources from the learner who takes the role of storyteller. Recounts demand, for example, that the learner simply describes a sequence of events in the past or present tense, possibly dramatising them using reported speech (e.g. ‘And he was, like, you’re joking!’). An exemplum requires the learner to be able to say what he or she has learned from the sequence of events recounted. An anecdote requires the learner to express an emotional response to the events told. A narrative combines some or all of these elements, while introducing a problem to be addressed and resolved. While the storyteller is speaking, the other learners need to respond appropriately, by performing what some language educators have called ‘listenership’ (e.g. McCarthy, 2002), the features of which are discussed later in this chapter. Even from this basic description of types of conversational story, the cultural functions that define these genres of interactional conversation should be clear. In conversational stories, we do not usually simply recount events. It is actually quite difficult to describe a series of events without turning a simple recount into an exemplum or an anecdote.

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Usually, when we recount events, we are presenting ourselves as having learned from them, or as having a particular emotional response to them. Most importantly, the stories act as an invitation to the listener or listeners to share our experience: to agree with the lessons we have learned, or to empathise with our emotional response. Listeners can choose to accept or reject the storyteller’s implicit invitation, or negotiate their responses to the story being told, and, in this dynamic interplay, individual and group identities are constructed. Learners of English, then, need to have the linguistic resources to take part in such interactions. The necessary linguistic resources can be taught through tasks that target particular storytelling genres, focus on listenership or spotlight other recurring features of conversation. To develop intercultural communicative competence, learners also need to reflect on how interactional conversation functions in English and in other languages and its role in co-constructing identity. Questions for reflection

Before reading on, think about the following issues raised above and, if possible, discuss them with your colleagues. • Discuss whether or not conversational skills in one’s first language (L1) are developed ‘naturally’ through the application of ‘common sense’. • Describe the characteristics of a ‘good’ conversationalist. • From your own observation and experience, describe any misunderstandings that have arisen because different contributors to a conversation are following different conversational conventions, e.g. about the purpose and role of silence, or the appropriate degree of backchannelling. Designing Conversational Tasks

The design of conversational tasks below follows the principles discussed in Chapter  4, namely, they identify linguistic and intercultural goals; supply input for the learners; set out the procedures required to complete an activity; and identify learners’ roles, teacher’s role and settings. The task components can be set out as follows: • Goals: Are the learners practising a particular conversational genre (e.g. relating an exemplum or telling an anecdote)? Is there a particular focus on listenership, opening moves, emotional language, etc.? Are the listeners invited to show empathy or to challenge the sentiments expressed by the speaker? • Input: Has the teacher presented the linguistic resources necessary to achieve the goals, e.g. past/present-tense narratives, opening moves, a range of possible minimal or non-minimal responses, empathy

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•

•

• •

markers and emotional language? Some of the input can come from text and reference materials – or the teacher’s own knowledge of English. Some of the input used in the sample activities that follow is suggested by searching digital corpora of spoken English. Activity: What are the steps that the learners need to take to complete the task? For intercultural communicative competence to be fully developed there should be an opportunity for reflection after the language activity has been completed, e.g. learners might be asked how ‘natural’ this activity felt to them, and whether they can relate it to their L1 conversational behaviour. Learners might consider the social or cultural goals that the activity serves to accomplish, e.g. the making of friends, or the justification of apparently impolite or antisocial behaviour. Learners’ roles: What do the learners actually do during the activity? Do they speak, listen and respond, or observe, describe and evaluate the behaviour of their interlocutors? Can they shape the nature of the activity, e.g. by choosing or changing the conversational genre, or the topic of the conversation, or do they simply follow the teacher’s instructions? Teacher’s role: What does the teacher do? Does the teacher set up the activity, monitor it, intervene during the activity, give evaluative feedback and/or prompt learners’ reflection afterwards? Settings: Is the activity done individually, in pairs or in groups? With most of the conversational activities that follow, I suggest the setting should be triadic, with two learners interacting, while a third observes and reports, in order to facilitate deeper reflection during class discussions.

The sample tasks suggested below deal mainly with the four storytelling genres identified by Eggins and Slade (1997), namely, recount, exemplum, anecdote and narrative. A focus on each in turn aims to build up increasingly complex conversational interactions that fulfil several cultural functions. As they are introduced, other aspects of conversational behaviour (e.g. initiating, listenership, empathising) are also practised. After learners have worked with a variety of interactional conversational genres in English, they are encouraged to compare what they have learnt with observed behaviour in their own and other cultures. Recounts

The foundation of all interactional conversations is the ability to express a sequence of related events, either in the present or in the past tense. This kind of activity will be familiar to most language teachers; however, for conversational interaction, it is crucial that the story being told is one that is of some importance to the learner. To practise this

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genre, learners might, for example, be invited to show their classmates a photograph that triggers a recount. When teaching this task, one possible procedure is the familiar routine whereby (i) the teacher models the activity; (ii) nominated pairs then practise in front of the class; and (iii) the class replicates the activity in pairs or groups: • The teacher displays to the class a photograph related to an event and explains that it has a personal meaning to him or her. She or he then tells the story of the event. • The teacher then nominates one learner to choose a photograph on his or her phone and tell the story of the photo to a classmate. The teacher supports the telling of this story, where necessary supplying useful expressions. • The class is then divided into pairs, each learner instructed to tell a story about a picture of his or her choice. At this point, the teacher might make the point that the story should be told without the storyteller or the listener displaying much emotion. After the stories have been told, the teacher might ask each pair how they felt about the stories – were they told in an interesting way? Did the storyteller feel that the listener was interested in the story? How did he or she judge the level of the listener’s interest? One thing that second language speakers often find difficult is to gain entrance into a conversation, for example by initiating a topic. Table 5.1 indicates possible ways of initiating a conversation. Some are more likely to be transactional, while others are interactional, but one type of conversation often flows into the other. The most likely form of conversational opener for a recount is ‘offering a fact’. Table 5.1  The language of opening moves Opening moves

Examples

Seeking attention

Hey Joe!/Joanne! Hi there!

Offering goods or services

Hi, would you like some…? Hi, can I offer you a…?

Demanding goods or services

Could I trouble you for…? Do you happen to have…?

Offering a fact

That reminds me of… A funny thing happened this morning. Oh, I must tell you about…

Offering an opinion

… looks lovely/awful! This/that is delicious/disgusting!

Demanding a fact

Who sent that text? Has Emerson called?

Demanding an opinion

What do you think of…? Isn’t this lovely/awful?

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Listenership

As part of a lesson on recounts, the topic of ‘listenership’ can be introduced. Conversations are not just about one person actively speaking while others passively listen. Rather, the listener encourages, empathises or simply indicates sustained interest through a mixture of non-verbal behaviour and short or minimal responses. At their most minimal, such responses might involve non-verbal communication such as ‘eyebrow flashes’ (the up-and-down movement of eyebrows), eye rolls, frowns, smiles, leaning forward or away and facial expressions suggestive of engagement, interest or boredom. Minimal verbal responses might include ‘yes/no’, ‘mmhm’, ‘uh’, ‘uh-huh’, ‘really’ and so on. The teacher can ask the learners to group themselves into threes, or triads: storyteller, listener and monitor. Then, one learner recounts a simple story to a listener, again based on a personal photograph, but this time the listener must display a specific level of interest (from very interested, via neutral, to bored) through their non-verbal behaviour and minimal responses. The monitor watches this interaction and, at the end, tries to judge the listener’s level of interest, based on the ‘listenership’ tokens. The storyteller and the listener compare their own judgement of the interaction. Again, the teacher can go through controlled stages (teacher–class, learner–learner, groups) to set this task up, before the groups perform: • The teacher takes the role of listener and invites a learner to tell him or her the story of his or her photograph. The class as a whole takes the role of monitor and judges the teacher’s level of engagement with the storyteller. • After the story has been told, the class, storyteller and teacher compare their evaluations of the teacher’s level of interest. • The teacher then repeats the activity with two learners interacting, before instructing the class, in groups of three, to tell stories and evaluate the levels of interest. It is, as noted, difficult to perform basic recounts without developing them into something more emotional or instructive. Once the basics of narrative storytelling and listenership have been introduced, more demanding kinds of conversation can be presented and practised. As well as non-verbal and minimal responses, there is a range of other ways of giving conversation support as a listener. Table 5.2 suggests possible supporting moves that can be practised as part of listenership. Anecdotes

Eggins and Slade (1997: 243) give the name ‘anecdote’ to those conversational stories whose purpose is ‘to enable interactants to share a reaction to a remarkable event’. The cultural aim of an anecdote is to

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Table 5.2  The language of conversational support Type of supporting move

Example of supporting move (in italics)

Ask for repetition of misheard element

‘She’s got a snake as a pet’. ‘Sorry, she’s got a what?’

Confirm that you have heard the right information

‘She’s got a snake as a pet’. ‘No way! Did you say a snake?’

Ask for additional information needed to understand the speaker’s turn

‘She’s got a snake as a pet’. ‘Sorry, you mean she keeps it at home and looks after it?’

Volunteer further, related information for ‘She’s got a snake as a pet’. confirmation ‘Right, she always had weird tastes’. Show that you have understood and agree with the information given.

‘She’s got a snake as a pet’. ‘Cool! What does she call it?’ ‘Yuk! What does she feed it?’

invite and engage the listener’s sympathy: if I have a strong emotional response to an event, I will tell you a story about it in the hope that you will share my response. The listener’s demonstration of empathy forms a bond of fellowship or friendship. Our shared cultural identity lies, in part, in that we have similar emotional reactions to particular kinds of event. To be able to forge a shared identity, then, listeners need to be able not only to describe events (as in a recount), but, additionally, to demonstrate and invite, implicitly or explicitly, shared emotional responses. Obviously, learners need to be able to draw upon a range of emotional and evaluative expressions in English if they wish to be able to establish group identities through interactional conversation. The teacher can elicit the range and quality of the learner’s current emotional repertoire by asking him or her to describe how he or she would feel in a number of situations that might evoke an emotional response. How would learners have felt in the following situations? • They received an unwanted birthday present. • They saw a small, unsupervised child in the kitchen, reaching up to a pan of boiling water on the stove. • They noticed a friend shoplifting. • They were accused of cheating in an exam. In order to perform anecdotes, the teacher and learners must focus on the emotional and evaluative language such ‘remarkable events’ provoke. The teacher can explain to the learners that he or she will help them enhance their emotional language. Researching evaluative language

There are different ways of researching emotional and evaluative language. One of the most useful nowadays is to use online digital resources, such as the suite of online corpora developed by Mark Davies and

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maintained at Brigham Young University (https://www​.english​-corpora​ .org). Various ways of utilising online corpora are explored by Anderson and Corbett (2017). For example, a search of synonyms for ‘lovely’ and ‘awful’ in the ‘spoken’ section of the British National Corpus (BNC) yields the results shown in Table 5.3. To practise these expressions, the teacher can describe an event and give an evaluation. The learners have either to repeat the evaluation or provide an appropriate synonym, bearing in mind that not all of them work for all occasions. For example: Teacher’s comment

Learners’ responses

I’ve bought a new kitten. It’s adorable! Adorable!/So pretty! S/he’s my favourite actor. S/he’s charming!

Charming!/Gorgeous!/So handsome!

The milk was sour. It tasted horrible!

Horrible!/How unpleasant!

Again, the learners can then practise in pairs. The learning point is that it is part of interactional conversation and listenership to invite an emotional reaction and to respond appropriately. The learners can now develop a recount into a fuller anecdote during which the speaker’s and listener’s explicit level of engagement and empathy can be evaluated by a monitor. A typical anecdote will usually end with an explicit expression of emotion and a possible response from the listener. Again, a corpus can give suggestions for relevant expressions. Searches of the BNC and the Corpus of American Soap Operas (SOAP), for example, give quite a different range of expressions that immediately follow the stem I felt so… (see Table 5.4). If learners have the appropriate level of language, then one possible activity is to ask them to choose an expression (e.g. I felt so responsible!) and prepare to tell an anecdote that leads up to this climax. The learners can again form triads (storyteller, listener and monitor) and tell each Table 5.3  Synonyms of ‘lovely/awful’ in the British National Corpus (Spoken) Synonyms of ‘lovely’

Synonyms of ‘awful’

good, nice, fine, pretty, beautiful, wonderful, perfect, poor, terrible, horrible, dreadful, attractive, gorgeous, pleasant, superb, splendid, handsome, appalling, shocking, unpleasant, charming, delightful, divine, fetching, agreeable, adorable horrific

Table 5.4  Collocates of I felt so… in the BNC (Spoken) and SOAP corpora BNC (Spoken): I felt so…

SOAP: I felt so…

sorry, guilty, rough, embarrassed, bloated, ashamed

bad, guilty, safe, helpless, alive, empty, stupid, good, awful, betrayed, horrible, lucky, terrible, sure, sorry, responsible, positive, happy, sad, free, ashamed, blessed, alone, comfortable, different, special

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other their stories. During the story, the listener must obviously attend to any emotional vocabulary and respond appropriately: non-verbally, with minimal responses and using repetition or synonyms. One of the group of three should once more act mainly as a monitor, evaluating and reporting back on the listener’s level of empathy and engagement. Anecdotes bond individuals into cultural units defined by the fact that they share the same emotional responses to events. If an individual declines to accept the invitation to empathise, by not echoing or varying the emotion expressed, then the pair or group will not cohere into a unit characterised by friendship or fellowship. To make friends, then, learners need to develop an appropriate emotional non-verbal and verbal repertoire. Exempla

Not all stories are told principally to invite an empathic response. ‘Exempla’ are stories that are told to illustrate a point that should be learned by both the storyteller and the listener(s). They express a point of view about how the world should be. They might well contain emotional vocabulary, but the main purpose of an exemplum is to work towards an interpretation of the event described that the listener is invited to share (Eggins & Slade, 1997: 237). One challenging aspect of stories is, as noted in Table 5.1, knowing how to begin them. Exempla are often triggered by a memory, and so useful initiating formulae again include offers of facts: • Oh, I remember once… • Oh, that reminds me of when… • Oh, a really terrible/nice thing happened to me once… The event is then recounted, followed by an interpretation, which may be in the form of a generalisation explaining what the storyteller and the listeners might learn from the story, for example, ‘one day you can be top of the world, and the next day you are back at the bottom of the heap’. Explicit markers of interpretations are phrases like ‘it just shows you, you must/should/mustn’t/shouldn’t…’ or ‘it just shows you how [adjective] it is to …’. To practise exempla, the teacher can think of the kinds of situation from which we can learn. An obvious set of shared experiences for many of us is accidents. Most of us have had them and most of us can learn from them. To demonstrate exempla, then, the teacher can model and then elicit stories about accidents, again using the setting of triads consisting of storyteller, listener and monitor. The storyteller tells the story of an accident he or she has experienced or witnessed, and then what can be learned from this event. The listener responds with appropriate minimal responses showing engagement and, if appropriate, empathising

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tokens, such as the evaluative vocabulary introduced above. After the story has been told, the monitor can rephrase or repeat the ‘moral’ of the story, and again evaluate the listener’s level of engagement. The teacher can then elicit from the learners stories of events that they have found instructive, and use these as the basis for further interactional conversations. Exempla allow the speaker to talk about a personal experience that directly or indirectly dramatises his or her attitudes and values. The recount plus interpretation invites the listeners to share or reject these values, which may, then, be countered or affirmed by the listener’s own stories (see ‘second-storying’, below). Like anecdotes, exempla have a cultural function: they allow for the indirect negotiation of values that bond individuals into like-minded groups. As well as being people who feel the same way about events, we are people who learn the same lessons from events. Narratives

Narratives are structurally the most complex kind of conversational story. They may involve aspects of all the other genres: they recount a series of events, they may involve emotional engagement and evaluation, and we might be invited to learn something from them. But their distinguishing feature is that, unlike the other story genres described so far, they ‘are concerned with protagonists who face and resolve problematic experiences’ (Eggins & Slade, 1997: 239). A full narrative can involve the following elements: • • • • • •

What the story is about. Where and when it took place. Complicating event/problem. Resolution of the problem (or non-resolution). Evaluations (at any point in the story). Summing up.

To practise a narrative, the teacher needs to elicit or present a common or emotionally engaging problem that the learners might have faced. One common problem is losing something, for example a mobile phone. The learners can be invited to introduce the story (‘Oh, I remember once I lost my phone’), describe where and when this occurred, how it happened and if and how the problem was resolved (e.g. finding the phone or having to replace it). There can be evaluations, or emotional invocations, at any point in the story, and at the end there might be a summing up, for example, indicating what has been learned, as in an exemplum. But the main focus here is on the resolution of the problem. Narratives allow the speaker to talk about problems, or obstacles that he or she has encountered and to explain how these problems turned

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out, for better or for worse. In doing so, the storyteller again dramatises values, showing the kind of person he or she is, and inviting the listeners to admire or empathise. As always, listeners help to construct the story by supplying or echoing (or challenging) any evaluations, and perhaps even supplying some of the stages, such as the summing up. Questions for reflection

If conversational storytelling is one of the most central aspects of human discourse, then one would expect it to be featured in English language coursebooks. Look at the spoken activities presented in a coursebook with which you are familiar. • Relate the conversational genres described here (i.e. recounts, anecdotes, exempla and narratives) to those present in the coursebook. If they are not taught explicitly or systematically in the coursebook, how would you adapt the activities to demonstrate to learners more effectively how conversation in English functions? • Consider your own conversational skills in your L1, and any other language you speak. Explain the challenges of being a ‘good’ conversationalist in any language. Extending Conversations

So far, we have discussed individual stories, those points in a conversation in which a single speaker takes the floor and performs a recount, anecdote, exemplum or narrative. Extended interactional conversations are often made up of sequences of stories, linked by relevance to a topic. These sequences are key to the establishment and maintenance of group identity in that different speakers have the opportunity to contribute to the negotiation of shared values and attitudes. Two common types of extended conversation are considered, here, ‘second-stories’ and gossip. Second-storying

‘Second-storying’ or ‘story-capping’ (Sacks, 1992: 764–772) is extremely common in conversation amongst friends and acquaintances. For example, it may be the case that someone in a group of friends has just returned from having a minor operation in hospital. He or she tells the story of the operation and shows a small scar. This recount or anecdote is the ‘first story’. Another member of the group then tells his or her own story of an operation, which is typically more vivid or frightening than the first, and might show a bigger scar. This is the ‘second story’. Then, a third member of the group tells a story of an even worse hospital experience, possibly one that happened outside the immediate group. And so it goes, until the story cannot be capped, and the topic shifts to something else.

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The primary function of second-storying is obviously not the simple exchange of information. The point is, once again, that the participants in the stories are affirming their group identities through the expression of shared experiences, through a sequence of recounts, anecdotes, exempla and narratives. The extended conversation is a way of confirming that they have experiences in common (‘we share the experience of having had hospital procedures’) and that they share common attitudes or beliefs about them (‘the experience is frightening’, ‘the nurses are caring/ uncaring/overworked’, etc.). Each successive story should be more exciting and dramatic than the preceding stories – by capping earlier stories, the final storyteller acquires a certain status in the group. Some people like to have the last word, the best story, the most attention. Other people might resist playing, and stay quietly on the margins of the group. In many groups of established friends, however, the participants share the responsibilities of initiating or continuing or capping the second-story sequences, sometimes having the best story, and sometimes just being part of the cycle. Second-storying is relatively easy to teach. Most language courses at some point encourage students to tell personal narratives on a topic such as ‘my holiday disaster’ or ‘how I got this scar’ (cf. Morgan & Rinvolucri, 2004: 115–116, ‘Scars’). From telling stories to second-storying is a small but significant step. (1) Learner roles/settings: Role-playing friends or acquaintances in small groups. (2) Activity: To share common experiences and to try to ‘cap’ the previous person’s story. (3) Intercultural goal: To bond members of a group and negotiate status within the group. (4) Procedure: One speaker tells a story on a given topic (e.g. ‘my phobia’ or ‘the day I outsmarted my boss’). The others in the group use ‘listenership’ to support the speaker while he or she is telling the story. When the first storyteller is finished, another speaker must tell a story on the same topic, but it must outdo the first speaker’s story; that is, it must be more dramatic and intense than the first story. When the second storyteller has finished, the third should take up the topic and tell a third topic-related story and so on until everyone in the group has contributed. (5) Language goals: The storyteller is likely to use past-tense narratives, while the listeners will use supporting moves, such as non-verbal and minimal responses, and evaluative language such as (‘that’s terrible!’ or ‘good for you!’ and so on). (6) Opportunity for reflection: After a second-story sequence has been completed, learners can reflect on the way each storyteller’s tale related to the opening topic, and how successfully each member

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‘capped’ the preceding story. They can also reflect on the distribution of types of story, e.g. by gender. Do, for example, males tend to tell problem-solving narratives while females invite sympathy through anecdotes? By slightly modifying storytelling activities so that they become secondstorying tasks, their cultural purpose can be demonstrated and discussed. As before, the role of listeners is important, and here the demands on listeners are increased: they need to attend to the story being told and simultaneously give feedback to the speaker, while formulating their own story and awaiting an appropriate opportunity to contribute it. Second-storying is, of course, a staple of film discourse, and many examples can be used to illustrate both the kind of language used and its cultural functions. The ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch in the film, Monty Python: Live at the Hollywood Bowl (Hughes & MacNaughton, 1982), takes the conversational genre to absurd extremes as four old friends, at a reunion dinner, tell ever more absurd stories about the hardships they endured in childhood. In Jaws (Spielberg, 1975), a shark-hunter and a marine biologist, who are initially antagonistic to each other, eventually bond by telling escalating stories of how they acquired their scars. The romantic comedy, Notting Hill (Michell, 1999), also has a key second-storying sequence: Julia Roberts plays a Hollywood star invited to an ‘ordinary’ English dinner party, where the guests compete for the last piece of dessert by telling stories of their failures in life. By being successful, Julia Roberts’ character is excluded from the group, so she bids for the dessert (and indirectly, for in-group membership) by telling a story designed to demonstrate that her life, too, has been a failure. In such scenes, the dual cultural function of second stories is evident: they create group solidarity while negotiating status within the group. Learners can be invited to watch out for second-storying sequences in films, plays and television programmes. Gossip

Gossip is a relatively stigmatised extended conversational genre, but it is a common occurrence in interactional conversation and, like secondstorying, it has an important cultural function. Eggins and Slade (1997: 278–284) give a narrow but useful definition of gossip, arguing that it consists of a group of interlocutors telling a story about an absent group member, or someone else who happens to be known to them all. Typical of gossip is the description and discussion of the absent group member’s behaviour, which usually falls below the acceptable norms of the group, and so in stating, negotiating and affirming this fact, the norms of group behaviour are reinforced. By choosing an absentee as the subject for gossip, conversational participants can safely draw, redraw and confirm the boundaries of acceptable behaviour in their group or community.

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Gossip is stigmatised in part because it can easily become malicious; however, by negotiating a shared reaction to the behaviour of someone who is absent, it is also a safe means of affirming group solidarity. To defuse the potentially negative aspects of gossip, the English teacher might (as below) address gossip through a role play, or gossip activities might be based on the behaviour of fictional characters, such as those in television dramas and soap operas. (1) Learner roles/settings: Close friends in small groups. (2) Goal: To have a discussion of whether the behaviour of an absent friend is acceptable or not. The behaviour is described and evaluated, and the evaluation is then confirmed or challenged. Gossip usually ends with some kind of agreement, consensus or compromise. (3) Intercultural goal: To recognise that, by gossiping, groups of friends establish and reconfirm what they regard as acceptable behaviour more generally in their immediate community. (4) Activity: A role play in which friends are discussing the behaviour of an absent acquaintance at a previous dinner party. The absent friend insulted the host and caused an argument. The friends have to decide whether or not to condemn the absent friend’s behaviour. (5) Language goals: Past-tense narrative to describe what happened at the earlier dinner party; language of evaluation; requests for clarification; challenges and agreements; support and compromise. There may be a focus on the modal auxiliary verbs of social obligation, e.g. he shouldn’t have…, you can’t just…, he ought to…. (6) Opportunity for reflection: After the role play is over, topics for reflection might include: (i) the morality of gossiping: is this kind of tale-telling fair on the absent friend?; (ii) the pleasures and social function of gossiping; (iii) do we gossip about celebrities?; (iv) do both men and women gossip, and if so, do they gossip about the same kinds of behaviour?; (v) do people ever gossip about the positive things that other people do? The role play suggested here can be guided by role-play cards that give different information to the different speakers; for example, one speaker can be prompted to tell the story of the absent friend’s bad behaviour at the party. The other role cards can prompt other speakers to give possible reasons why the absent friend might have behaved in the way he did (e.g. perhaps the host had earlier refused to lend him money to pay gambling debts). This kind of role play should allow learners to display their own attitudes to a number of topics, such as gambling, the allegiance owed to friends and acceptable etiquette at social occasions. As with other examples of interactional conversation, the role play can be videorecorded and the ways in which learners contribute to the discussion can be analysed and alternatives suggested. The learners can also debate the

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consequences for group solidarity of coming, or failing to come, to a compromise about their attitudes to such ‘transgressive’ behaviour. The function of gossip within and across cultures is further discussed in Blum-Kulka (2000), Hall (1993) and Tannen (1984, 1986). Like other conversational skills and genres discussed here, gossip is open to intercultural reflection by the learners. Patterns of interaction in the home cultures of learners can be observed, discussed and compared with the patterns described here (see further, below). In this way, the learner comes to a richer, more complex understanding of how conversational interactions, which might seem, at first glance, superficial and banal, can have a significant cultural function. Questions for reflection

Look again at the quotation by Penny Ur (1996: 131) at the start of this chapter. • Given what we now know about the conventions of interactional talk in English, discuss whether or not teachers should avoid teaching such conventions explicitly. • Consider whether or not you agree with Ur’s (1996: 131) statement that ‘most learners will be able to cope adequately with interactional speech on the basis of their own cultural knowledge and common sense’. • Discuss whether or not teachers should avoid teaching stigmatised forms of conversational interaction, such as gossip. Other Features of Conversation

Becoming conversationally adept and fluent in a second language is, of course, not simply a matter of understanding and putting into operation conversational genres such as small talk, recounts, anecdotes, exempla and narratives, even in extended sequences such as second-stories and gossip. Thornbury and Slade (2006) identify and explain a host of features of conversational language that there is not space to cover here, including colloquial vocabulary, vague language, fillers, typical grammatical features and cohesion, as well as the kind of ‘educated discourse’ encountered in contexts like school or college. Some of these features are particularly culturally salient or particularly variable across cultures, and so they are discussed briefly below. Conversational implicatures

A difficulty, even for advanced second language speakers who are contributing to casual conversation, is that much of what is said in conversation is indirect. People often do not mean what they literally say. Participants in conversations, then, regularly have to infer, from what

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is said, what is actually meant. The name usually given to an expression that demands some kind of inference in order to make sense is a ‘conversational implicature’ (Grice, 1975). Both transactional and interactional talk make frequent use of implicatures. For example, a typical example of a conversational implicature is when someone says, ‘It’s cold in here, isn’t it?’. The listener is presented with an utterance that is literally a statement plus a request for confirmation. However, depending on their relationship (e.g. boss to employee, or parent to child), the utterance can be understood as a request or an instruction to turn up the heating. Bouton (1999) presents evidence that second language learners find certain kinds of conversational implicature particularly difficult to make sense of. Most difficult were examples of irony, understated criticism and certain types of indirect affirmation or denial, such as, ‘Do cows fly?’. Bouton further reports that learners respond well to explicit practice in interpreting these kinds of implicature, although other kinds were less susceptible to instruction. The teaching consisted of giving handouts of numerous examples such as the following, loosely based on Bouton’s illustrations: Irony On seeing a friend called Bill admiring himself in a mirror, someone might say, ‘Bill’s not vain at all, is he?’ Does Bill’s friend mean what he says? Understated criticism Jill: Do you like my new dress? Angela: It’s very different. Does Angela like the dress? Indirect affirmation/denial George: Are you going to the office party? Alex: Do dogs have fleas?/Do chickens have lips? Is Alex intending to go to the party or not? Irony, understatement and indirectness all again have a cultural function. If the listener correctly interprets the meaning of the speaker, he or she is bonded into a community of like minds. Not ‘getting it’ can result in social distance between conversationalists. Bouton’s study suggests that, with practice, second language learners can improve their inferencing skills, which should help them more confidently interpret indirect utterances in conversation. Recurring colloquial expressions

Learners of English also need to identify and build up a repertoire of colloquial words and phrases, those expressions that occur particularly

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Table 5.5  Adjectives following nice and in COCA (Spoken) nice and…

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

warm easy hot clean smooth soft sweet

  8. thin   9. tender 10. brown 11. golden 12. moist 13. quiet

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

fresh thick crispy cold creamy friendly

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

green cool mild healthy juicy clear

frequently in speech and so characterise conversational style. One such phrase, identified by Thornbury and Slade (2006: 41), is nice and [ADJECTIVE], which is used to intensify the force of a positive evaluation. And so instead of saying that something was ‘pleasantly warm’, people might say that it was ‘nice and warm’. Table  5.5 shows the 25 most frequent adjectives following nice and in a search of the spoken section of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).1 As a conversational prompt, learners can be asked how many of them they could fit into a story, for example about a memorable holiday or meal. A further search of COCA shows that nice and [ADJECTIVE] occurs more in the spoken sections than the written sections of the data (it occurs around 28 times per million words in speech, as compared to around 6  times per million words in written news discourse, and only about once per million words in academic prose). The ability to identify, attend to and use those expressions that particularly characterise speech is clearly integral to the development of a fluent conversational style. A further aspect of conversation is the way in which conversational turns between participants are managed. Conversational management

Sociolinguists and ethnographers of communication have long observed that diverse speech communities have different ways of managing turns between conversational participants (cf. Sacks et al., 1974). For example, there are different tolerances of the length of silent pauses between conversational turns, and different attitudes to overlap between conversational participants. As a result, some speakers might seem hesitant and others rude or aggressive, simply because they either tolerate longer pauses between turns, or because they start their conversational turn before the person who is holding the floor has finished a turn (cf. Harumi, 2011). It is also sometimes difficult for learners to impose their own topics in a conversation, often because they are so busy processing the listening input that they do not take control of the direction of the conversation. One activity that can help learners practise and reflect on conversational management is ‘Hidden Sentences’, a game from the resource book, Keep Talking (Klippel, 1984: 38–39). In this activity, the class is divided into two teams, each of which nominates a speaker. Each speaker is then

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given a ‘hidden sentence’ written by the teacher, which the speaker then must use in conversation, within a given time, in such a ‘natural’ way that the opposing team cannot recognise it. Sentences might be something like ‘I sometimes think of becoming a vegetarian’ or ‘A friend just sent me this funny text’. The class then identifies a topic that the nominated speakers will talk about (e.g. ‘sport’). The nominated speakers need to embed their hidden sentences into a conversation without the other team noticing. In order to do this effectively, they must manage the conversation so that it moves towards their designated topic area. When the time is up, the speakers get a point if they have embedded the sentence into the conversation without the opposing team noticing. Two other speakers are then nominated. This activity can also be recorded and discussed with the class. The length of pauses between turns can be commented on, as can the degree of overlap. Is a particular speaker considered slow or aggressive? Does he or she lose the opportunity to take the floor, or is he or she seen as interrupting? Learners can discuss how the speakers’ performances might be improved upon and, over time, their skill in managing conversational interaction can be significantly enhanced. From Performance to Observation

This chapter has so far focused largely on teaching English conversational skills, bearing in mind that interactional conversations have a cultural function. Conversation can also be used as the basis for learners’ investigations of how interaction works, in their own or other cultures. The conversation activities suggested above can be supplemented by exploratory and reflective questions, such as: • What kind of conversations do you hear around you? • Who controls the conversational topics? • What happens if a listener does not support a conversational storyteller? • Are there gender differences in conversational topics and the stories told? There is, of course, no single set of answers to these questions. Hall (1999) observes that interactional talk is directed towards managing our membership of a range of speech communities, which are defined by age group, social class, gender, ethnicity, nationality, profession or, indeed, leisure interest. She gives the name ‘the prosodics of interaction’ to the investigation of the linguistic features that structure conversations in such contexts. Judd (1999: 162) proposes a model of the prosodics of interaction that might be used with more advanced learners who are given the task of observing conversational interactions systematically.

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The observation schedule suggested below combines elements taken from both Hall and Judd: Setting: What is the physical location, time and duration of the speech events? Participants: What is their age, ethnicity, gender and geographical origin? What is the relative status of the participants to each other (peers; inferior–superior; child–parent)? Expected goal/outcome: Are these transactional (e.g. to make a purchase) or interactional (e.g. to tell a story to affirm group values)? Topics: What is being talked about? At social events we might expect gossip, while in classroom situations we might expect topics to be determined by the object of study. The development of speech acts: What are the utterances and how are they to be interpreted? Here, learners focus on the form and function of the utterances; for example, learners might focus on the directness or indirectness of the utterances, or whether or not irony and understatedness are used. They might also consider how structured the sequence of speech acts is: is it ritualised, as in, for example, a religious service, or does it follow the more flexible stages of a conversational narrative (with perhaps an orientation, setting, problem to be addressed, resolution and summing-up)? Participation strategies: How is the taking of conversational turns managed among the participants? Are speakers self-selecting or are they nominated? How many can speak at the same time? Who interrupts/overlaps and who yields the floor? What strategies do participants use to take the floor, maintain the floor and keep the conversation going? Participation strategies will differ from context to context: in a classroom, the teacher will usually keep the floor and nominate other speakers, while in a casual conversation among friends and equals the floor will be negotiated more freely. Formulaic openings and closings: Are there predictable openings and closings? Some types of speech event are more predictable than others. Transactions often begin with ‘Can I help you?’ while story-telling genres might start with a cue like ‘Well, I remember when…’. Relevance to learners: Is the learner likely to encounter this kind of speech event? Does it have an equivalent in his or her home culture? If so, does the speech event in the home culture have similar or different characteristics to that of the target culture? This observational framework for the analysis of talk is intended to guide advanced learners towards an ethnographic analysis of the speech event. That is, they not only assume the role of participants in speech events but they also become observers and analysts. Ethnography is a

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topic that is taken up more fully in Chapters 6 and 7. The purpose of ethnographic analysis is to raise learners’ consciousness of the many ways in which spoken English is used, both transactionally and interactionally. Judd, however, is rightly cautious about enthusiastically recommending that learners become amateur ethnographers: this kind of analysis, as we shall see, takes training, skill and time, as well as a certain level of maturity. Moreover, it is not always easy for teachers and learners in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts to find examples of ‘authentic’ target culture discourse to analyse. Judd recommends that EFL learners turn to media discourse for speech events to analyse; however, as we shall see in Chapter 10, this strategy has its drawbacks. In Chapter 9, we look at ways in which learners might collaborate virtually, online, to facilitate such ‘amateur ethnographies’. Questions for reflection

The latter part of this chapter has turned away from teaching the performance of conversational stories in English to the observation and interpretation of conversational behaviour, either using corpora of spoken discourse or the exploration of local spoken interactions. • If you work in a school with a staffroom, take some time during a break to sit quietly and observe the conversational interactions around you. Can you identify anecdotes, exempla, narratives, second-storying and gossip sequences? Make a note of how listeners respond. From your notes, describe the linguistic resources that participants need to participate in this educational ‘micro-culture’. • If you have access to an online corpus with a spoken component, like COCA, try searching for examples of what you think of as ‘colloquial language’, e.g. evaluative vocabulary such as great, fine, whatever and totally. Explain how they function as tokens of ‘listenership’ (cf. O’Keeffe et al., 2007: 43–45). Conclusion

One of the key types of intercultural knowledge included in the CEFR is knowledge of how interaction occurs. As we have seen, casual conversation is one of the key sites for the construction of personal and group identities. Whereas in earlier ‘communicative’ approaches to EFL teaching, interactional conversation was relatively neglected in favour of transactional exchanges, in an intercultural approach to ELT, there should be a systematic focus on types of interactional conversation, namely recounts, anecdotes, exempla and narratives. Speakers dramatise and negotiate their individual and group values and identities via the telling of conversational stories, and so intercultural speakers need to observe how this is done in different cultures, and learners of English

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need to acquire the appropriate resources to be able to tell effective stories in the target language. They also need to be aware of the responsibilities of ‘listenership’ and how to attend to, respond to and support speakers effectively. The tasks suggested in this chapter are designed to guide learners in the acquisition of the linguistic resources and skills necessary to participate in different conversational genres, as speaker and listener. The reflective components of each task, and the setting of ethnographic tasks, are designed to prompt learners to attend to the cultural functions of interactional conversation in their own as well as other cultures. The intercultural approach to language education necessarily raises numerous ethical issues. The avoidance of a cultural perspective on language teaching by some earlier ‘communicative’ teachers and materials designers was not necessarily the result of neglect but of a principled stance. Many felt that it was not the role of the language educator to be a moral arbiter who imposes his or her own cultural values on learners. However, values tend to be visible and they play an explicit part in an intercultural approach, even in areas such as the teaching of conversation. For example, in some research by conversational analysts into mixedgender interactions in America, Australia and Britain, it has been found that there is an unequal distribution of conversational roles adopted by males and females. In mixed-gender company, it is often males who have been observed taking the role of initiator, and they are more likely than females to challenge group values and identity through their talk (e.g. Eggins & Slade, 1997; Talbot, 2019; Tannen, 1984). Females are more likely to monitor, backchannel and respond, unless the group is composed of very good friends, in which case conversational roles are more evenly distributed. This unequal distribution of participant roles in conversation is, some argue, indicative of women’s role in cultures that are still deeply patriarchal, where male power and female subservience is played out in the patterns of everyday conversational interaction. If we accept that such a description is indeed a valid representation of widespread conversational behaviour in anglophone communities (which is admittedly debatable, given the relatively small size of the data analysed), how should we respond to it as English teachers, materials writers and course designers? Should teachers encourage or require their learners to accept or challenge conversational behaviour patterns that replicate unequal gender relations? The question clearly has broader applications: are we studying cultures in order to copy or subvert the patterns of behaviour that we encounter? Are there ‘universal’ values, attitudes and beliefs that should underlie intercultural curricula? These questions are too large to address adequately here (see FitzGerald [2003] for an extensive discussion of intercultural talk and the construction of identity), but a provisional, if somewhat glib, response would be to reiterate the importance for teachers and materials designers of integrating genuine opportunities for reflection into their intercultural

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activities, particularly for more advanced and mature learners. Reflection on the cultural attitudes, values and beliefs that underlie language behaviour should allow for an informed critique of both target and home cultures, and for an exploration of how learners position themselves with respect to each community. Active reflection should develop critical intercultural awareness (cf. the contributions to Byram & Fleming, 1998; Kramsch, 1993). Naturally, as educators, we must expect learners’ behaviour to be challenged and to change – it is not the purpose of education, after all, simply to reinforce the status quo – but that change should be a result of choices that the learners control, not a result of values imposed by a teacher, syllabus or institutional authority. The role of the teacher can be to help learners to see more clearly the values, attitudes and beliefs that underlie interactional conversation, and to help them build the communicative resources to engage in conversational genres effectively. It is then the learners’ responsibility to use and adapt those resources as they see fit, to establish, negotiate and maintain their own identities in a changing world. Note (1) The searches were performed in mid-June 2020. As COCA is regularly expanded, the order of items in the ‘top 25’ might alter slightly over time.

6 Developing an Ethnographic Frame of Mind

This chapter begins a sustained discussion, from several perspectives, of the crucial role of ethnography in intercultural language education. Ethnographic approaches are the focus of this and the following two chapters. The present chapter gives a more detailed account of ethnography and its applications than was outlined in Chapter  1, covering not only its development as a research discipline but also its role in curriculum innovation, before turning to a description of small-scale classroom tasks designed to develop an ethnographic mindset amongst learners. This chapter addresses the following issues: • • • •

What is ethnography? The role of ethnography in different research disciplines. The role of ethnography in curriculum innovation and intervention. Developing an ethnographic perspective through classroom activities.

The following two chapters develop the ethnographic theme by focusing specifically on interviewing skills and larger-scale ‘practical’ ethnographic projects (Chapter 7) and then on ‘virtual ethnography’ through online intercultural exchanges (Chapter 8). Over the three chapters, the focus of the language skills involved in the ethnographic activities shifts from mainly spoken to mainly written. The Ethnographic Turn in Language Education

Ethnographic practices, broadly conceived, have become central to intercultural approaches to language teaching and learning. As we saw in Chapter 1, English teaching has long drawn on the discipline of linguistics, to the point where English language teaching (ELT) became virtually synonymous with ‘applied linguistics’. In recent decades, however, ethnographic practices have become more influential in the literature of both cultural studies and language learning (e.g. Byram, 1997a, 2020; Byram & Fleming, 1998; Byram et al., 1994; Damen, 1987; Holliday, 1994, 2018; Nightingale, 1989; Phipps, 2007; Radway, 1988; Roberts et  al., 1992, 102

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2001). In giving a more detailed discussion of the ethnographic turn in language education, this chapter first considers how ethnography is understood as a research methodology in relevant disciplines (anthropology, sociolinguistics, cultural studies and media research) and then examines more specifically what the practice of ‘amateur ethnography’ (Damen, 1987) can offer the language teacher and learner, both as a form of action research and as a basis for learning tasks. While, for many learners, there may still be few opportunities for direct contact with cultures in which English is either the dominant language or a lingua franca, there are nevertheless many ways to stimulate an ethnographic imagination, and so develop intercultural communicative competence. With the development of digital communications, there are further opportunities for undertaking ‘virtual’ ethnographies that connect a wide variety of second language learners from a range of cultures and geographical areas. Ethnography as a Research Method

There is no consensus on the nature and research procedures of ethnography in social science research; methods differ considerably across a number of research disciplines that claim to be ethnographic. Some argue that ‘pure’ ethnography is an activity that demands complete immersion in the field of study, often for a number of years, while other researchers argue that ethnographic projects can be much more limited in scope and shorter in duration. Teachers who wish to understand the role of ethnography in language education will benefit from an understanding of the range and uses of ethnographic techniques in research, before deciding how to apply or adapt those techniques to their own research and teaching. Ethnology, ethnography and ethnomethodology

As we saw in Chapter 2, ethnography originates in the anthropological study of cultures. In anthropology, the general term given to the study of living and recent cultures is ‘ethnology’. There are various aspects of ethnology, including ethnography, ethnomethodology and microethnography. All these terms are related, although they are not strictly synonymous. ‘Ethnology’ originally referred to the study of ‘primitive’ (i.e. non-industrialised) societies, by the detailed observation of the daily lives of members of these societies by anthropologists (‘ethnologists’), usually living near or among them for an extended period of time. One introductory textbook, Contemporary Cultural Anthropology (Howard, 1997), for example, includes essays on living among the Nasioi tribe of New Guinea, communication problems in the southern Philippines, patterns of subsistence in the Aleutian Islands and the marriage customs of the Mapuche Indians on the Chilean island of Huapi. ‘Ethnography’, technically, is what ethnologists produce; that is, it refers to the

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descriptions that ethnologists produce of such societies (Damen, 1987: 57; Howard, 1997: 14). Although ethnography is focused on descriptive practices, Blommaert and Dong (2010: 5–6) argue that, historically, it has also encompassed various theoretical principles. Over time, ‘ethnography’ overtook ‘ethnology’ as the general term for using fieldwork as the basis for the systematic study of cultural practices, values and beliefs. Moreover, the type of society studied shifted from non-industrialised and ‘exotic’ to industrialised and ‘familiar’. Ethnography developed within the discipline of anthropology in the early years of the 20th century, falling out of scholarly favour somewhat in mid-century, as more ‘scientific’ or ‘positivist’ traditions of research dominated the human sciences (Saville-Troike, 1989: 7). However, as some social scientists became disenchanted with the inadequacy of experimental methods to capture the complexity of social life, ethnography regained a broader popularity as a research paradigm. A later ethnographer, Shirley Brice Heath (1983) revisited the methods of earlier researchers like Kluckhohn (1940) and immersed herself as a participantobserver in the cultures that she studied, namely, two ethnically distinct working-class communities of millworkers in the southern United States. Heath lived in and with the two communities and studied them over a 10-year period, focusing on their literacy practices. Her description of the two communities was therefore the result of prolonged, detailed, systematic observations and interviews, supported by field notes and taperecordings. Over a full decade, she explored the question of how one’s cultural environment impacts on the learning of the language structures and functions required for success in school and in the workplace. The validity of this kind of ethnography as a language research procedure and its relevance to language teaching is discussed by Nunan (1992: 64–68) and it has inspired a wealth of later work on what are now known as ‘the new literacies’ (e.g. Barton & Hamilton, 2012; Street, 2014). Ethnography, today, then, in its fullest or ‘purest’ form, ideally immerses the fieldworker in the target culture for a lengthy period of time, often amounting to years, with the goal of using systematic observation, recording and interviewing to relate social context to behaviour, particularly linguistic behaviour. As Saville-Troike (1989) put it: Observed behaviour is now recognized as a manifestation of a deeper set of codes and rules, and the task of ethnography is seen as the discovery and explication of the rules for contextually appropriate behaviour in a community or group; in other words, culture is what the individual needs to know to be a functional member of the community. (Saville-Troike, 1989: 7)

In Saville-Troike’s description, we again see ‘culture’ being envisioned as types of knowledge, usually implicit, that in turn shape different forms

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of behaviour that take place in concrete situations. By looking systematically at patterns of behaviour in such situations, the researcher can eventually infer the deeper ‘rules’ that account for the behaviour. Such descriptions are ethnographic accounts of the culture. This kind of ethnography is clearly a job for a dedicated researcher, probably a doctoral student or professional scholar, who has sufficient time, funds and energy to devote to the task for an extended period of time. However, advocates of ethnography in intercultural language education argue that training in some ethnographic techniques can benefit the language teacher and also the language learner (e.g. Byram et al., 1994; Roberts et al., 2001). Later in this chapter, we consider how language teachers and learners might be taught to think ethnographically. Not all ethnography takes as its research object broad patterns of culture and literacy practices; these branches of ethnography have also influenced intercultural language education. Ethnomethodologists focus much more on the ways in which participants in conversation interact to construct meaning jointly (e.g. Cook-Gumperz & Gumperz, 1984; Garfinkel, 1967; Gumperz, 1977; Saville-Troike, 1989). Ethnomethodologists argue that individuals in a specific interaction bring to their encounter social knowledge and prior experiences that they use to build context and interpret the utterances of fellow conversational participants. The detailed descriptions of particular conversations are termed ‘microethnographies’ or ‘ethnographic microanalysis’ (e.g. Erickson, 1996). Where ethnography considers the whole life of a community, microethnography focuses on the ‘ebb and flow’ of individual spoken interactions. In the unfolding of these interactions, cultural knowledge is used to create contextual frames that elucidate the ways in which participants present themselves and co-construct meanings. Microethnography is a strong influence on the kinds of analysis of conversation presented in Chapter 5, and it also influences the kinds of detailed discourse analyses of intercultural communication found, for example, in Scollon and Scollon (2001). Ethnography, in sum, can be immersive, large scale and prolonged, encompassing the cultural knowledge that underlies the whole way of life of a community, or it can be more detached, focused on specific encounters, and concerned with only the cultural knowledge required to make sense of particular interactions. Beyond anthropology and discourse analysis, however, ethnography is a popular research paradigm in other disciplines, such as cultural and media studies. The kinds of ethnographic techniques practised within these disciplines have also influenced the types of tasks designed to promote intercultural language education. Questions for reflection

• What relevance might ethnographic descriptions of a community have for intercultural language education? What opportunities do

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your learners have to be participant-observers in communities, either familiar or unfamiliar? How long and to what extent might they be immersed in such communities? How might they make systematic observations of these communities? • Can you think of any situations in which you or your learners might ethically record ‘authentic’ interactions in their first language and/or English for microethnographic analysis in class and for presentation to the class? Ethnography, Cultural Studies, Style and Subjectivity

As we saw in Chapter 2, the field of cultural studies has had a considerable influence on intercultural language education. Cultural studies combines ethnographic methods with sociology, history, literary and media studies to develop interdisciplinary interpretations of the practices of contemporary subcultural groups and movements, often those that have been marginalised, such as the working class, youth, women and ethnic communities (Gray & McGuigan, 1997; Turner, 2003). Ethnography has a central position – albeit a controversial one – in the methodology of cultural studies. A key text in the British tradition is Paul Willis’ (1977) Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, the result of three years’ observation of 12 ‘antiacademic’ school-leavers, just as they left school and began careers in unskilled jobs. Like Heath (1983), Willis based his account on prolonged observation, diaries, group discussion and informal interviews. The resulting analysis is in part descriptive and in part theoretical, informed by an understanding of his subjects’ socioeconomic context, but, perhaps most influentially, offering an interpretation of their style, that is, how they present themselves through their dress and through the social rituals they perform. Willis prefigures later researchers into youth cultures (e.g. Cohen, 1980; Hebdige, 1979; McRobbie, 1981; Muggleton, 2000; Widdicombe & Wooffitt, 1995) by interpreting style as an important cultural resource in the construction of personal and group identity. For example, he interprets his subjects’ smoking as a sign of their rejection of school values and their adoption of adult, working-class behaviour (Turner, 2003: 148; Willis, 1977: 19). In other words, a social practice is treated by the analyst as a kind of ‘text’ through which certain meanings are produced and displayed for interpretation. Willis also claims that his group rejects the ethos of mainstream education because at some level of consciousness they recognise that its promises are a sham. The subjects of Willis’ study accept that their class position effectively restricts them to certain modes of employment. This kind of research is clearly of interest to intercultural language educators for several reasons: specific types of individual and group behaviour are understood as a means of displaying or performing

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cultural identity, and in some cases give evidence of learners’ attitudes to education itself. This model of ethnographic study is not without its critics. As Nunan (1992: 65) observes, long-term ethnographic analyses are immensely rich in data, and their reporting therefore requires selection and interpretation by the skilled researcher. Since the data gathered by ethnographic researchers is unique and complex, it is impossible for other researchers to check it comprehensively or replicate it, and so the interpretations and conclusions of the ethnographer must be taken, to some extent, on trust. Given the selection of data, there may be obvious gaps in ethnographic accounts, no matter how rich the original data set might have been. For example, McRobbie (1981) points out that Willis’ study of his ‘lads’ makes practically no mention of the women in their lives, whether mothers, aunts, grandmothers or girlfriends. This absence raises the question of whether females indeed figure little in the lads’ lives, or whether Willis has only selected data that supports his thesis that his subjects construct a vigorous, male, working-class identity for themselves. Ethnographic research is always open to the criticism of subjectivity, a charge intensified when the observer is drawn to a subculture because of empathy, or previous or current personal involvement. Blommaert and Dong (2010) discuss the inevitable subjectivity of ethnographic analysis, recommending that the researcher reflects rigorously on the field notes that he or she has collected, separating those pieces of data that are purely factual from those in which the researcher’s perspective is involved: Distinguishing such degrees of subjectivity is helpful: it assists you in distinguishing between those bits of reality about which you can safely make statements in a factual way, and aspects about which you may wish to be a bit more circumspect, because they may be ‘rich points’ that tell you more about yourself and your own frame of reference than about that of the other. (Blommaert & Dong, 2010: 67)

The ability to distinguish between fact and interpretation does not mean that interpretations will be uncontroversial. Dick Hebdige’s (1979: 116–117) influential Subculture: The Meaning of Style notoriously interprets the punk movement’s use of the swastika as an ‘empty symbol’, divorced of its fascist associations, designed only to shock the sensibilities of a complacent bourgeoisie. Although Hebdige had observed the use of this symbol by members of the subculture, and noted a newspaper report of one punk’s alleged reason for its use, he apparently did not, in his own interviews, ask any of his young informants why they had adopted it. His own authority as a trained semiotician, that is, an expert in interpreting verbal and visual signs (cf. Chapter 9), arguably allowed him to dispense with the strategy of checking his own interpretation of the symbol with that of a member of the subculture that actually used it. It might fairly

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be asked whether the reasons given by a member of the subculture for the use of this or any other symbol would be any more authoritative than Hebdige’s, but the issue remains about who has the right and the requisite degree of insight to interpret the meanings of behaviour. Ultimately, the strength of any ethnography is in the detail of the observation and the richness of the data, but data cannot be its own explanation. At some point, the researcher has to organise the data according to a theory: a simple transcript of all the accounts of those observed and a factual record of all their behaviour (even if it were possible) would amount to an avoidance of intellectual responsibility. The moral is that ethnographic studies are immensely valuable but even ethnographers themselves would affirm that they have to be read critically. With reference to Hebdige’s analysis of the meanings of subcultural fashions discussed above, Turner (2003: 150) warns that ‘When we read ethnographic studies, there is always a point at which we need to ask who is speaking, and for whom’. Nunan summarises a series of steps, earlier suggested by LeCompte and Goetz (1982), to safeguard the reliability of ethnographic studies. The attentive ethnographer should make explicit ‘the status of the researcher, the choice of informants, the social situations and conditions, the analytical constructs and premises, and the methods of data collection and analysis’ (Nunan, 1992: 59). In short, reliable ethnographic research of a subcultural community should clearly and accurately state the following: • The relationship of the researcher to the community being described. Is the researcher a visiting observer, a participant-observer, a working member of the community, a sympathiser from outside the community, etc.? • The rationale for choosing the informants. If the subjects are presented as being typical of the subculture, state the grounds for considering them as such. If they were chosen as random samples of the subculture, what procedures were used in their selection? • The social situation and conditions pertaining to the research. Details of the class, gender, ethnicity, educational background, etc., of the informants should be clearly stated. • The methods of data collection. Were observation schedules used to give consistency to the description of routine behaviours? Was the behaviour recorded in field notes, or recorded audio-visually? If the former, were the field notes written during the event, immediately afterwards or some time later? • The methods of analysis. Were multiple observers used to limit individual subjectivity? Are the meanings of the kind of behaviour observed easy to agree upon (i.e. do the meanings demand inferencing on the part of the observer(s))? For example, it would be easy for observers to agree about whether or not a learner volunteered

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many answers in class. It would be less easy for them to agree that a relatively quiet student ‘lacked interest’, ‘was shy’ or ‘showed signs of boredom’. Even if ethnographic research can never be wholly replicated, as too many factors are unique to each individual project, the findings and conclusions of ethnographic accounts can be persuasive if the above points are made explicit. The safeguards suggested by LeCompte and Goetz (1982) are useful to bear in mind when reading ethnographic research in preparation for an intercultural class project, and also when preparing learners to undertake ethnographic projects of their own, as discussed later in this and the following chapters. While it is unlikely that most learners will undertake an ethnographic study on the scale of an academic or professional researcher, these critical criteria can guide the practical or ‘amateur’ ethnographer when she or he comes to reflect on what has been learned from the observation of a familiar or unfamiliar community or group. Questions for reflection

• Many ethnographic studies take as their object ‘subcultures’ such as youth movements or socially marginalised groups. What access might your learners have to such groups? What kinds of groups might they be interested in investigating? What ethical and practical considerations might there be in selecting an appropriate set of groups to study? • Is it feasible for you to consider your own classes as members of a subculture? How would you design an ethnographic study of your own educational context? What would you hope to learn from such a study? Ethnography in Media Studies

Not all ethnographic research takes years to accomplish. Certain types of media research also draw upon ethnographic methods, and their more modest scope allows them to serve as useful models for the kind of ‘practical’ or ‘amateur’ ethnography advocated by intercultural language educators. For example, media researchers might observe or explore the behaviour of audiences watching certain television programmes, record their responses and elicit further, more detailed reactions through formal or informal interviews. Media researchers generally take the theoretical position that meanings are not only encoded in the programmes themselves but are also dialogically constructed in the interactions between the viewers and the ‘text’ (see further, Chapter  10). Consequently, we may assume that different groups of viewers construct different meanings in response to the same programme. Media researchers are therefore

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interested in how different social groupings ‘decode’ the messages that are relayed to them via television or the internet. The broad political questions that interest researchers in cultural studies also interest many media researchers; principally, how might certain subcultural groups ‘resist’ the dominant viewing positions assumed by mainstream television programmes? Such viewers, in the tradition of Willis’ rebellious school leavers, can be seen operating strategies to construct identities in opposition to those offered to them by institutions, in this case the media corporations that create the programmes. Examples of ethnographic media research include David Morley’s (1980) ground-breaking The ‘Nationwide’ Audience, which was an attempt to discover how members of different social classes variously interpreted the content of ‘Nationwide’, an early evening BBC current affairs programme that was popular in the UK in the 1970s (see also Kim, 2004). More recent collections of key articles on media studies typically include ethnographic research of various degrees of depth and complexity. For example, Thornham et al.’s (2009) reader includes studies of gay and heteronormative responses to reality television programmes in Australia, young girls’ performances of femininity as they play video games, and the construction of identity on social media, alongside critiques of the methodology and assumptions of ethnographic research. Media ethnography is usually very different in depth and scale from studies such as Heath’s (1983). Whereas Heath observed patterns of interaction and behaviour in two entire communities for a decade, Bull (2005) based his short study of the ways in which commuters used their music devices on their way to work on a 35-item online questionnaire that attracted 426 responses, some of which were later followed up with more expansive online interviews. Nightingale (1989) questions whether such relatively small-scale projects, interesting though they are, can be termed ‘ethnographic’ at all. A fundamental problem with such focused studies is that by limiting themselves, for example, to one group of media consumers, researchers forfeit the complexity or ‘thickness’ of description valued by broader ethnographic studies. By narrowing down the topic of research to issues such as, say, male/female or adult/child use of the remote control during family television viewing, researchers are in danger of losing insight into wider uses of leisure time and resources by males and females, or adults and children, as well as the wider gender and familial relationships that could inform their media consumption and the construction of their cultural identities. Even so, small-scale ethnographic studies in media research share some of the advantages of broader ethnographic research and can still serve as useful models for intercultural language learning projects. Small-scale projects share the curiosity and political engagement of much ethnographic research, and assume, like all ethnographic studies, that meanings derive from interactions among viewers, participants and

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texts that are concretely situated in social contexts. Small-scale studies also share with more ambitious projects the great benefit of sensitising researchers to the presence of patterns in empirical data, patterns that can be marshalled to support an interpretation or argument. All ethnographic researchers have to become skilled in the careful observation of complex data and in describing the production and negotiation of meanings in real-life interactions. All such researchers also need to be sensitive to the seductive qualities of having a wealth of ‘real’ data generated by the research and be aware of the necessary subjectivity involved in the interpretation of the language and behaviour of their informants. They consequently need to be cautious when presenting their findings. The intercultural language teacher who is aware of the various branches of ethnographic research, along with their strengths and limitations, might draw upon ethnographic methods in different ways. Largescale ethnographic studies seek to explain the cultural knowledge that partially shapes social behaviour in context, through the observation of communities, in depth, over a lengthy period of time. Ethnomethodology and microethnography seek to understand how participants in situated interactions actively construct meanings through negotiation in unfolding communicative events. Ethnography in cultural and media studies often focuses on marginalised groups and ethnographers attempt to raise the status of their subjects by treating their social practices as complex, meaningful and worthy of attention. These research agendas are not, however, necessarily pedagogical agendas (although schools are often the site of ethnographic research). The methods of ethnographic research must be adapted to the various possible needs and purposes of language educators, who might be interested in them because they might promote, for example, curriculum change, or the development of learners’ intercultural communicative competence. The sections that follow turn to the value of adapting ethnographic methods to these ends. Questions for reflection

• Explain how the relationship between members of a group might be indexed by a particular instance of behaviour, for example, by negotiation for possession of the remote control of a television that the group is watching. • Describe how you and your learners ‘consume’ media such as films, television, music and other media. Individually or in groups? On television or on mobile devices? In what languages? Using subtitles or dubbed? Do viewers ‘talk back’ to certain programmes or characters? Do they talk about the programmes in groups? If so, what languages are involved? • Brainstorm how you might use your learners’ media consumption as the topic of an ethnographic project.

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Ethnography, Curriculum Development and Change

For many schools and institutions, even two decades and more after the publication of the 2001 Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), the adoption of a systematic intercultural approach to language education often demands dedicated teacher development and curricular change (see Wagner et al. [2019] for case studies on intercultural language education across the age range in one North American educational district). Developing an intercultural curriculum demands particular ways of thinking about how language is used by individuals and groups, and a particular set of goals related to the development of intercultural communicative competence. The act of developing and implementing an intercultural approach to ELT, in any institution, then, still requires a change in the established learning culture of many ELT institutions, a change that has to be negotiated and managed amongst stakeholders, including teachers, parents and learners. At this level of language education, ethnography can support effective innovation and interventions. Holliday (1994, 2016) observes that cross-cultural encounters occur every time a teacher meets a new group of students and every time a curriculum planner enters a new institution or attempts any kind of curricular reform. He argues that effective curriculum planners and teachers should draw upon ethnography to understand the ‘deep action’ of learners and teachers, that is, the hidden agendas and wider life objectives that might impact on the acceptance or rejection of new curricula or new styles of teaching and learning. Like many other educators, Holliday is critical of past endeavours to introduce the kind of communicative language teaching methodology favoured by commercial European and North American ELT schools into contexts where it has not been appropriate. For example, Holliday (1994) reports that university lecturers in Egypt who attempted to introduce task-based discovery procedures, instead of traditional professor-centred presentations, often lost the respect of students who were socialised into valuing the authority associated with long-established modes of disseminating content. He argues that curriculum consultants who neglect to understand the affordances of the educational culture they are trying to change will fail. Innovation and intervention must take into critical but sympathetic consideration the ways in which, for example, established practices might accord status to members of the educational community. In taking an ethnographic approach towards an established educational culture, Holliday (2016) follows educationalists such as Canagarajah (2004) in proposing that attention be paid to the world of the learners and the world of the teacher. Specifically, Holliday (2016) cites Canagarajah (2004) in advocating that the curriculum developer needs to pay attention to: such things as ‘asides between students, passing of notes, small group interactions, peer activities, marginalia in textbooks and notebooks, transition from one teacher to another, before classes begin, after classes

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are officially over’. They take place in ‘the canteen, library, dorms, playgroups, and computer labs’. They are also very evident ‘in cyberspace’ with ‘email, online discussion/chat’. (Holliday, 2016: 267 citing Canagarajah, 2004: 121)

Collecting such data and informally interviewing learners will bring insights into the role of English in their lives, and how they visualise their engagement (if any) with English in the future. The world of the teacher is one of mediation between institutional constraints and each learner’s set of personal goals. The curriculum developer needs to be sensitive to the usually unarticulated expectations and social relationships that any curricular innovation is bound to challenge. In any staff room there is likely to be rivalry for status and promotion, and some teachers might adopt innovations favoured by the institution’s management in the belief that it will further their own career, rather than out of a conviction that the innovation is educationally worthwhile (though the two are not, of course, incompatible). Other, perhaps more established, teachers might see the introduction of innovations as a threat to their identity and hard-won status, and reject curricular change on those grounds. The curriculum developer also needs, then, to pay attention to small talk in staff rooms and canteen gossip, as well as contributions to staff meetings and emails or texts. This kind of data can be followed up in informal conversations and more formal opportunities to elicit teachers’ attitudes and goals. Ethnographic analysis seeks to observe, understand and describe the life goals of learners and teachers, and the meanings of teacher–learner, learner–learner and teacher–teacher interactions before trying to impose changes that might be received by the target community as inappropriate, unnecessary or even threatening. This is not to say that curriculum change should be avoided. Curriculum planning that involves a period of ethnographic exploration is more likely to result in planners, teachers and learners reaching a consensus that is more than token about strategies for educational improvement. Only if teachers and learners ‘own’ the innovations negotiated with the planners – only if they agree that the innovations are in their best interests – will they actually continue to develop them when the planners have left the scene. As was noted in Chapter 3 of this volume, different learners in different contexts will be attracted (or not) to an intercultural approach for different reasons – for acculturation, enculturation or the possibility offered to become an explorer or mediator of otherness. Likewise, aspects of the intercultural approach outlined in this book will likely be adopted, rejected or cannibalised by different teachers for different purposes. The task types suggested in this book are deliberately designed to be familiar and unthreatening to most English language teachers: they involve role plays, projects and other collaborative, goal-directed activities. However,

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as this volume aims to demonstrate, the view of language and the goals of the intercultural curriculum are substantially different from earlier ELT programmes in that a much greater emphasis is placed on the role of language in constructing individual and group identities, and on the development of the linguistic and personal qualities necessary to cope with and mediate cultural difference. While this volume advocates an intercultural approach to language learning, it also acknowledges that different institutions and teachers around the world will respond according to their own perceived needs and priorities. A curriculum developer who is planning to design and implement an intercultural curriculum in any context should (1) develop a clear idea of what an intercultural approach means in the given context and (2) seek sufficient time to use ethnographic techniques in order, as Holliday suggests, to come to a ‘thick’ understanding of the established educational culture where the intervention is to occur. As Holliday (2016) affirms: Always starting from the assumption that students are intelligent and capable, it is necessary to address and interrogate attitudes, prejudices, power structures, histories, preoccupations, destructive stereotypes, and theories about culture and values. (Holliday, 2016: 275)

Given adequate resources, in-depth ethnographic research in second language teaching has been shown to be both possible and desirable. A case study that remains useful and relevant is the detailed report on the ethnographic studies undertaken by the UK Industrial Language Training (ILT) service in the 1970s and 1980s (Roberts et al., 1992: 171–244). The ILT was established to investigate and meet the language needs of ethnic minority workers in the workplace. An enlightened local education policy allowed the ILT team enough time and funding to conduct extensive research into the communication used on the shop floors and in other working contexts. As Roberts et  al. (1992: 171) observe, this research was viewed as a necessity rather than a luxury because the curriculum developers wished to (1) convince employers that training would meet their actual needs; (2) document and counter explicit racial hostility encountered in the workplace; and (3) provide relevant input for training materials. As part of the ethnographic investigation, which included factual data collection and interviews with ethnic minority workers and their employers, the curriculum developers undertook participant observation in the workplace ‘to record the nature of work, patterns of social and work contact and examples of interaction (often recorded on audiotape)’ (Roberts et  al., 1992: 172). Even so, the ILT team, like Holliday, distinguishes between the ‘practical’ or ‘applied’ ethnography practised by curriculum developers and the ‘full’ or ‘pure’ ethnographic studies conducted by professional researchers. They do

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so for three reasons: (i) because curriculum designers who practise applied ethnography do not seek a comprehensive account of a whole society, only of part of one; (ii) because the ILT researchers submitted the recorded data to a more detailed discourse analysis (or ‘microethnography’) than most ‘professional’ ethnographies would attempt; and (iii) because applied ethnography has a practical outcome for curriculum and materials design, rather than a scholarly outcome as a written account of a cultural context. Roberts et  al.’s (1992) report on the work of the ILT still makes illuminating reading for anyone considering language curriculum reform and materials design in a specific context where members of different cultures are in interaction. It spells out the procedures used by the training service as a suggested model for other projects to follow. There are, for example, clear descriptions of how to set up participant observation; in this case, trainers were taken on as temporary employees in the client firms and expected to work alongside other workers whose patterns of socialisation and communication they monitored and wrote up (see Roberts et  al. [1992: 185–193] for examples of reports, recordings and analysis). In this kind of educational context, the use of ethnography has obvious benefits; in the ILT case, the team drew upon their data to convince many of the UK employers involved that not only did their ethnic minority workers require English language training, but their long-established ‘local’ employees did too. The ‘locals’ also needed training not because their language was ‘deficient’ but because their cultural assumptions about communication patterns were not aligned with those of their new workmates, a mismatch which could lead to unconscious discrimination. One vivid illustration of such misalignment is given in accounts of ‘gatekeeping’ recruitment or promotion interviews (see further, Chapter 7). As a result of their ethnographic practices, the ILT team was able to design communication training for the ethnic minority workers, their ‘local’ workmates and the employers that drew upon the insight that meanings arise from the interaction between all the participants in a given situation. Questions for reflection

• Describe, briefly, the kind of data you might wish to collect for an ethnographic study of your own teaching situation. What might be the duration of such a study? How might the data be collected? • If you wished to introduce curricular innovations in your own teaching situation (e.g. the adoption of an intercultural approach), what resistance might you expect from colleagues, learners and other stakeholders – and why? Describe an actual or possible forum in your current context where such innovations could be discussed and debated.

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Ethnographic Activities in the Intercultural Classroom

The previous section has suggested how an ethnographic approach to curriculum change can afford insight into the legitimate concerns of language teachers and learners, how they construct their identities in relation to each other, and how the ‘small culture’ of the educational (or other) domain can be understood, and communication issues addressed. Ethnographic methods are therefore useful to any curriculum designer, materials designer or language teacher who intends to implement an intercultural approach in his or her institution. There has also been a long-standing interest in teaching ethnographic skills alongside language skills to learners themselves. These techniques draw upon the kinds of ethnographic methods we have seen used in anthropology, and in cultural and media studies. As far back as the late 1980s, in the United States, Louise Damen (1987) drew upon a host of cross-cultural training techniques and anthropological literature in a detailed discussion of ‘culture learning’ in the English classroom. Like the ILT team in the foregoing section, Damen (1987: 141; see also 1987: 228–230) was concerned largely with learners of English who were immigrants in a host anglophone community: she formulates the learning outcomes of the activities as ‘acculturation’, which she defines as ‘the continuous process in which the immigrant adapts to and acquires the host culture, so as to be directed towards ultimate assimilation’. Although Damen grants that the degree of ‘assimilation’ into the host community is a matter for learners to decide, the goal of ‘culture learning’ for her differs markedly from the development of intercultural communicative competence as defined by later educators, such as Kramsch (1993) and Byram (1997b), or indeed in the CEFR or the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) guidelines. For Damen, the observation and understanding of the kinds of knowledge and values that shape different cultural behaviours should ultimately lead to the learners’ adoption of those kinds of knowledge, values and behaviour, at least to some degree. For later intercultural educators, however, the learner is not necessarily expected to assimilate but to mediate (cf. Corbett, 2021). From this perspective, the knowledge, values and behaviour of the other community do not need to be absorbed and simulated, but an understanding of these factors should lead to an informed stance towards that knowledge, values and behaviour, in order to better manage an intercultural encounter or experience. For example, a devout Moslem learner in an anglophone context might be presented with an invitation home to dinner by a friend or colleague. He or she might refuse the invitation because of concerns about the preparation of the food. However, repeated refusals of offers of hospitality, no matter how polite, can put a strain on friendship or collegiality. A learner who assimilates might finally agree to the invitation, an assimilation that implies full or partial

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alignment with the norms and values of the other community. An intercultural learner, however, might recognise the fact that conventions of hospitality were in tension with religious beliefs and customs, and seek to manage the situation through mediation. He or she would then need the language resources to explain politely about the necessary preparation of halal food, and the difficulties of accepting such invitations when such preparation cannot be guaranteed. The learner would also need the language resources to explain that he or she does not wish to give offence by refusing the offer of hospitality, and to seek alternative ways of socialising. Obviously, knowledge, values and beliefs are not static and they will often change as a result of cultural contact. Some learners will have more of a culturally integrative motivation for learning English than others. The teacher who adopts an intercultural approach therefore needs to consider the intended outcome of any ethnographic activity: mediation between cultural perspectives, or alignment with and simulation of the cultural norms observed and analysed? If the goal is alignment and simulation, the teacher might wish to make it explicit to the learners that the purpose of such simulation is to ‘decentre’ from one’s own conventional ways of thinking to empathise more closely with the perspective of the other. A key part of any classroom ethnography is a period of reflection and discussion about the cultural values and assumptions that shape behaviour, and whether the learner would be comfortable or uncomfortable if asked to adopt them. Damen and the ILT team assume ethnographic training will be useful to learners and teachers who are living or working in an anglophone or other community. Where learners are living in the home community, they can still be trained in ethnographic techniques, possibly in order to participate, through telecollaboration, in online intercultural exchanges (see Chapter  8). There is also considerable value in developing ethnographic skills to better understand the home community, and thus acquire aspects of intercultural communicative competence: specifically, conscious knowledge of the products and patterns of interaction of one’s own culture (savoirs), the skills of discovery and interaction (savoir apprendre; faire) and the interrogation of attitudes (savoir être). Chapter 7 focuses specifically on the development of ethnographic interviewing skills, which directly address the skills of interpreting and relating (savoir comprendre), while the tasks suggested in the following sections focus more on developing an ethnographic ‘mindset’ through systematic observation and interpretation, intercultural mediation and, if appropriate, simulation of ‘other’ ways of being. The activities that follow are adapted from a range of resource books and teachers’ guides, such as Damen (1987: 279–297), Fantini (1997), Sercu (1998) and Tomalin and Stempleski (1993). Corbett (2010) also contains a number of practical ethnographic tasks, designed for use in

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the English classroom; it is organised according to a range of themes, including domestic and public spaces, different kinds of interpersonal interaction, and offers a range of topics to explore across cultures, such as sports, food, iconic figures, religion and politics. Concept training

Concept training (Anderson et  al., 1997; Sercu, 1998: 265) is a type of small-scale task designed to develop systematic observation by attending in detail to a particular concept. Trainees (who might be learners or teacher-trainees) are assigned an everyday situation or event to observe. This might be a religious service, a sports event, a school lesson or even something as apparently ordinary as visiting a café or browsing or buying books in a bookshop. Concept training aims to ‘decentre’ the observer’s sense of the ordinary by contemplating the situation or event and devising questions to ask and answer. If the concept is behaviour in a bookshop, questions to include might be: • Is this a specialised bookshop or a general one? Where is it situated? What are the opening hours? What kinds of customers are likely to visit the location? Are the books on display new, second-hand, antiquarian, remaindered or a mixture of those? Are other types of product available to buy? • How are books organised? What is the proportion of books to each section? What does the organisation of books suggest about the reading tastes of the customers? • Are the customers allowed to handle the books? If not, how do they obtain information about the content, the prices and so on? Is there any space where customers can sit and read before they decide whether or not to buy? Are refreshments available? If so, what kind? • What is the process of actually purchasing a book? What are the methods of payment: cash, credit card, store card, contactless payment? Are there preferred methods – or methods that are not preferred (e.g. ‘cheques not accepted’)? • How typical of local bookshops is the one under observation? Is it a family business, a large organisation or a chain store/franchise? What is its history in the neighbourhood/community? How have bookshops developed in the culture under observation? What is their social and economic history? What other products and services do they normally provide? The characteristic features of bookshops (or ‘bookstores’ in North America) obviously vary from place to place and over time, and the cultural frames associated with this concept vary accordingly. When I lived in Moscow at the end of the Soviet period, in 1988–1989, I found that

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customers were usually physically separated from the books, and they had to call on assistants if they wished to handle a copy. If the customer wished to purchase it, the assistant gave the price, the customer then paid at a cashier, and returned with a receipt to the assistant, who then surrendered the book. In contrast to the formality of this procedure, franchise bookshops in the US and the UK began to cultivate a social atmosphere in the later 20th century, integrating cafés into the ambience and providing spaces for relaxation and facilities for book groups. In Brazil, where I have been living more recently, in larger bookstores, which also feature cafés and book groups, prices must be ascertained by finding an electronic scanner, passing the book in front of it and checking the readout. Detailed observation, contemplation and discussion of an ordinary concept such as a bookshop can lead to cultural insights and speculations. These might be followed up by interview (see Chapter 7) and library or internet research. In the 1980s, at the end of the communist period in Russia, the authorities still regulated the flow of information, and the socialist system favoured the labour-intensive use of shop assistants who acted almost like a barrier between the customers and the products. In many Western, capitalist countries, by contrast, consumption was promoted as a leisure and social activity, encouraged by the relaxed environment of larger bookshops. In this period, too, larger bookshops were having to counter the growing tendency to purchase books online, by adding value to the experience of visiting a bookshop. In Brazil, the use of computer scanners to give prices can be seen as an enduring legacy of that country’s history of economic instability, in particular a period of hyperinflation in the early 1990s: the prices, especially of imported goods, can more easily be changed by a computerised system and the use of barcode scanners than by the continual manual labelling of individual books. The textured history and ideological systems of different places at different times result in different expectations about ‘normal’ ways of behaving in everyday situations. Concept training can function as a preliminary to the larger-scale ethnographic studies that are discussed in Chapter  7. Through concept training, learners and trainee-teachers are primed to realise that the ordinary is culturally constructed in complex ways, and they begin to realise the kinds of questions that ethnographers ask, and possible ways of answering them. Cultural associations

This kind of task (based on Damen, 1987: 285) is another small-scale activity to foster intercultural awareness. In this case, a specific concept is chosen and learners find out as much as they can about it, this time comparing information across cultures. One such ‘cluster’ of associations might involve food that has a particular cultural significance. Table 6.1

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Table 6.1  Cultural associations: Foods of cultural significance Brazil

Scotland

USA

Food

Feijoada

Haggis

Hot dog

Ingredients

Salt pork, pork sausage, ham, salted tongue, pig’s knuckle and trotters, black beans, onion, parsley, tomatoes, garlic

Sheep’s stomach, heart, liver, lungs and windpipe, onions, suet, oatmeal, salt, herbs

Frankfurter sausage (beef or beef and pork), oval-shaped bun, optional mustard and ketchup and pickle

Meal/snack

Meal

Meal

Snack

Where or when eaten

Wednesdays and Saturdays

c. 25 January

Sports games, especially baseball

Accompanied by

Rice, manioca four, sliced Mashed potatoes Optional mustard, kale, sliced orange, hot and turnips (‘tatties ketchup, pickle pepper sauce and neeps’)

Origins

Peasant food

Peasant food

Convenience food at sports retail outlets

Things to do afterwards

Lie down, doze, chat sleepily, while digesting

Dance, listen to speeches, songs and poems, drink whisky

Go back to your seat and continue watching the game

charts what might be found if learners investigated certain types of food from Brazil, Scotland and the United States. Such ‘association charts’ are necessarily simplifications, even stereotypes: feijoada, haggis and hot dogs are all eaten outside the times and places specified, but there is still an association in people’s minds with particular times, dates, places and meanings. For example, feijoada in Brazil is associated with Wednesday and Saturday lunchtimes; haggis is associated with celebrations of the birthday of the Scottish poet, Robert Burns, who immortalised it in verse; and hot dogs, in the US, are associated with certain sports events. While not everyone needs to know these associations, seeking them out and learning about them can help a learner to understand cultural allusions and jokes in the target culture. Like ‘concept training’, charting ‘cultural associations’ can be a useful first step in defamiliarising ordinary phenomena and acquiring knowledge about their cultural significance. The task again helps develop an ethnographic frame of mind. Inverted etiquette

If the above two task types help learners and trainees to ‘decentre’, the next two examples, ‘inverted etiquette’ and ‘critical incidents’, suggest ways of helping participants to recognise and manage tricky intercultural encounters. Roberts et al. (1992: 168–169) suggest that one way of raising the consciousness of cultural patterns of behaviour is to devise rules of how not to behave in certain situations, effectively a guide to

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‘inverted etiquette’. They offer a list of actions for interviewers that show ‘How to Make Sure a Candidate Fails Your Interview’, a list that consists of no fewer than 17 items, including: • • • • •

Misuse or mispronounce your candidate’s name. Be jokey and informal. Do not explain the reasons behind your lines of questioning. Ignore the candidate’s responses and change the topic. To show your humour/cynicism/solidarity, say the opposite of what you mean.

The list, obviously, is not aimed at the language learners but at the local English-speaking employers, pointing out modes of behaviour that disadvantage ethnic minority candidates. However, the list could also be used with learners, to alert them to how English speakers might behave. While care must be taken not to give offence, the ‘how not to’ format has the advantage of defamiliarising the familiar while raising questions about how locals interact with the other, and about how people might deal with unfamiliar or unexpected behaviour and attitudes. A similar strategy is used in a guide to Scotland, targeted at English as a foreign language (EFL) learners (Maule, 1989: 26–27). The textbook author includes the following list of ‘seven ways to annoy the Scots’: (1) Use England instead of Britain, or English instead of British. (2) Use British instead of Scottish. (3) Use Scotch to refer to the people. (4) Pretend never to have heard of Robert Burns. (5) Say it would be better if the UK had one football team instead of four. (6) Talk about men wearing skirts. (7) Imitate the local accent. Like the ‘cultural associations’ task above, this activity is best used to explore rather than reinforce stereotypes. The first two items on the list can be explained with reference to Scotland’s historical relationships with its larger southern partner in the United Kingdom. Citizens of smaller nations are often sensitive about their national identity being confused with that of a larger, more powerful neighbour, and members of a political union might wish to have their individual identity asserted. Items 3–6 focus on specific symbols of national identity: national drink, national poet, national football team and national dress. It might reasonably be asked how important such symbols of nationhood are to citizens of other countries. Here, the selection of symbols of nationhood speak to a range of issues, such as stereotypes of drunkenness and masculinity that pervade Scottish culture (Scots drink Scotch, and the men wear kilts but do not identify as women), and the role of sport in raising the profile

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of countries that are politically relatively powerless. The final item (7) addresses the difficulties an outsider faces when simulating some of the linguistic characteristics of an insider – the imitation of an accent can be considered flattery (=‘I wish to be identified with your culture’) or ridicule (=‘You talk in a strange and funny way’). Lists explaining ‘how not to behave’ or guides to inverted etiquette, can be drawn up for a range of situations and groups, based on observation and/or interviews with in-group members (e.g. by simply asking questions like ‘what annoys you?’). Lists for aspects of one’s own home culture can also be drawn up and discussed. Critical incidents

The final example of ethnographic training for the classroom derives from an exploration of issues that can arise from differences in communication patterns. Various cultural training textbooks use critical incidents in different ways (e.g. Barnak, 1979; Bosher, 1997; Corbett, 2010: 42–43; Damen, 1987: 282–283; Roberts et  al., 1992; Tomalin & Stempleski, 1993: 84–88). In most types of critical incident, learners are invited to consider an incident (either fabricated or from personal experience) in which (1) a conflict about values, goals or meaning becomes apparent; (2) the solution to this conflict is not immediately evident, or is controversial; and (3) the cultural context of the conflict is clearly and concisely presented. Learners are presented with the incident in the form of a scenario or role play and invited to explore possible reasons for the conflict and means towards resolving it. A related technique, the ‘cultural assimilator’ (Damen, 1987: 183–185) offers learners different interpretations of the cause of a conflict and invites them to choose from among them and justify their choice. Examples of critical incidents, based on the literature cited, include the following: (1) A female supervisor is employed in a factory with a multicultural workforce. In the previous week, a male worker came to ask her if he could take extended unpaid leave to visit his family overseas. The supervisor told him she was doubtful, but she would see what she could do. After checking the work schedules, she decided that she could not afford anyone to be absent for a long period of time and she made her decision known to the worker. Yesterday, the supervisor discovered that the worker had gone over her head to her line manager to ask directly for unpaid leave. The line manager passed the request back to the supervisor, because these decisions are supposed to be her responsibility. The supervisor calls the worker to her office to explain why he has challenged her decision. (2) An American teacher on a short multicultural summer course decided to give a party to her students, so she invited them to her house. The

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Japanese arrived at 8pm promptly and ate much of the food; however, they left at 10pm just as the Italians were arriving. At around midnight the Latin Americans arrived, by which time the food was finished, but they stayed, singing and dancing, till around 4am. The Saudis did not turn up at all. Should she ever hold a party again? Critical incidents can be effective ways of investigating cultural differences that cause communication misfires and conflict. There is, however, a clear danger from even the above examples that they encourage racial, ethnic, national and gender stereotyping (e.g. that all Latin Americans sing and dance, and that all males will disrespect female authority). Even so, used carefully, they can be useful in dealing with general patterns of cultural behaviour or – more accurately – expectations about those patterns. In the first example, the critical incident emerges, most probably, from the different conceptions of a supervisor’s role by the female employee and the factory worker. The female supervisor regards it as her responsibility to make workload decisions, and she expects those decisions to be respected. She does not like these decisions to be challenged or to lose face with her own line manager. The factory worker, on the other hand, might see the supervisor’s role as a mediator between himself and upper management. When she fails to ‘see what she can do’, he feels that it is legitimate to approach someone who has the authority to grant his request. Neither individual in this scenario is right or wrong – each has a culturally influenced way of perceiving the obligations of the other. An intercultural mediator might attempt to resolve the situation by making each explicitly aware of the other’s position. The second situation is based on different cultural expectations of ‘partying’. Tensions might arise through different conceptions of a number of relevant factors: the time when parties take place, whether guests are expected to be punctual and what happens during them (eating, drinking, dancing, chatting). Some of the partying activities that are conventional for some (e.g. the consumption of alcohol) might be forbidden to others. Some guests might function as groups and arrive together while others arrive individually. Depending on the form of the invitation, some people might regard it as a polite gesture, while others might regard it as a firm offer. Like the other classroom tasks described in this section, critical incidents should be understood not as a way of teaching learners how a particular group is likely to behave or not to behave, but to train them to think ethnographically – that is, to ‘decentre’ from their own everyday habits of thought and behaviour, and to realise that the ordinary is culturally constructed and varies according to context. These types of small-scale classroom task can lead to the kind of extended ethnographic project described in Chapter 7.

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Questions for reflection

Concept training, cultural associations, inverted etiquette and critical incidents are all relatively modest ways of beginning to explore aspect of everyday life, as experienced either by the familiar ‘self’ or the unfamiliar ‘other’. • Describe some ‘everyday’ concepts that would reward your learners’ close scrutiny either as a concept training or a cultural association activity, e.g. observation and description of behaviour in bookshops, cafés and sports events. • Describe some topics for inverted etiquette or critical incidents that would interest your own learners, e.g. behaviour in public places, like cinemas, dating customs, classroom behaviour or online communication norms. This chapter has offered a broad introduction to ethnography across a range of research and applied disciplines, including its use in curriculum innovation and course planning. We have also addressed applied ethnography as a teaching practice. The chapter concluded with some small-scale suggestions for developing learners’ ethnographic thinking. The following two chapters will consider the development of skills and techniques for more extensive ethnographic projects.

7 Interviewing Skills for the Intercultural Learner

Chapter  6 surveyed the use of ethnography in intercultural language education and suggested some practical ways of developing an intercultural mindset. This chapter continues the treatment of ethnography in an intercultural approach to English language teaching (ELT) from a more specific angle. A fundamental set of skills for the intercultural learner to acquire are those involved in the elicitation and interpretation of information, often through interviews. While question-and-answer exchanges designed to bridge an ‘information gap’ are familiar from the communicative approach to language learning, ethnographic interviews are nuanced, situated events that demand not only the ability to elicit information, directly and/or indirectly, but also an alertness as to how the interviewee is responding to the speech event, and the skills necessary to interpret the answers accordingly. The chapter, then, looks at the focused development of ethnographic interview skills, before considering how they might be used in more ambitious learning projects than were suggested in Chapter 6. The issues covered in this chapter are: • • • •

The nature of the interview as a speech event. Developing questions for ethnographic interviews. Inferring the meaning from non-literal responses. Incorporating interviews into larger-scale ethnographic projects.

In Chapter 8, we develop this theme further by considering the challenges of conducting telecollaborative ethnographic projects online. The Interview as a Speech Genre

In the final sections of Chapter  6, the suggested learning activities focused on developing the observational habits that are characteristic of ethnographers: the skills involved in noticing everyday patterns of behaviour and inferring the cultural values and attitudes that might account for them. Ethnography is usually considered to involve a combination of observation and interviewing. In this chapter, the focus is 125

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less on observation and more on how to conduct interviews as part of small- and larger-scale ethnographic research. Particular attention is also paid to how data from the interview may be analysed and interpreted. Interviews might at first sight seem a highly specific topic to be allocated a full chapter in a book such as this; however, the issues involved are, in fact, important enough to merit an entire volume to themselves (see, for example, Briggs, 1986). Interviews are important for several reasons. First of all, superficially, they seem to be a speech genre that has evolved to allow the unproblematic exchange of information: the interviewer asks a question and the interviewee responds with the required data. In many ELT textbooks, interviews are used in listening comprehension passages as examples of information gaps being bridged. However, as we shall see, the purpose, content and form of questions and responses in interviews are not always understood unproblematically by participants. Informational exchanges also incidentally give cultural information, for example about the participants’ geographical and social identities, and about their values, assumptions and attitudes. Roberts et al. (2001) echo Briggs (1986) in cautioning about the uncritical use of interviews to collect data: The conclusions drawn from data collected in interviews are not unproblematic facts. The questions are asked in particular ways and construct and constrain the answers. A different question would produce a different response and so different data. So any interview data is jointly produced and is as much a product of the interviewers’ social world as it is of the informants’. (Roberts et al., 2001: 142–143)

Briggs (1986) reminds researchers that the interview itself is a culturally specific speech genre: the idea that an ethnographer, often a young researcher, can simply enter an unfamiliar cultural context and have the right to demand answers to questions from, say, senior members of the target community is not one that will be necessarily widely shared by members of that community. Briggs recommends that researchers spend some time observing the target community, noting patterns of interaction, before embarking on the hard task of eliciting data. He notes that when, as a young man, he researched a New Mexican traditional community in Spanish-speaking New Mexico, he had little luck in trying to elicit information through formal or semi-formal interviews but learned a lot indirectly from conversations with community elders once he had been accepted by them in the role of an apprentice woodcarver. Despite their limitations, if the researcher uses caution and analyses the data carefully, interviews are still a tremendously useful way of gaining insight into an unfamiliar culture. This chapter gives advice on how to prepare for interviews and then analyse them from a cultural perspective. The chapter is illustrated by examples from published sociolinguistic and

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social research, alongside data gathered by second language (L2) learners doing practical ethnographic projects. Interviews are sometimes considered a form of conversation (e.g. Blommaert & Dong, 2010: 44–58); however, although they may share with conversations many characteristics of spoken interaction, interviews do not share the same social and cultural purposes as, for example, the kinds of conversational interaction described in Chapter 5. Indeed, there we argued that interactional conversation has been problematical in ELT precisely because its cultural function is not primarily to exchange information but to establish and maintain social identity through the sharing of experience, and to negotiate, affirm and challenge the values and norms of the group through genres such as stories and gossip. An understanding of the cultural functions of conversation accounts for familiar characteristics such as turn-taking, holding and ceding the floor, second-storying and so on. At first glance, interviews should be a much easier genre to cope with in the language classroom. In interviews, at least ostensibly, the information exchanged is the primary focus of attention. This transactional function can be illustrated by a brief excerpt from an audio script from a popular Business English coursebook, Pre-Intermediate Market Leader (Cotton et al., 2012: 155). The script is clearly designed to illustrate a learning point, and it does so in the form of a typical ELT ‘interview’ in which a prospective customer, Chen, is quizzing a sales representative, Martin, about his product, electric automobiles. (M = Martin, C = Chen) M: So your plan is to provide electric cars in your town centre. People will rent them to do their shopping, go about their business and so on. Right? C: Yes, pollution is a big problem here. We’re trying all sorts of ideas to reduce it. We’re interested in starting with 10 electric cars. If it works, we’ll increase the number later on. I see from your price list that a standard two-seater car will cost about €12,000, is that correct? M: Yes, the price includes transport and insurance costs. If you order 10 vehicles, you’ll be paying us about €100, 000, minus the 2% discount we offer a new customer. But if you increase your order, we could offer a much higher discount. C: OK, how much would that be? M: Well, for an order of 20 or more vehicles, the discount would be 5%. This scripted interview is evidently written for learning purposes: it is a relatively dense sequence of questions and answers, with the minimal response ‘yes’ typically elaborated with further information (‘pollution is a big problem here’ or ‘the price includes transport and costs’). An obvious language teaching point is the frequently used conditional structure

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(‘if it works… if you order 10 vehicles… if you increase your order…’). Over the course of the interview, Martin learns about Chen’s product requirements and Chen learns what Martin can offer and various conditions about payment options. The focus in such teaching dialogues is on what Briggs (1986: 50–54) refers to as the referential aspect of the exchange, that is, the information that each speaker gives refers to a realworld context. Little, if any, attention here is paid to what Briggs (1986: 42–43) calls indexical features, that is, those modes of communication that are directed towards the context and utterances themselves, and may indicate the speakers’ stance towards what they say; for example, does Martin adopt a friendly or cold tone of voice, or does Chen raise an eyebrow? Do they laugh? Who does Chen refer to as ‘we’ when he says, ‘We’re trying all sorts of ideas to reduce it [i.e. pollution]’? Is this the same ‘we’ that we find in the utterance, ‘We’re interested in starting with 10 cars’? Arguably, in the former, he positions himself among those who have an active environmental concern, while in the second he acts as a representative for his company; he leaves it to Martin to infer whether or not the two groups are related. The ethnographic interviewer needs to be sensitive to indexical as well as referential features, that is, those features that point to the speakers’ unfolding identity, attitudes and values as the exchange develops. If the primary purpose of casual conversation is indexical, the primary purpose of the interview genre is referential – the information exchanged has an importance beyond that of establishing and negotiating participant identities. Nevertheless, interviews are still used in a variety of contexts to accomplish cultural as well as transactional goals. In the textbook interview quoted above, the transactional goal is to negotiate the purchase of a product for a reasonable price. The participants in the interview are on relatively equal terms, professionally, and treat each other with respect. Other types of interview have different goals and may involve participants with different degrees of power and authority, and different stances towards each other. As we shall see in Chapter 10, some television celebrity interviews are as much about performance and display as about the genuine exchange of information, and different types of broadcast news interview might hold the interviewee to account, or elicit eye-witness statements or expert opinions. In doing so, the interviewer might treat the interviewee with more or less deference. Many interviews that are used, for example, in recruitment, promotion panels or social services contexts, involve high stakes, and unequal relationships between applicants and those ‘gatekeepers’ who determine access to resources, status or power. In the latter type of interview, the question-answer exchanges may not be as straightforward as that found in the scripted exchange between Chen and Martin. Applicants for a job, for example, might regard requests for information as having a hidden

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agenda. It has been shown that in gatekeeping interviews with English as a second language (ESL) speakers, a lack of familiarity with the rules of the ‘cultural game’ of anglophone interviewing styles can put applicants at a serious disadvantage. Roberts et al. (1992: 47) give the example of a job interview role play in which an ethnic minority candidate (‘B’) was asked about his driving experience by an English interviewer (‘N’): N: You obviously don’t drive in the job you’re doing. What sort of driving experience have you had? B: In this country? N: Um hum. B: I’ve got um light goods vehicle driving licence and I’ve…I don’t think I’ve done nothing wrong. As Roberts et al. (1992) observe, the applicant here shows himself in a poor light by giving what might appear to be a defensive and only tangentially relevant answer to ‘N’’s question. In analysing the exchange closely with the participants, however, Roberts and her colleagues realised that there was an issue in the ways in which the two participants understood the function of the job interview. Acting in accordance with the norms of anglophone job interviews, ‘N’ understood that by asking his question he was indirectly offering the applicant an opportunity to present his skills and experience. However, ‘B’ came from a culture where the norms of job interviews more closely resembled a test where weaknesses were probed, and so he interpreted the question as an attempt to find fault with his driving record. In short, the question and response have different meanings depending on the cultural frame being used by the interlocutor. In his own terms, ‘B’ is being relevant in his response, but both ‘B’ and ‘N’ have different assumptions about the cultural function of the question, and so different expectations about the kind of information to be exchanged. This example is a vivid illustration that even ‘simple’ information exchange is culturally conditioned, not least by the participants’ presuppositions about what the purpose of the exchange is: what kind of information is important, and why is it being requested? On this cautionary note, we now look at interview techniques that attempt to mitigate opportunities for what Briggs (1986: 39–60) bluntly labels ‘communicative blunders’, we examine the way that meanings are co-constructed interactively by all participants in any interview and we suggest ways in which interviews can contribute to ethnographic projects in intercultural language education. Questions for reflection

• Look at a selection of dialogues in an ELT textbook you use. Do they feel ‘natural’ or ‘scripted’? Give reasons for your answer; for

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example, do the dialogues focus on information transfer, or is indexical information about the speakers also important? • Find a transactional dialogue in a textbook and read it aloud in ways that foreground possible indexical features, e.g. in a bored, suspicious, hostile or seductive manner, or with a pronounced regional or social accent. Describe ways in which the meaning or the interpretation of the dialogue change when the indexical features change. • Think of job interviews or other kinds of selection interview that you have experienced. Describe your personal experience of any communicative ‘blunders’ that have occurred owing to the misalignment of cultural frames. Developing Interview Techniques

As we have seen, interviewing is only one way of gaining cultural information. Indeed, ethnographers tend to avoid formal interviews, preferring covert observation or ‘focused conversation’, that is, informal spoken interaction that aims to elicit cultural data. Roberts et al. (2001) make this point in their description of a programme developed to train undergraduate language learners in ethnographic methods: One of the most difficult aspects of the methods element of the course is to help students unlearn their preconceptions about the interview as a research method. They have to replace their image of the white coat and the clipboard with something that is much closer to a focused conversation. This does not, however, mean that ethnographic interviews are unstructured, unprepared encounters. (Roberts et al., 2001: 141)

A structured guide to ethnographic interview techniques is given in Spradley (1979) and it is still useful today. Key pieces of advice for the novice ethnographer are: • Try, if possible, to interview the respondent more than once, over time. • Decide in advance which general themes or topics you wish to cover in the first interview. • Listen to the interviewee’s responses to establish further topics to follow up later, in more focused interviews. • Decide in advance how you will record the responses (e.g. notes taken during or immediately after the interview, audio or video recordings?). This will depend in part on the location of the research and the interviewer’s relationship with the respondent(s). • Avoid ‘leading questions’ that presume a particular answer, e.g. ‘Who is your favourite author?’ which presumes that the interviewee reads and has a favourite author. Remember that interviewees may

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not have consciously formed or settled opinions on many of the topics that the ethnographer wishes to explore. • Elicit information with as little explicit evaluation as possible. Backchannelling, using minimal responses and simply repeating what the respondent has just said often encourages the respondent to elaborate. Where necessary, probe the interviewee’s responses by asking questions like ‘What do you mean by __ ?’ • Encourage interviewees to develop their topics. Do not be in a hurry to hasten them on to new topics by asking a new, direct question after they have given a brief response to the previous question. If this advice is followed, ethnographic interviewing in a foreign language need not be as difficult as might be supposed. Roberts and her colleagues introduced their students to ethnographic interviewing first by practising in their first language (L1) and then by role-playing in the target language. They found that their students’ initial anxieties about their ability to interview in the target language were ill-founded (Roberts et al., 2001): Interestingly, the fears about their own competence in interviewing in the foreign language are quickly laid to rest. They find that ethnographic interviewing requires relatively little productive competence because the whole point is to give the informant control of the interview and because questions so often use the informants’ own language. (Roberts et  al., 2001: 145)

After the data has been recorded, the interviews should be transcribed, in whole or (more likely) in part. Anyone who has attempted a full transcription of a text will attest to the length of time it takes to make a full and accurate transcription of spoken interaction: easily 10 hours of transcription time is required for each hour’s worth of recording. Blommaert and Dong (2010) suggest making a summary of the recording, using the following procedure: • Play the recording • Make detailed notes ⚬⚬ Note the topic development ⚬⚬ Copy out in full any particular phrases, expressions or exchanges that seem important ⚬⚬ Make a note of the time that topics change or expressions/ exchanges were uttered ⚬⚬ Add any observations that you make while listening (Blommaert & Dong, 2010: 68) This kind of summary will allow the researcher to quickly scan the interview data, and then make a more detailed transcription of particular

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sections for microethnographic analysis at a later point. In more detailed transcriptions, different conventions may be used to mark hesitations, pauses, overlaps, non-verbal phenomena such as laughter, gestures and facial expressions, and characteristics such as volume, intonation and voice quality (e.g. whispering or creaky voice). The way interviews are transcribed depends in large part on what the researcher identifies as being important to his or her research. If two interviewees are talking and one interrupts or overlaps with the other, then this should be indicated, particularly if the researcher is interested in why there is interruption or overlap: is one interviewee trying to dominate the other or is the interviewee supporting the other’s turns? If an interviewee changes his or her voice quality to dramatise certain episodes in the interview, then this should be coded so that patterns can be shown systematically. The interviews transcribed below illustrate some of the differences in the conventions governing the presentation of speech in writing. Finally, of course, the interviews have to be analysed and interpreted. As noted above, this is not a transparent process that can be characterised as simply plucking information from an interviewee’s responses to questions. Rather, analysis and interpretation involve the interviewer reflecting on the usefulness and the function of his or her questions, and the assumptions that underlie both the questions and the answers. The following sections suggest different ways in which the researcher can approach the analysis and interpretation of interview data, with respect to a range of perspectives involving class, gender and subcultural group affiliation. Finally, more practical ‘classroom’ examples of data collected and analysed by language learners are presented. Questions for reflection

• Explain how you might introduce your own learners to the interview strategies described above. • Transcription and analysis of even a small part of an interview can be time-consuming and possibly tedious – but it is also good, detailed listening practice. Explain how you might turn the transcription and analysis of an interview extract into an effective and engaging classroom task for your own learners. The Presentation of the Self in Interviews

People respond to interviews in different ways, as revealed by the way they represent themselves in their responses through their styles of speech. The implications of these differences have been the subject of discussions in sociolinguistics for half a century, since Bernstein (1971) investigated the presentation of the self in the speech styles of children and related these to their working-class or middle-class status, that is,

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their ‘social formations’. In brief, Bernstein argued that working-class children grew up in a cultural environment in which individuals were socialised into a fairly rigid and uncontested hierarchy. In traditional working-class communities, in short, everyone was taught to know their place within the social structure. Somewhat controversially at the time, Bernstein related the discourse patterns typically produced by middleand working-class speakers to the structures of each social formation. In hindsight, Bernstein can be seen as a pioneer of research that seeks to relate discourse styles to cultural assumptions. Working-class communities at that time were, arguably, relatively stable, and their hierarchical structure promoted solidarity and clearly defined social roles. Middle-class children, by contrast, grew up in an environment where there was greater social mobility and more scope for the negotiation of roles and status – social roles (e.g. of males and females) were less fixed and the community itself was less well-defined. Bernstein argued that these contrasting social formations led to a disposition to use language in different ways: working-class speakers used language to affirm their identity as part of a collective; while middle-class speakers used language to argue for their role as part of the collective. The similarity to Hofstede’s ‘cultural dimensions’ of individualism versus collectivism (Chapter  2) is worth remarking on, though in Hofstede’s case, social formation is predicated on national rather than class identity. Montgomery (1995) summarises Bernstein’s position succinctly: The contrast between the two social formations could be summed up in terms of the relative bias of each towards the collectivity or the individual. The first raises the ‘I’ over the ‘we’. In doing so, each formation – with its characteristic role systems – develops a distinctive orientation towards communication. (Montgomery, 1995: 140)

Bernstein suggested that the differences between the speech styles manifested itself in working-class speakers’ preference for narrative genres (‘restricted code’) to argumentative genres (‘elaborated code’). Bernstein’s view of the relationship between language use and social formation became the subject of critical debate in the 1970s, since some of his findings were sometimes taken to suggest that working-class speakers were unable to form the arguments necessary to negotiate their social roles, and that they were consequently linguistically deprived. As Montgomery (1995) observes, most sociolinguists today would not consider ‘orientations towards communication’ as wholly determining the way working-class or middle-class speakers use language – they are simply ‘orientations’. Any competent speaker can move along a continuum between individual-oriented and community-oriented speech styles, depending on personal experience, inclination, the perceived context of the interaction and the relationship between the participants.

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However, in given speech genres, such as interviews, general patterns of preference do seem to be correlated with social formations, such as social class. In other words, working-class and middle-class speakers tended consistently to view interviews in different ways, and construct a relationship with the interviewer in accordance with these varying perceptions. The realisation of different communicative orientations can be observed in transcripts of interviews from this period, particularly in those interviews conducted by sociolinguists who probed for personal information as a way of putting informants at ease. Macaulay (1991) elicited the following responses when interviewing middle-class and working-class speakers from Ayr, in Scotland. Macaulay organised his transcripts in lines, each of which is a phrase containing a single verb. In each case, the speaker is reminiscing about the past, prompted by the interviewer, but the speakers present themselves in quite different ways. Extract A shows a middle-class speaker presenting himself in terms of his likes and dislikes. He constructs an argument to justify his preferences and explicitly draws attention to the status of one of his statements as a ‘generalisation’. At one point, he even appeals to the written mode of discourse (‘put normal in inverted commas’) which serves to underline the fact that his presentation of the self takes the form of an argument – an individually oriented negotiating position with respect to the collective. Extract A well I quite like this environment I like the people here and I like the countryside and I like the attitudes of people because I found one – one problem with say Germany or Oxford was that there was a certain amount of [.] unreality in Oxford in that the academics were really a bit isolated from the rest of the community and many of them felt that this was the whole point of living to solve their own particular research problems and nothing else was really all that important and they tend to live in this sort of ivory tower atmosphere although obviously with a generalization like that you know there were many exceptions and there were many sort of – sort of normal people put normal in inverted commas

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By contrast, the working-class speaker below presents herself not as someone who argues for a set of preferences but as someone who narrates a story, something more like a conversational narrative identified in Chapter  5. As Macaulay (1991, 1995/6, 2005) points out in several studies, this so-called ‘restricted’ style of self-presentation is no less sophisticated than the middle-class style, requiring as it does a command of pacing, suspense and a control of dramatised direct speech, deployed skilfully here at moments of crisis. The spelling of the transcript in Extract B represents some features of a working-class Ayrshire accent and dialect (e.g. oot, ‘out’ and telt, ‘told’), and these indexical features, also, obviously, indicate the geographical and social origins of the speaker. The middle-class speaker in Extract A would also have a Scottish accent, but his dialect would be closer to that of Standard English and so it is more difficult to represent in writing. As Blommaert and Dong (2010: 68) observe, the form that transcriptions take when speech is transformed into writing is always a political issue, and no transcription is neutral. The choice the transcriber needs to wrestle with is whether the orthography used in the transcription retains the distinctive social characteristics of the speaker or whether it stigmatises the speaker. Here, Macaulay opts for a lightly Scots orthography, retaining some features of the speaker’s social formation: Extract B [talking about her mother] she watched you like a hawk so I goes oot this night it was my first husband I’d made arrangements to meet him – away at Tam’s Brig away from the Prestwick Road to the Tam’s Brig and somebody had telt her they had seen me so we’d made arrangements we’d meet at Tam’s Brig he would go his road and I would go mine and then naebody would see us walking hame however whoever spouted on me had telt her where I was and aw the rest of it so she – I come to Tam’s Brig this night And I’m just coming ower Tam’s Brig

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And I stopped dead Bertie says to me “What’s up with you?” I says “Oh don’t luck the noo There’s my mother” he says “It is nut” I says “It is” “Well come on and we’ll face her” I says “You may but I won’t” says I “You’d better stop there And I’ll go on” he stopped as I telt him and I went on well she hammered me fae the Tam’s Brig tae the Prestwick Road and everybody watching me and I was eighteen

The narrative adheres to the structure of narratives described in Chapter  5 in that there is a setting in which the young woman meets her boyfriend (and future first husband) without her mother’s permission, a complicating event in which they meet the mother in the street, a resolution in which the young woman leaves the boyfriend and is beaten by her mother in public view, and a summation (‘and I was eighteen’). The content of this narrative is directly concerned with the social roles in working-class communities in the speaker’s youth. By courting her boyfriend without her parents’ permission, the speaker had violated the norms of the community, and when her mother discovers the violation, she makes a public example of her. Both the speaker and her boyfriend seemed to be aware of the social conventions they had flouted, and although the man appeared willing to ‘face’ the mother and resist those conventions, the speaker was not, and she accepted her public punishment and humiliation. In the summary, or coda (‘and I was eighteen’), the speaker seems to be implying that, even as a young adult woman, she accepted the roles and constraints of the traditional community more willingly than she – or young adults – would now. The working-class speaker here presents herself not through explicit argument, but by way of a conversational narrative that dramatises

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key social issues, and does so implicitly, in a way that the interviewer is expected to understand and appreciate. As Macaulay observes, such narratives are no less sophisticated than arguments in terms of structure and performance, although in educational contexts they might be less highly valued than those structures that make and defend an argument. The point to be attended to here is that ethnographic interviewers should be able to perceive what communicative orientation their interviewee is selecting as an appropriate way of responding to their questions and to analyse the presentation of the interviewee’s self accordingly. While these two examples focus on class as a social formation, the ways in which speakers respond to interview questions might equally be sensitive to other cultural factors such as gender and ethnicity. When training learners to be ethnographic interviewers, then, it is necessary to demonstrate through the analysis of such examples that even in apparently ‘objective’ situations of information transfer and exchange, such as interviews, the background and communicative orientation of individuals will predispose them to understand the function of the interview differently, and so they will select and structure their responses in systemically different ways. The following sections further illustrate this point and suggest ways of addressing it. Questions for reflection

One description of ethnographic observation is ‘loafing and lurking’. Part of the development of an ethnographic mindset is to take time to ‘loaf and lurk’ in everyday situations, such as a café or with a group of friends, and to listen systematically to the interactions going on around you. • In what ways do the interlocutors orient their communication towards the individual or the collective? Describe the linguistic features that indicate the different orientations. • If you are with friends or colleagues, prompt them to give you their opinion on a particular subject. In their response, identify whether they respond with an individual or collective orientation. Interviews as Interaction

The scripted interviews found even in good ELT textbooks, such as Market Leader, quoted above, often share a problem with scripted conversations, namely, a stiltedness that becomes even more apparent if learners are asked to read the dialogues aloud. Erickson (1996: 292) pinpoints the source of this recurring inauthenticity in the absence of ‘the on-line mutual influence that we experience in naturally occurring conversation, the dynamic ebb and flow of listening and speaking relations’ and the ‘fluidity of social identification that can occur as real

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people converse face to face’. There may be many good reasons for reading textbook dialogues aloud, of course, but they do not offer learners the opportunity to cope with real-life interaction which, as Erickson observes, demands a degree of spontaneity and the ability to cope with the unexpected. Interviewers, certainly, need to be aware of the multifaceted and fluid natures of the identities they are probing, and to be able to deal with unpredictable responses to their questions. Erickson (1996: 292– 293) gives the fictional example of an interview between a supervisor and a new employee, a young, female, Puerto Rican of African ancestry, who happens also to be a college graduate in business, a former track star, a lesbian, a mother of small children and an active member of the local Protestant church. Her identity is thus multifaceted, as are all our identities, and in the interaction with her supervisor (or an ethnographic interviewer) she may choose to select one or more facets in preference to another as an interview develops. Thus, as Erickson (1996) reminds us: Different badges for attributes of identity could be made more salient at one moment in the encounter than at other moments. Thus, which attributes of identity would be emphasized as central to the conduct of interaction might vary for a given individual, not from one social situation to the next but within a given situation. (Erickson, 1996: 293)

Such a ‘fluidity of social identification’ in part explains the responses of the members of a set of ‘spectacular’ youth subcultures (i.e. goths, punks, rockers and hippies) when interviewed by researchers who wished to investigate their styles and subcultural affiliations (Widdicombe & Wooffitt, 1995). Their initial difficulties and their ways of resolving them again afford insight into the interpretation of ethnographic data. The researchers clearly set out in the hope that their interviews with members of youth subcultures would yield insights about their need for group affiliation; however, in the interviews the respondents typically avoided categorising themselves and instead addressed their individuality and ‘ordinariness’. One record of an exchange between an interviewer (I) and two ‘goths’ (R1 and R2) makes this point clearly: I:

right, so as a said I’m doing stuff on style and appearance can you tell me something about yourselves the – the way you look R1: w-wu-wh’t d’you mean like … what do you mean … about ourselves’s a bit general huhh I: well … how would you describe what you’re wearing R1: ehm … what I feel … be(hh)st in hhuh … what I feel is sort’f myself I: what about you R2: uhm …

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R2: I: R2:

[Alarm goes off in the background] I just find it really offensive when people… sorry I just find it really offensive when people try to label … what you look like and so … I: yeah R2: then go away and write a magazine article and say oh they’re gothic … or they’re hippy or something. (Widdicombe & Wooffitt, 1995: 106– 107; presentation adapted slightly) Here, as the researchers acknowledge in their subsequent reflection on the exchange, the interviewer seeks what seems to be unproblematic information about the visual style adopted by two ‘goths’, that is, members of a subcultural community who typically choose to dress in funereal black, wear deathly pale make-up and listen to rock bands whose lyrics dwell on morbid themes. Despite their obvious adoption of a spectacular fashion style, both interviewees resist the interviewer’s categorisation of them, the first by seeking clarification of the question and then in her response, emphasising personal choice rather than affiliation with other members of the subculture. The second respondent ‘forcibly protests about the kind of self-identification which the interviewer’s first turn was designed to achieve’ (Widdicombe & Wooffitt, 1995: 107). Information, then, is not exchanged in the straightforward way that the interviewer originally anticipated; instead, the respondents choose to downplay the visually obvious markers of their group affiliation and protest against what they see as the easy assumptions of a ‘straight’ mainstream researcher whose motives, they assume, are to gain status by writing an article for a magazine. In their defence, Widdicombe and Wooffitt (1995: 75n) argue that they did not look like ‘prototypical market researchers’ and did not look ‘out of place in the festivals we attended’ and so they maintain that their informal interviews should be regarded as equivalent to conversations. However, this is a difficult claim to sustain. As we saw in Chapter  5, participants in actual conversations are typically engaged in a negotiation of values and the co-construction of a shared identity. If these negotiations break down, then the conversational group can fragment. By contrast, in Widdicombe and Wooffitt’s interviews, an outsider, no matter how inoffensive, is requesting information about the group affiliations of perceived insiders. The shift in purpose changes the nature of the speech genre. The respondents perceive the interview prompts as implicit demands to explain or justify their dress and lifestyle choices. The first respondent’s request for clarification can thus be interpreted as a strategy to make the interviewer ‘come clean’ about the intent of the question; the second respondent’s complaint can be interpreted as a rejection of the assumptions that might lead the interviewer to classify them as one

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thing or another. It is important to note that the interview progresses on the basis of the participants’ interpretation of the intent behind the utterances of the other participants. As the second respondent assumes that the researcher is a journalist who is planning to write a stereotypical magazine piece on teen styles, her complaint can be read partly as a protest about being misunderstood, and partly about being exploited. The downplaying of what may seem to be obvious badges of social and cultural affiliation was a common (but not universal) feature of Widdicombe and Wooffitt’s interview data, and this fact is a cautionary example to anyone hoping to conduct ethnographic projects on the topic of group identity. The way that identity is constructed is not straightforward and the question-answer structure of interviews may not be the best way to elicit it. Even when their respondents were cooperative, the answers to the questions were not necessarily direct, although later analysis showed them to be surprisingly consistent in some respects. When Widdicombe and Wooffitt asked various subcultural members ‘Is being a punk/hippy/rocker important to you?’, they received similar answers, although none of them directly addressed the benefits of subcultural affiliation: I: is being a punk very important to you R: yeah, very indeed I couldn’t imagine myself being straight at all … like dressing neatly in tidy nice clothes an’ having my hair down and all that hh      […] I: is it very important to you … being a hippy R: er … I dunno, y’know, I – well, I wouldn’t like to be anything else – put it that way – I wouldn’t like to be ’orrible trendy smelly yellow shirts an’ things like that …     […] I: is being a rocker important to you R: er … ahha aye … it’s jus the way I am er … couldn’t imagine life … of er … of say I lived wi’ … I dunno … bu’ … I remember the royal family you know having a go at these people as er you know an’ er going about wearing suits an’ everything … gong to all these functions and do’s an’ that er … driving about in a Ferrari … I jus couldn’t see it … I mean … I: mmhm R: it’s easier being being the way I am … it’s jus … jus comes natural ken? (Widdicombe & Wooffitt: 1995: 168–176; ­presentation adapted) Instead of saying something like ‘It’s important/not important to me because…’, the respondents construct their answers in terms of what

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Widdicombe and Wooffitt (1995: 174) call ‘a rejection of alternatives’. Those who are rejected as ‘other’ are those who conform (are ‘straight’), are fashionable (‘trendy’) or, in the final example, are business people (‘suits’), conspicuously wealthy (‘drive Ferraris’) or epitomise the establishment (‘the royal family’). Respondents thus indirectly affirm the importance of membership of their subcultural group without actually referring to the lifestyle, beliefs or activities associated with that group but through a rejection of what they are not. By describing and rejecting the ‘other’, here the ‘straight’ middle classes or even aristocrats, the respondents are implicitly affirming their own values. The interviews discussed above are useful for novice ethnographers to consider for several reasons. First, they again demonstrate what is meant by speech progressing through real-time interaction, and the importance of being sensitive to the way participants frame the exchange, even in an interview situation when the focus might be expected to be on the ‘objective’ transfer of information. The oppositional stance taken by some members of the subcultural group is communicated not by the explicit statement of a personal position but implicitly by strategies such as seeking clarification, challenging, rejecting the inferred basis for the question and rejecting alternatives rather than stating preferences. Secondly, the examples show the difficulties that even a professional researcher can experience when trying to acquire data on an interesting cultural phenomenon. It can be hard going to interview members of a particular community or subculture in order to gain information about the values, attitudes and behaviour that bond the group together and afford the individual member some kind of benefit. The interviewer may well be treated, at least at first, as an outsider, and his or her motives may be questioned. Moreover, the presuppositions that inform the interviewer’s questions might well be challenged by the interviewees in a series of interactional strategies, and, if they answer the questions at all, they answer them only indirectly. As well as being skilled at observation and eliciting, then, the interviewer must also be adept at analysing the data that results from the interview process. Questions for reflection

Think of a distinctive cultural group whose members you or your learners might feasibly be able to interview. This might be a group that is distinguished, for example, by style, faith, profession or leisure interest. • List some direct or indirect questions or prompts that your learners could use in order to probe the issues of identity, value and belief that might underlie the interviewees’ cultural affiliation. • Look again at your questions from the perspective of the interviewees. Discuss whether some interviewees might interpret the questions

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or prompts as hostile or intrusive. Explain how you might frame the interview in advance, to better ensure interviewees’ cooperation. • Describe the linguistic resources that learners would need to call upon to cope with the almost inevitable ‘communicative blunders’ that occur in interview situations. Using Interviews to Explore Culture

If used cautiously and reflexively, interviews can certainly be a rich and informative means of exploring culture. Learners can be trained to use them in small-scale and also larger-scale projects. In the analysis of an interview, both the content and the speech style of the interviewer and the interviewee are worth attending to. In other words, as well as paying attention to what is said, learners should pay attention to how it is said, and be alert to patterns that reveal attitudes, values and beliefs. The following framework for analysis might help novice researchers: (1)

Setting (a) Where did the interview take place? (b) How comfortable did the interviewee feel there? (c) How well did the participants in the interview know each other beforehand? (d) What was the stated purpose of the interview? Would the participants understand its purpose in the same way? (2) How were the interviewer’s questions understood? (a) What points, if any, required clarification? (b) Were any of the questions challenged? If so, why? (c) Did any of the questions have to be rephrased? If so, why? (d) Did the interviewee give minimal or extensive responses? (e) Were difficult questions responded to by hesitation, false starts, changes of topic direction? (f) How explicitly did the interviewer articulate his or her questions? How far did he or she attempt to elicit information by indirect questioning? (3) Presentation of the self/relationship with the interviewer (a) Did the interviewee mainly present arguments, give descriptions or tell stories? (b) Did he or she answer from an individual or group perspective? If the latter, how was the group characterised? (c) Was the language used relatively formal or informal? (d) Did the interviewee interrupt the interviewer? (e) (If video-recorded) How did posture, gesture, eye-movement, facial expression, etc. contribute to the interaction and shape the meanings exchanged?

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To give a brief example of modest, learner-produced interviews, we shall consider in detail extracts from two interviews between a pair of adult, advanced L2 speakers (one from Brazil and the other from Turkey) and three respondents whom they interviewed in Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, some months after the gallery opened in the late 1990s. The interviewers were participants in a British Cultural Studies summer school organised by the British Council in Glasgow. The interviews illustrate the kind of small-scale project work that can be done with advanced learners who are sojourning in an anglophone environment. Here, working as a pair, the interviewers approached, in turn, an older woman and a younger couple, who were strangers to them. The respondents were visiting the gallery for the first time, and they accepted the invitation to answer the interviewers’ questions upon being informed that they were doing a project on visitors’ views of the rebranding of Glasgow as a city of culture. By the late 1990s, Glasgow had been marketed as a destination for cultural tourism for some time, having been designated ‘European City of Culture’ in 1990, and the interviews focused on eliciting locals’ awareness and views about of the makeover of Glasgow’s earlier image as a declining industrial conurbation. In the interviews, A and B are the interviewers, C is the older woman, and D and E are a younger couple. In the Art Gallery (1) A: and you think this idea of city of culture … come … is a new … new one? C: it’s a new thing … and I don’t feel it’s for the ordinary working class people you know B: [inaudible] C: I don’t think so, I think they are going over the top as far as ordinary peop – ordinary people can’t get to these things, you know what I mean A: mmm C: they’re so expensive … even the new eh concert hall, now it’s been built I think maybe it might be two years, maybe three, maybe even four, I have never been near it B: ohh C: and as I say because of all the – they’ve built a lot of nice – people go there – but things are so expensive they’re not really for the ordinary person if you can understand … I’m sorry to go on like this but I really feel that that’s what it’s about you know, they’re dealing – they’re definitely going above theirself and people just can’t afford these kind of things … if they’d get down to a lower level I feel that, em, you know, it would be much better … but that’s only my opinion … thanks very much. B: thank you

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In the Art Gallery (2) A: it’s presented eh as a city of culture mainly and we were wondering to eh what extent this idea is eh real and genuine and to what extent this idea is eh real and genuine and to what extent it is something constructed, created by the tourism industry maybe. D: yeah, the 1990 year of culture thing helped quite a lot A: mmm D: but I think a lot – E: that was built upon D: yeah, I think it’s been built upon a lot since then and – E: it … I think it started off as em just sort of being created to help tourism or whatever and now they’ve built upon that em – D: yeah, I think the people of Glasgow have taken to their heart quite a lot to actually build on it quite a lot E: it means they’ve done a lot with theatre and you know constructing the art gallery and things like that and they’ve taken pride in their city being a city of culture A: yeh E: and so it’s developed from there A: when the word culture comes into one’s mind is it high culture which is meant here in Glasgow or popular culture in general? D: I think it’s popular culture E: yeah A: popular culture D: it’s very much a culture of the people, you know, it’s it’s a culture that [clears throat] that everyone can take part in, it’s not a sort of hierarchy culture A: ordinary people D: yeah, uh huh, definitely, I mean there’s here E: there’s not there’s not a great deal of snobbery in it D: no no E: em, you know, it’s just your everyday person what they believe culture is D: yeah everyone takes part A: yeh D: very much so In projects like this, the learners will gather a number of responses from different people, and, as the examples show, this kind of interview will yield a sample of diverse opinions. Novice researchers may need to be reminded that this kind of random data collection is manifestly unsystematic and therefore unrepresentative of the population as a whole, and they may need to be cautioned about making easy generalisations from the data. What they are looking for is the ‘telling’ example rather than

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the ‘typical’ example (cf. Mitchell, 1984: 239) – that is, while we cannot argue that the respondents in interviews like this represent the general population, the patterns of their responses nevertheless afford insights into certain key beliefs, values and attitudes. The interviewees here were cooperative and articulate, and seemed to understand the questions and their purpose. The responses were relatively extensive and expressed clear points of view. The content of the responses is divergent in that the older woman and the younger couple express different opinions about Glasgow’s image as a city of culture, but the discursive strategies used to justify those are, interestingly, almost identical. The older woman complains that the rebranding of Glasgow as a city of culture is not for the ‘ordinary’ person: events are too expensive and they are ‘over their heads’, in other words, ‘ordinary’ people are not in a position to gain access to or understand or appreciate the cultural events. She supports this claim with the observation that she has never visited the new concert hall. Her combination of personal evaluation (‘I think/feel…’) and anecdotal support shows the inadequacy of a polarised view of speech styles as either individual or community oriented in the terms discussed earlier in this chapter. The respondent, who aligns herself explicitly with the working class, is articulate in presenting what she acknowledges is ‘only her opinion’ and draws upon elements both of Bernstein’s ‘elaborated code’ (in her arguments) and ‘restricted code’ (in the narrative element) in order to do so. The couple in the second extract are more consistently oriented towards the individual in their speech styles: there are many generalisations, often hedged with ‘I think’. Even here, though, as in the other interview, the ‘I thinks’ are balanced by the community-oriented discourse marker ‘you know’, the function of which is to raise common ground between the respondent and the interviewer, that is, to appeal to shared community norms and perspectives. The utterance of ‘you know’ tends to be an invitation for the interviewer to backchannel with a nod or a supportive ‘mm’ to show engagement or assent. In this extract there are no narratives to support the claims made, though ‘E’ gives several examples that chronicle the development of the artistic programme of the city, in defence of the repeated statement that its emerging cultural reputation has been ‘built upon’. What links the two divergent opinions is the common strategy of constructing an ‘ordinary’ person’s perspective. Although this idealised construction is consistently referred to in the third person (e.g. A: ‘People just can’t afford…’; E: ‘It’s just your everyday person, what they believe culture is’), the ‘ordinary’ person’s viewpoint is the position from which all three respondents choose to discuss Glasgow’s cultural aspirations. The cultural construction of ‘ordinariness’ may vary according to age and social class but it is clearly seen by all three respondents here as a powerful rhetorical position from which to advance their opinions. This finding is not particularly original: when researching youth subcultures, Widdicombe and Wooffitt were initially surprised to find

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that members of these subcultures who were easily identifiable by their ‘spectacular’ modes of dress, make-up and hairstyle, consistently regarded themselves as representatives of ‘ordinariness’. This is evident, for example, in one of their interviews with a punk: R: ah mean I know ah’m a punk know but … I jus(t) … I feel as though I’m the same as everyone else … I mean I dress diff’rently (h) but there again everyone dresses differently to everyone else so like I: yeah R: when people look at me as if I’m an alien, it sometimes … it gets me really annoyed because … you know, I’m just the same as everybody else. (Widdicombe & Wooffitt, 1995: 124; presentation adapted) Evidently, whatever their opinions, fashions or lifestyles, many people wish to be considered ‘ordinary’. The interesting thing to explore is the ways in which, for example in the ‘art gallery’ interviews, the respondents construct how an ‘ordinary’ member of the collective behaves, and what values he or she is presented as having. In the first interview, the ‘ordinary’ person is supposed to have limited access to city centre arts venues, limited funds to spend on arts activities and a common-sense understanding of cultural products. The respondent’s criticism of the city council is based on the argument that it is not making culture accessible – economically or intellectually – to the ‘ordinary person’ thus conceived. By contrast, the younger couple constructs the ‘ordinary person’ as interested in and having access to cultural products, as taking pride in the city and being without pretension. Their idealised ‘ordinary person’ is an active participant in cultural events, and one who has even hijacked the city council’s agenda, which is seen as focused on expanding tourism, by encouraging a more democratic local participation in cultural events. The responses of ‘C’, ‘D’ and ‘E’ in these interviews indirectly tell us as much about who the respondents feel the ‘ordinary person’ is, and how that ‘ordinary person’ should engage with high culture, than they tell us directly about their opinions of the marketing of Glasgow. The interviewers’ analysis of their transcripts therefore needed to pay attention to indexical as well as referential data. An ethnographic approach to interviewing, in sum, needs to attend to (1) the content of the interview; (2) the way the interaction develops between interviewee and interviewer; and (3) the speech styles and discursive strategies used by respondents as they describe their opinions, argue their case and dramatise their values through narration. By role-playing and recording ethnographic interviews in both the first and the target languages, and then analysing stretches of the interactions, learners can be trained in basic interview techniques and interpretative strategies.

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Questions for reflection

Think of how your learners might interview you as a subject. • Consider the aspects of your identity that you would be comfortable or uncomfortable being questioned about, e.g. your professional identity, your social class position, your gender orientation, your views of parenthood or your role as a family member? • Discuss how your own attitude and responses might differ, depending on which aspects of your identity are being foregrounded in an interview? Designing Larger-Scale Ethnographic Projects

A considerable volume of the literature on the intercultural approach to language education encourages mature learners who are, linguistically, reasonably competent, to undertake larger-scale ethnographic projects, preferably as part of a visit to the target culture (e.g. Barro et al., 1998; Jackson, 2019; Roberts et  al., 2001). Damen (1987) also advises teachers and learners to undertake a more extended ethnographic project, although she is as hesitant as other educators to conflate ethnography in language learning with the kind of ‘professional’ research outlined at the start of Chapter  6. Damen (1987) prefers to label ethnography for language learning as ‘pragmatic ethnography’, noting: This designation has been chosen in order to remind all of us that the procedures used are to serve personal and practical purposes and not to provide scientific data and theory. (Damen, 1987: 63)

Although pragmatic ethnography is not directed towards scientific or theoretical ends, it can take inspiration from research-oriented ethnography, and aspire to a detailed and systematic observation of aspects of the target culture. Damen (1987) suggests seven steps towards an individual ethnographic project for teachers, and these steps are evidently adaptable for advanced learners too. They are summarised, with minor adaptations, below: (1) Choose a target group and spend time observing and studying it, taking field-notes. (2) Choose informants who are able to represent this group. (3) Do library/internet research on the group, if possible. (4) Interview the informant(s) remembering: (a) not to identify informants by name unless permission has been granted (b)  not to make evaluative comments during the interview, but rather eliciting non-judgmentally

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(c) to request permission to make notes or to record the interview in some other way. (5) Analyse the resulting data and form a cultural hypothesis. (6) Reflect upon your own frames of reference and expectations; seek to understand the limitations of the evidence used to make the hypothesis in (5). (7) Use the insights from your research to inform your teaching materials. (Damen, 1987: 64–69) For example, a project in a non-anglophone setting might look at the ways in which children in secondary education use English outside the classroom. Available respondents would have to be chosen and, in most contexts, consent forms would have to be obtained from parents and assent forms from the subjects themselves. The researcher would need to do some background reading to gain an understanding of the local educational system and the place of English in the local curriculum. If possible, the researcher might observe some English classes in order to see how the subject is taught, and, if possible, observe the pupils outside class to identify the patterns of face-to-face and online communication that they engage in. The researcher would then be in a better position to start devising informed interview questions or prompts. The actual interviews might be face to face or conducted initially by written questionnaire. If face to face, the researcher might decide to interview respondents individually or in groups. The questions might balance more general topics with more specific ones. The researcher might be interested in the pupils’ reading habits, media consumption, use of social media, interaction with English-speaking friends or family and so on. The data can then be analysed initially, not only to see what patterns of English usage pupils engage in (e.g. do they use English to watch television or films, or listen to music, or read graphic novels, or whatever?) but also to explore what their attitudes are (are they curious about anglophone culture or do they actively avoid it?). The exploration of attitudes obviously speaks to issues of intercultural communicative competence, and the researcher might begin to form a cultural hypothesis relating pupils’ use of English outside the classroom and beyond the formal curriculum to, say, attitudes of openness and curiosity. Step 6 is a necessary corrective to the researcher’s likely enthusiasm – here researchers should reflect on their own frames of reference (Are they adequate for the explanation of the data? Are alternative explanations of the data possible?). The seventh step supports Damen’s view that ‘practical’ ethnography should support teachers and learners in designing, selecting and supplementing their learning materials and activities. A project such as the one above might support, for example, the dissemination of good practice: learners who do not actively seek opportunities for learning English outside the classroom might learn new strategies from classmates who do.

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Moreover, a teacher who is better informed about the ways in which his or her learners are using (or not using) the target language outside the formal curriculum is in a better position to align the ‘formal’ learning materials with learners’ actual language practices, even if the outcome is simply the suggestion that learners watch their favourite English language television programmes broadcast by streaming networks with subtitles in English rather than in the L1, and make a list of interesting expressions to bring to class to use in role plays or discussions. Ethnographic projects can be at different levels of ambition. One of the most elaborate and influential programmes in ethnographic training for language learning is described in Barro et al. (1998) and Roberts et al. (2001). A group of lecturers at the then Thames Valley University (now the University of West London) in Ealing, England, developed a course to prepare modern languages students for ethnographic fieldwork during their mandatory year abroad, that part of their studies in which they were required to live in the country whose language they were learning. The Ealing Ethnography programme was implemented over three years in three distinct stages: (1) an introduction to ethnography during the second year of the BA degree programme; (2) fieldwork conducted during the year abroad; and (3) a written project, completed in the fourth and final year of the programme, based on the fieldwork undertaken. The project had to be written in the target language. The introductory training phase in ethnography covered such skills as participant observation, interviewing skills, conversation analysis and microethnography, and the recording and analysis of ‘naturally occurring’ events, as well topics such as non-verbal communication, family structures, gender relations, education, national and regional identities, politics and belief structures (Barro et  al., 1998: 82). The ethnography training was conducted ‘experientially’ through fieldwork in the home culture, in the expectation that the ethnographic skills thus developed would transfer to an investigation of the target culture later. However, there was also background reading, mainly of academic texts from the discipline of anthropology. Although the Ealing Ethnography project was elaborate and integrated fully into the modern languages degree programme at university level, it was still distinguished by the course team from ‘real’ ethnographic research. They conclude: The students are not intending to become specialists in social anthropology. They are language students who, we hope, will become even better language students as a result of living the ethnographic life […] They need the cultural tools for making sense of new intercultural contacts and experiences rather than positivistic facts about other countries, structures and systems which are, despite the text-books’ attempt to freeze-dry them and turn them into fresh-looking, digestible items of information, constantly in a process of contestation and change. (Barro et al., 1998: 97)

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From the modest in scale to the ambitiously elaborate, then, there is a range of ways in which learners can be encouraged to ‘live the ethnographic life’. At one extreme there are prolonged and well-resourced programmes such as the Ealing Ethnography project, in which learners were carefully prepared to enter an unfamiliar environment and conduct fieldwork over a year, with equal time to reflect on the data and write it up afterwards. At the other extreme, there are small-scale observational tasks and interviews that learners of English can conduct in their home communities as part of ethnographic training. The intercultural competences involved are obvious: learners acquire knowledge, skills of discovery and interaction and, in many cases, attitudes of openness and curiosity are encouraged via active engagement with an unfamiliar community, or even a familiar one, looked at afresh. Questions for reflection

• If your learners have the time and opportunity to undertake a more ambitious ethnographic project, think about how you would identify a particular community to observe, how you might develop observation schedules and rehearse interview protocols, and how you would guide learners on strategies for interpreting the resulting data. • In your own teaching context, explain what your preferred format would be for the final presentation of findings, e.g. a mini-conference, a blog or a written report. • Discuss what ‘rehearsal’ activities might usefully be developed in class to support an ethnographic project, e.g. certain types of role play or analysis of question-and-answer exchanges. • The more ambitious activities described in this chapter are clearly targeted towards more mature learners with at least intermediate level (minimum CEFR B2) English. Discuss if they could be adapted for younger and less linguistically competent learners, and how. This chapter and the previous one have focused on the development of observational and interviewing skills. The assumption so far has been that the learners’ observations and interviews will take place in situ, either at home or in an unfamiliar community. However, a growing area of language learning activity is ‘virtual ethnography’ involving internet-mediated partnerships across countries. In online intercultural exchanges, the learner can be engaged in home ethnographies with a view to presenting the outcomes to partners elsewhere. The partners, in turn, are also engaged in parallel tasks to which the learners are required to respond. Such exchanges can be demanding and frustrating, but they can also be highly rewarding for both learners and teachers – and they are substantial enough to be addressed separately in Chapter 8.

8 Virtual Ethnographies: Intercultural Telecollaboration

This chapter concludes a set of three chapters exploring the value for intercultural language education of conducting practical, learningoriented ethnographies. In this chapter, the focus shifts towards computer-mediated intercultural collaborations, or ‘virtual ethnographies’ between geographically distant learners. Such collaborations have become increasingly popular since the dawn of the era of digital communications (for early experiments, see Warschauer, 1995), in part because they hold out the promise of meaningful observation and reflection on one’s own culture whilst exploring the culture of others. However, as most practitioners allow, successful online exchanges are difficult to achieve (cf. O’Dowd, 2007; O’Dowd & Dooly, 2020). In many ways, the affordances and challenges of virtual ethnographies parallel those of ‘live’ ethnography, in that the potential for cultural understanding is balanced by the potential for making, and learning from, what Briggs (1986: 39–60) calls ‘communicative blunders’ (see Chapter  7). While there is a regrettably low likelihood of preventing misunderstandings, misfires and confusion in online exchanges, as in many other intercultural communicative contexts, there are also ways of mitigating them and exploiting the possibilities they offer for intercultural learning. The topics covered in this chapter, then, are: • • • • • •

The nature of virtual ethnography. Setting up a collaborative partnership. Sample ethnographic activities. Developing rapport amongst telecollaborators. Exploring learner identities online. Facilitating telecollaborative exchanges.

The chapter ends with a summary of the ways in which developing an ethnographic mindset, as described in this and Chapters 6 and 7, relates to the promotion of intercultural communicative competence.

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The Nature of Virtual Ethnography

The first two decades of the 21st century have witnessed an explosion of active interest in computer-mediated telecollaborations between geographically distant learners, a trend that began as the previous century drew to a close. The growth of interest can be traced in numerous collections that report on teachers’ experiences with this new and swiftly developing set of educational practices (e.g. Belz & Thorne, 2006; Dooly & O’Dowd, 2018; Guth & Helm, 2010; Linke, 2006; O’Dowd, 2007; O’Dowd & Lewis, 2016; Sharifian & Jamarani, 2013; Tcherepashenets, 2015; Warschauer, 1995). Among the more useful position papers for intercultural language educators are O’Dowd (2012), O’Dowd and Dooly (2020) and Belz (2007). This chapter draws on these sources as well as this author’s own experiences of a number of telecollaborations, as reported, for example, in Corbett and Phipps (2006), Anderson and Corbett (2012, 2015), Lima and Dart (2019) and Corbett et al. (forthcoming). O’Dowd (2012) and O’Dowd and Dooly (2020) give a brief historical outline of the surge of interest in telecollaboration, which can be dated back to learning networks established in the early 20th century by dedicated teachers who used pre-internet forms of communication to connect distant groups of learners and engage them in activities that combined language and culture learning. The development of the internet in the 1990s and increasing ease of access to digital communications in the 21st century have radically altered the landscape for telecollaboration. A host of formal and informal partnerships developed between teachers, groups and institutions that aimed to connect learners who were distant from each other. Digital platforms also proliferated, from simple emails to virtual learning environments, such as Moodle, Edmodo and Google Classroom, and social media such as Facebook. Following pioneering early work (e.g. by the contributors to Warschauer, 1995), Dodd (2001) reported on an email-based project that aimed to increase the motivation to learn about language and culture amongst English and French schoolboys, and Carel (2001) described a project that used video, computermediated communication and classroom-based investigation specifically to train ‘virtual ethnographers’. A decade later, O’Dowd (2012) identified 12 types of popular telecollaborative task: • • • • • • •

Authoring ‘cultural autobiographies’. Carrying out virtual interviews. Engaging in informal discussions. Exchanging story collections. Comparing parallel texts, e.g. common folk tales, or remakes of films. Comparing class questionnaires. Analysing cultural products, e.g. films, literature, pieces of material culture.

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• Collaborative translation activities. • Collaborative creation of a product such as an essay or PowerPoint presentation • Rewriting of texts from one genre to another. • Collaboration in ‘closed outcome’ activities such as ‘spot the differences’ pictures. • Making cultural translation/adaptations, e.g. revising a film scene or advertisement from one culture so that it is appropriate for another. O’Dowd (2012: 345–347) In his discussion of these task types, O’Dowd observes that they target different learning contexts, different kinds of learner with different motivations and language proficiencies. None is perfect; for example, the writing of ‘cultural autobiographies’ can lead to self-stereotyping and is restricted to personal narratives; the exchange of story collections can (depending on the degree of learner involvement) be a more or less superficial form of information exchange and so on. Even carrying out virtual ethnography via written interviews and informal online discussions can become activities that dwell too much on the information exchanged, whereas, as Chapter 7 indicated, much of the ethnographic interviewer’s interest usually lies in indexical features such as tone of voice and facial expression. Despite the limitations and the potential pitfalls, telecollaboration remains a powerful resource for intercultural language education, and it does so for a number of reasons. First, as Belz (2007: 130) suggests, telecollaboration enables learners who are not physically present in another culture to become virtual tourists or sojourners, exploring the attitudes, values and beliefs of others through computer-mediated contact with individuals and groups from that culture. They are also encouraged to view themselves through the defamiliarising experience of describing their own attitudes, values and beliefs to the other. The resulting dialogue, of course, is not one between two monolithic, static and given sets of identities; rather, participants can be encouraged to reflect on how aspects of their identities are shaped in and through intercultural dialogue (cf. Anderson & Corbett, 2015; Dervin, 2013; see further below). Secondly, unlike the ethnographic activities described in Chapters 6 and 7, which focus largely on speaking and listening, most virtual ethnographies involve written communication of one kind or another, since, given practicalities like time zone differences, regular online contact between participants is often asynchronous rather than synchronous. There may be, and often is, teleconferencing among participants in a telecollaboration at some point, but most activities in O’Dowd’s list, above, involve written work, e.g. a written personal narrative, written interviews or discussions, completion and discussion of questionnaires, description and evaluation of cultural products, collaborative essay or report writing and

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so on. While the genres involved in computer-mediated interaction are distinctive, and, as we shall see, in some cases they are closer to speech than to other written text types, the asynchronous nature of virtual ethnography lends itself to the development of writing and reading in the target language. Despite the inevitable frustrations, then, telecollaborations that focus on intercultural exploration and mediation can be rewarding. The following guidelines and suggestions may help maximise the effectiveness of such exchanges. Questions for reflection

• Look again at the list of activity types suggested by O’Dowd (2012). Which would be most suitable for your own learners to try? • Which of the activity types would be more suitable for older and younger participants? • The experience of setting up and running a telecollaboration can be challenging. What kinds of problems and frustrations do you anticipate that teachers and students might encounter – and how might they address them? Setting up a Collaborative Partnership

There are various websites that are designed to help novice telecollaborators to partner with colleagues elsewhere in the world.1 Experience suggests, however, that one of the best ways to establish partnerships is through personal connections, perhaps fellow instructors encountered at conferences or on professional development courses. A core of interested colleagues can then grow organically into a small network of like-minded collaborators. The personal connection among participating teachers is vitally important in establishing and maintaining a successful telecollaboration, as goals and procedures need to be agreed at the outset, and partners need to develop good trust and reliable communication practices amongst themselves. As we shall see, this basis of mutual trust and understanding needs to be replicated, in due course, by the participants. Müller-Hartmann (2007) discusses the teacher’s role in setting up and managing a telecollaborative exchange once contact with a potential partner has been made. The key points may be summarised as follows, with some additions and adaptations: • Negotiate the aims of the collaboration, bearing in mind learners’ age, maturity, language proficiency level, familiarity with the digital platform, etc. • Ensure that all partners and participants are comfortable with the chosen platform. • Set up a clear timeframe for the collaboration, e.g. 10 weeks.

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• Agree the tasks – or task types – that the participants will engage in and who is responsible for posting them. Again, in our experience, effective partnerships tend to have one enthusiastic coordinator who assumes responsibility for keeping the partner teachers ‘on task’ by posting reminders and monitoring learner activity. • Set aside an initial ice-breaking period for participants to learn about each other and establish rapport and trust; identify rules of ‘netiquette’. • Set up basic rules for the learners, e.g. they must post at least one response to the task weekly, and also respond to at least one other participant’s posting. • Agree if and how teachers will coach learners during the project, e.g. if they will participate and intervene in discussion threads online (see further below). • Build in opportunities – online or offline – for participants to reflect on their postings or even analyse them in depth. These guidelines are flexible enough to allow for a number of types of telecollaborative project, e.g. where participants agree to watch a series of films or internationally streamed television programmes and discuss them online, perhaps responding to teacher prompts on a weekly basis. In one short telecollaborative exchange I observed, students from the Islamic University of Gaza and the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil used English to share their own creative writing and ‘flash’ non-fiction (i.e. short pieces of non-fictional writing) in a closed social media group, before meeting ‘live’ in a teleconference to discuss their work. In some contexts, care needs to be taken at the beginning to establish ground rules for discussing ‘sensitive’ topics such as religion and politics. In some countries, exchanges between participants in telecollaborations are likely to be monitored by authorities who are sensitive to what they see as ‘anti-establishment’ content. There will, therefore, be restrictions on topics that participants in those countries can directly address. The following sections of this chapter assume that participants are engaged in small-scale tasks that are designed to develop an ethnographic frame of mind towards the local and other culture, and so develop aspects of intercultural communicative competence (cf. Anderson & Corbett, 2013; Belz, 2007). The age level is assumed to be mid-upper teens to young adults, with at least intermediate-level English (Common European Framework of Reference [CEFR] B2 and above). The participants can be linked via a virtual learning environment such as Moodle, Edmodo or Google Classrooms, though social media platforms such as Facebook groups might also be used. The choice depends partly on learners’ access and the teachers’ and learners’ familiarity and comfort with the platform. The telecollaborations tend to be 10–12  weeks in length,

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to allow for initial ice-breaking and rapport-building activities, and the subsequent development of a number of activities plus periods of reflection. The course coordinators post a task each week, and the learners are required to respond to the teacher’ prompts and also to each other’s posts. In many courses that I have been involved with, the coordinators follow Brumfit’s (1985: 12) dictum that the best kind of syllabus is one with ‘holes in it’, that is, it is flexible enough to allow for learners’ own interests to emerge, and, indeed, many of the most productive discussion threads and explorations, in my experience and that of my fellow teachers, have been learner generated. A 10–12  week telecollaboration also allows for periods of reflection and analysis of the interactions. Although many telecollaborations take place fully online, the ideal scenario is a ‘blended’ course whereby learners have the opportunity to rehearse and reflect in the classroom regularly, say once a week, alongside the online activities. As noted, then, the following sections assume a telecollaboration of this kind, although the structure is flexible enough to be adapted to different contexts of learning. The sections will discuss sample ethnographic activity types, how the learners’ responses display rapport and changing identities and the role of the teacher in sustaining and guiding learner responses and reflections. Questions for reflection

• Note down a brief checklist of the kind of characteristics you would want to find in a partner in a telecollaborative exchange. Discuss the extent to which you, too, embody these characteristics. • Look again at the summary of Müller-Hartmann’s (2007) advice on how to set up an exchange once you have identified a partner or partners. Explain how you would draw upon his advice to set up a telecollaborative exchange for a group of learners with whom you are familiar. Sample Tasks for Virtual Ethnography

The kinds of task that can be undertaken for virtual ethnography are very similar to those that can be used for ‘home’ ethnographies (Chapter 6), with the added value that the descriptions and analysis will be shared online and discussed with telecollaborative partners. Ideally, the activities would allow for rehearsal and presentation in class, with time for refinement before posting online, and further time for reflection afterwards, although time constraints may curtail some of this process. Corbett (2010) is a resource book that suggests a number of ethnographic activities that can be adapted for telecollaborative projects; indeed, many of them are based on successful activities developed over a number of such exchanges.

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Trust-building activities

Activities suggested for the initial stage of any new exchange focus on ice-breaking and, as such, they will be familiar to many English language teachers. For example, learners might simply be asked to describe themselves, or their likes and dislikes, in four or five words or phrases, and post those online. They are then required to follow up on the others’ postings, perhaps asking them to elaborate on particular choices of words or expressed preferences. Even as apparently simple a task as this can yield rich points for reflection. In one example from an intercultural exchange, a female Asian undergraduate medical student expressed a fondness for the character, ‘Hello Kitty’, and invited friendship with those who shared this liking, which prompted a class discussion amongst the European undergraduate participants about the meanings and expectations of ‘cute culture’ and how to respond to it as an outsider. In some telecollaborations, given time, learners can be encouraged to develop and share their own rules of ‘netiquette’, which could involve discussing and then negotiating their own aims and expectations from the collaboration. One common problem with telecollaborations is that teachers and learners in different locations have diverse and unstated goals that they assume the exchange will achieve: some might see the collaboration primarily as a social exchange intended to give the opportunity to practise interactive language, while others might consider the exchange an opportunity to engage in more academic, and perhaps more critical description and analysis. At the start of the telecollaboration, then, the teacher might prompt the learners to state explicitly how many hours they will invest in the project, and how often they will post and respond to postings. ‘Netiquette’ also establishes norms of mutual respect and openness to whatever diversity of opinions might arise from the interaction. Openness does not necessarily mean acceptance of attitudes, beliefs and values expressed, but a commitment to addressing difference with critical respect and a desire to understand why (if this occurs) certain unfamiliar or even distasteful attitudes, beliefs and values might have been expressed by one’s telecollaborative partner – and equally a desire to understand why one’s own beliefs, attitudes and values might be found strange or distasteful by the other. To sum up, early in a telecollaborative project, some activities should be directed towards building trust between participants, establishing an agreed frame by which all participants understand the goals and procedures of the telecollaboration, and certain rules of interpersonal behaviour that will govern the exchanges. Teacher-led activities

The main activities in a telecollaborative course on virtual ethnography might adapt the kinds of concept training, critical incidents and

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ethnographic interviews described in Chapters  6 and 7. Corbett (2010) categorises such activities in part according to whether the investigations address aspects of public or domestic life. Thus, learners are invited to explore familiar public spaces such as shopping centres, hairdressing salons, cafés and urban transport, and they are also prompted to think about the layout of the rooms of their houses, the type of furniture they have and how it is used, and patterns of media consumption within the family. Further activities focus on topics like childhood, religion, politics and sport: learners are encouraged to do cross-generational research into childhood play, attend a religious service as an ‘outsider’, consider political campaign procedures in different cultures (where they exist) and look at how spectators behave at a sports event. In some cases, observational schedules are provided to prompt learners who have not yet developed their own systematic habits of ‘loafing and lurking’, describing and analysing. If viewed using the CEFR model of intercultural communicative competence, such activities mainly target the savoirs of discovery and interaction, although knowledge about various aspects of the home and other culture, as well as an exploration of attitudes, and a certain amount of relating and interpreting, are also involved. Not all of the activities will be suitable for all learners, and teachers and coordinators need to use their judgement about, for example, how sensitive learners might be about exposing to the group aspects of their personal and domestic lives. Experience suggests that some participants are completely happy, even enthusiastic, about doing so, while others are reticent. There are also certain countries where open discussion of religious, sexual or political issues is delicate or even dangerous. Teachers will need to monitor these issues, treat them sympathetically if they arise and manage any conflicts that emerge over the duration of a telecollaboration. A sample activity: Linguistic landscaping

Activities can be modest or more elaborate in scale, and adapted to the age, maturity and linguistic competence of the learners. An example of a topic area that lends itself to intercultural comparison and a number of flexible activities is that of linguistic landscaping in different countries. The sociolinguistic study of multilingual textual practices in public spaces is now well established (see, for example, Schmitt, 2018; Shohamy et al., 2010; Zhang, 2016; Zhang & Chan, 2017) and it lends itself to home and virtual ethnographies of varying degrees of complexity, particularly but not solely in non-anglophone environments. The increasing use of English in public spaces in non-anglophone countries has been noted in the linguistic landscape literature cited above. In most countries of the world, learners can, at a very basic level, be encouraged to identify examples of English used in their local community

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(e.g. in shop signs, metro stations, shopping centres and tourist spots) and, again at the most elementary level, simply photograph, collate and share online an A–Z of local English usages, with perhaps a brief comment about where the examples were collected (cf. Corbett, 2010: 70–71). A more ambitious ethnographic study might involve both observing English signage in the local landscape and interviewing subjects about their attitudes to it. Subjects could be either local inhabitants or tourists in the home environment, or the online partners. The teachers and learners can develop an interview schedule to prompt the elicitation of information and attitudes from the subjects. One inspiration for such an interview schedule is the series of prompts suggested by Garvin (2010) for a ‘post-modern walking tour’ of Spanish language signage in Memphis, Tennessee. Garvin’s argument is that long-term locals and Hispanic newcomers in Memphis construct their identities, to some degree, in dialogue with such signage. Adapting her prompts slightly for the investigation of English language signage in nonanglophone contexts, learners might elicit responses from their subjects along the following lines: • How do you feel when you see signs in English? • When was the first time you noticed the presence of English on signs in this area? • What was your initial thought or reaction to the linguistic changes? • Do you feel at home visiting or shopping in this area? If yes, why? If not, why not? • Do you go into stores and shops that advertise in English? • Would you spend more or less money in a shop that had signage in English? • Does or did this place have a special meaning or memory for you? • What do you think the languages on the signs say about the people or groups in this area? Again, these prompts might form part of a ‘home ethnography’ in a shopping centre or tourist location that would involve interaction between a group of learners and some locals and tourists, in which case the results and analysis can be reported back to the telecollaborative partners. Alternatively, the interviews can be conducted synchronously or asynchronously online with the telecollaborative partners, to follow up on data on English signage that the learners and their partners had earlier collected. In this case, the results can be analysed to compare how the learners and their partners respond to the anglicisation of their respective linguistic landscapes. The results of such investigations can be enlightening for participants and teachers. The discussion of Garvin’s (2010) study of the responses of tourists and locals to Spanish language signs in Memphis

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addressed the subjects’ differing identity constructions. For instance, a Mexican immigrant took the Spanish signage to indicate the growth and increasing confidence of the local Hispanic community, while an Ethiopian immigrant acknowledged that he might enter a Mexican restaurant that only had signage in Spanish, but he might avoid a car maintenance shop whose signage was exclusively in Spanish. Brazilian students with whom I have done small-scale investigations of English signage in and around São Paulo were surprised by their own findings and analyses, particularly by the realisation, confirmed by subjects interviewed in tourist areas, that the English displayed locally was for the benefit not only of the relatively few English-speaking visitors, but also for wealthier Brazilian day-trippers who wished to experience a cosmopolitan ambience within their locality. The ethnographic investigations of English signage in local public spaces is thus a good point of entry into the discussion of attitudes to the status and functions of World Englishes in the 21st century (see further, Chapter  9 for the semiotic analysis of English language signage). Learner-initiated discussions

For teachers and coordinators of virtual ethnographic telecollaborations, one of the more fulfilling occurrences is when learners initiate and develop, with enthusiasm, their own topics of inquiry, thus displaying evidence of the curiosity and openness that typically characterise intercultural communicative competence. Discussions rarely happen unprompted by the instructor, even when learners are encouraged to take the initiative, though in many groups there might be one or two participants whose marked and persistent curiosity becomes a model for their peers. In most courses, however, the teachers need to create the opportunity or space for learner-initiated discussions, explain to the learners why their own discussions are important and valued (e.g. a particular discussion forum might be reserved as ‘their’ space, allowing participants to develop their own lines of cultural inquiry). Instructors also need to ensure that learners have the linguistic resources required to start and maintain informal discussion. Working with anglophone and non-anglophone participants in the early 2000s, my fellow coordinators and I realised that a particular formula was often effective in initiating extended discussion threads: (1) Mitigation move (e.g. ‘This is perhaps a strange question, but…’). (2) State the question to be asked. (3) Express genuine interest in the topic. (4) Offer a personal perspective on the topic. (5) Anticipate, gratefully, telecollaborators’ responses. (cf. Corbett & Phipps, 2006: 167)

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A genuine example, unedited, of a productive discussion starter that was one of several texts that suggested this pattern to us is as follows.2 Discussion Starter A This might seem like a bit of an odd question but i was just wondering what everyone’s favourite drink is? (not including alcohol!!!). Mine would have to be that old British favourite, tea, although I know many others prefer coffee … Hehe bit of a dull subject I know but I thought it might be interesting to see how much we all differ in our basic preferences. I would much appreciate everyone’s thoughts and ideas […]

The discussion starter is marked by its friendly tentativeness – ‘this might seem like a bit of’, ‘mine would have to be’, ‘it might be interesting’ – which protects the face of both the writer (who acknowledges that the topic is odd and potentially dull, although of interest to her) and that of the readers (who are absolved of the responsibility of responding to such an ‘odd question’ if they don’t wish to). As well as asking the question, the participant offers her own perspective, thus indicating a genuine interest. She justifies her own interest and then offers anticipatory thanks for any responses. The starter is also characterised by various rapport markers (exclamatory punctuation and laughter, ‘hehehe’) that will be discussed in more detail below. This discussion starter initiated a long and digressive thread that did satisfy the participant’s desire to find out ‘how much we all differ in our basic preferences’ while using beverages to indicate a set of attitudes towards broader concepts like diet (implicit in the ‘shocking number of calories in a smoothie’) and the industrial processing of foodstuffs (the experience of drinking milk ‘straight from the cow’ was valorised). One of the salutary features of learner-initiated discussions is that, in many cases, the teachers or coordinators, like me, would have considered them too trivial to be worth asking (e.g. ‘what is your favourite non-alcoholic beverage?’) and in some cases the topic might have been considered too intrusive, as when one participant initiated an online discussion of his gay sexuality, a topic that initially caused the coordinators some alarm but which turned out to be handled by all participants with both candour and maturity. Moreover, these and other topics were usually much more productive than those initiated by the teachers or coordinators. This is not to say that the normative requirements to be open and respectful in online interactions are never transgressed; clearly, participants, teachers and coordinators need to be vigilant and alert to potential and actual abuses. In some cases, however, such incidences can

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be turned to pedagogical advantage as ‘rich points’ (Agar, 1994: 100–101, cf. Chapter  1) to be explored through reflection and self-examination. One of the characteristics of learner-initiated discussion, as opposed to teacher-led activities, raised by some learners in some post-course evaluations is that while the teacher-led activities were felt to be ‘contrived’ because they had an explicit pedagogical purpose, the learner-initiated discussions were ‘genuine’ because they were an expression of the participants’ own interests and their own developing relationships with their telecollaborators. Questions for reflection

• Think of an ice-breaking activity that you have used with new groups of learners to introduce them to each other and to build a sense of community and trust. Explain how you might adapt that activity for members of an online intercultural exchange. • Look again at the example of a discussion starter to be used by the students. Try following the guidelines to ask a question that interests you. Discuss whether or not you could use your own example as a model for your learners to follow. Developing Rapport among Telecollaborators

Online interaction between telecollaborators in the activities suggested above will often be in the form of interviews or informal discussions. In that respect, they resemble the face-to-face ethnographic engagements discussed in Chapter 7, with the significant difference that the interlocutors often will not be able to see each other. In written interaction, the indexical information that would have been communicated by gesture or facial expression needs to be conveyed by other means. The most common are the use of affective language, punctuation, onomatopoeia and ‘emojis’ or ‘smileys’. These textual features are doubly important to understand because they have two functions: they build rapport and trust between telecollaborators and they indicate the writer’s stance towards the referential information being communicated. Anderson and Corbett (2015) emphasise the importance of affective language in informal discussions between telecollaborators. They point to the frequency and importance in discussion threads of evaluative adjectives (e.g. positive expressions like good, best, great, special, nice, happy, amazing, cute, beautiful and negative expressions like bad, weird, strange, horrible), emotive verbs (e.g. like, love, hate) and intensifiers (e.g. very, really, totally). As in many conversational stories (cf. Chapter 5) these linguistic resources display emotional engagement and, effectively, invite the respondents to empathise. Anderson and Corbett (2015) also found that positive lexical evaluations outnumbered negative ones in range and frequency of use, but this was in part caused, apparently, by

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participants’ preference for negating a positive evaluation than making a negative one, and so things would be described as ‘not good’ or ‘not nice’ rather than ‘bad’ or ‘nasty’. Other means of displaying emotional engagement in discussion threads is excessive use of exclamatory and questioning punctuation marks (‘!!!, ???’) to indicate surprise, uncertainty or the writer’s personal distance from the proposition being asserted, and capitalisation of words or phrases to indicate an emphatic statement. Laughter and shock are indicated through conventional abbreviations (e.g. ‘lol’ and ‘omg’ for ‘laugh out loud’ and ‘oh my God’), or by onomatopoeia that might be specific to a particular language or country (e.g. laughter is ‘hehehe’ in anglophone countries; ‘kkkkk’ in Brazil; ‘jajajaja’ – pronounced ‘hahahaha’ – in Argentina). The use of emojis to convey indexical information also varies according to region (cf. Hwang & Matsumoto, 2013), with happiness often being represented by :-) in anglophone countries, ^_^ in China and Korea, (^ ^) in Japan and so on. Hwang and Matsumoto speculate on the reasons for differences in the icons used across different languages, drawing on Wang’s (2004) research into the use of emoticons, or emojis, by American and Chinese users. They suggest that Americans are more likely to use emojis for informational purposes while Chinese are more likely to use them for social interaction; however, as this claim may well be an overgeneralisation, it can become a focus for learners’ own research. What the teacher or telecollaboration coordinator can take from research into computer-mediated discourse is that (as we saw in Chapter 5 with regard to conversational interaction) in order to invite and respond to explicit or implicit invitations to engage emotionally, participants need a range of lexical expressions, some knowledge of conventional abbreviations and emojis (and awareness that they vary) and an understanding of punctuation conventions. Participants also need to develop a sensitivity that telecollaboration partners might have different conceptions of the need to invite and respond to implicit or explicit requests for emotional engagement and empathy. One way of developing such sensitivity is through in-class reflection on discussion starters and responses. Anderson and Corbett (2015: 183–184) show two responses by Argentinians to a discussion starter on British traditional food (‘fish and chips’) by a British telecollaborator (all the participants were university-level students): Discussion Starter B Hello! As we were preparing for one of our presentations, [firstname] and I discovered that people abroad no nothing of the “fish ‘n’ chip shop”.

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This was something we were absolutely horrifed about, and we intend to make everyone aware of them! If anyone who has never had fish and chips from a fish ‘n’ chip shop GO RIGHT NOW AND GET ONE! You’ll never regret it. I promise. You’ll love them. If you’re ever in Whitby or Seahouses, or any other seaside town, buy fish and chips there, if possible because they are the best! (Though make sure you’re really hungry, because the fish tends to be HUGE!) Anyone who loves or hates (perish the thought) fish and chips, or if you’ve never heard of them and want to find out more about them, please share your thoughts! All comments welcome, good or bad!

Discussion Response B1 Hello You are right, I’m from Argentina and the only thing I know about “fish ‘n’ chip shops” is that they are named very often in British novels. We don’t have that kind of shops here.

Discussion Response B2 Hello! I’m [firstname] from Argentina. It’s true that here in Argentina we don’t have that kind of shop. However, we do have our equivalent here. If you ever happen to be in Argentina, more precisely in La Plata, you must try our special: “milanesa con papas fritas”. Here in La Plata, young people go to what can be called a shop (generally in a square or park), where the special is prepared at any time. Generally, after going to a disco, like at 5am in the morning, we have “breakfast” with one of this specials!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The discussion starter is emotionally effusive, with liberal use of exclamation marks, capitals, direct address and emotive language (e.g. ‘You’ll never regret it, I promise’). Response B1, while being polite, does not respond to the invitation to empathise: the writer acknowledges that the discussion starter is correct but there is no exclamatory punctuation, capitalisation or evaluative language. The impression given is of

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lack of interest. Response B2, however, does mirror the emotional tone of the discussion starter, avoiding capitals but liberally using exclamation marks. Interestingly, while Response B1 simply acknowledges that his or her only knowledge of ‘fish and chips’ comes from British novels, Response B2 attempts to find a local cultural equivalent, and indicates to B how this equivalent (i.e. milanesa con papas fritas) is consumed in the local Argentinian context. The discussion starter and two responses can be compared in a reflective session in class, during which learners can be asked to comment on which response is more effective in creating rapport between telecollaborators. The construction of rapport and the communication of sincerity are crucial to effective informal discussions. As with face-to-face ethnographies, the perception of sincerity can be damaged by misunderstandings about the nature and purpose of the exchanges. After a few responses to Discussion Starter  A, quoted above, about participants’ favourite nonalcoholic drink, a telecollaborator in Taiwan posted the following: Response A1 Hi, nice to meet you. I am [name]. May I ask you a question? What’s your opinion about the transformation of women’s status in your society in the past and in the present, in the West and in the East? Thank you for your help!

In the face-to-face session with the Glasgow-based participants following the posting of this response, the students complained that the author of A1 was evidently abusing the project in order simply to obtain data for a class assignment. The instructor attempted to turn the heated discussion into a reflection of what the participants expected of each other (particularly when some telecollaborators had less proficient language skills than others), and one Glasgow-based participant, a European exchange student, eventually agreed to write a response that gave an opinion on the topic raised and – more importantly – elicited the collaborator’s own views on the subject. The result was a genuinely informative and friendly ‘side sequence’ (cf. Jefferson, 1972) about gender roles, that ran for a few turns until the topic of preferred non-alcoholic drinks was resumed. The building of trust through the construction of rapport, a mutual understanding of the aims of the interactions and the communication of sincerity of intent (whether or not that is actually felt) are all as crucial to online interviews and less formal discussion as they are to face-to-face ethnographic data collection. The exchanges themselves, like formal and

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informal ethnographic interviews, can also be used as classroom data to reflect on the way that participants interact, their unspoken assumptions and the reasons why certain topics are of more or less interest to them. As we shall see in the next section, these reflections often address issues of identity. Questions for reflection

• Discuss the extent to which the issues that arise from online interaction are similar to those that arise in face-to-face ethnographic interviewing (Chapter 7). • Explain how, in online communication, e.g. emails and texts, you express emotion and engagement. Describe how you would feel if your interlocutors did not use similar means to express their engagement with you. The Negotiation of Identity in Telecollaborations

The general development of online communication as an instantaneous and accessible means of communicating across vast geographical space has prompted Blommaert (2010) to call for a ‘sociolinguistics of globalisation’. In brief, Blommaert argues that language in use is governed by situated norms, or ‘orders of indexicality’ that apply differently to different contexts. For example, the norms governing informal faceto-face conversations are not those that apply to formal written reports or academic essays. Blommaert (2010: 34–35) argues that the orders of indexicality are sedimented in layers that are governed by location in time and space: an informal conversation would be momentary, ephemeral, local and situated (i.e. on a lower scale), while a formal report functions translocally, according to norms that are more widespread and ‘timeless’ (i.e. on a higher scale). Blommaert suggests that in producing discourse, speakers may jump from one ‘scale’ to the other, for example by producing in an informal conversation an expression associated with the norms of written language, or vice versa. While this phenomenon might also be described as ‘intertextuality’ or ‘register shifting’, Blommaert prefers to call the mixing of language that indexes different social orders ‘scale jumping’. The telecollaborative discussions of second language learners tend to exhibit scale jumping. This is partly because participants’ command of the norms governing different scales in the target language might be limited, and so they will scale-jump accidentally, but it is also partly because all online interaction represents a complex blurring of the local and the global. Online discourse has many of the indexical features of ephemeral, informal conversation; however, it also takes on a translocal, widespread function. As Anderson and Corbett (2015) suggest, there is a tension between locally indexed language and the global nature of the

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interactions. To put it simply, just because participants share English as a lingua franca and a digital platform does not mean that they find it easy to coalesce into a single, coherent discourse community. As Discussion Starter B and the two responses, B1 and B2, that follow it show, online chat is saturated with indices of locality – such as slang terms and situated cultural references – and telecollaborators need to deal with these expressions as potential obstacles to immediate communication before reflecting on them as ethnographic data. The tension between local and global orders of indexicality also has an impact on the identities of the telecollaborators as they are coconstructed through the developing discourse. Ushioda (2011), following Zimmerman (1998) and Richards, K. (2006), identifies three aspects of identity relevant to telecollaborative interactions: situated identities that are conferred by the context of the communicative event (e.g. the identity of being a learner in an online discussion group); discourse identities that relate to the role that the participants play in the discourse (e.g. the identity of being an initiator of a thread, or a responder to a question, or a non-participating lurker); and transportable identities that are invoked by the interaction, e.g. the identity of being a football fan, a pet owner, a lover of fish and chips or milanesa con papas fritas and so on. It is worth considering the fact that the telecollaboration creates a situated identity for all learners, teachers and coordinators, with each assuming that he or she will have a particular role to play in the microculture that the project constructs. As noted above, effective telecollaborations will take time at the start to ensure that participants in the project are aware of the roles and responsibilities that their situated identity confers and are comfortable with them. Once the telecollaboration starts, the participants (teachers and learners) will assume discourse identities, starting discussions and explorations, responding to them and following up. The distribution of discourse identities is likely to be unequal, with some participants being more inclined to initiate, some more inclined to respond and some more inclined simply to observe. One responsibility of the teacher or coordinator, generally during the reflective sessions, is to encourage participants to vary the discourse identities that they assume during the project. A commonly neglected aspect of discourse identity is the assumption of the role of the follow-up questioner. While many discussion starters are responded to, telecollaborators often avoid following up the response and thus extending the discussion. In the discussion thread about fish and chips, for example, nobody followed up the response about milenas con papas fritas, thus missing the opportunity to reflect more deeply on the significance and functions of ‘iconic’ dishes in the local cultures. Of course, the teacher can assume this identity and intervene (see further, below), or this kind of missed opportunity can be flagged up in reflective sessions, and learners can be prompted explicitly to adopt this aspect of discourse identity.

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In many online threads, it is aspects of their transportable identity that the initiators of exchanges bring to the interactions, as the basis for learner-initiated discussion threads. The degree to which participants negotiate their transportable identities through their initiations and responses can indicate the degree of their intercultural communicative competence. Reflection on and analysis of discussion threads often indicate that the transportable identities that telecollaborators bring to the exchange are not fixed, but fluid, and develop during the interaction. Dervin (2013) demonstrates that even such apparently fixed transportable identities as national belonging can be mutable, in his discussion of an email exchange between a Lithuanian of Russian ancestry, and a Dutch learner born in England. Anderson and Corbett (2015) also observe that telecollaboration allows for the co-construction and interrogation of transportable identities through the discussion of apparently ‘trivial’ topics that, in the context of the interaction, become safe sites for an overt display of attitude and emotion. In my experience, the more popular topics in the informal learnerinitiated discussions tend to be thin on substance, but they function, rather, to offer and elicit affective expression; for example, participants shared information and photos of their pets, discussed particular words they did not like and talked about whether Sundays were pleasant or boring. Some topics took the form of lists of preferences, a constant feature of online communication, typified by ‘What’s your favourite drink (not including alcohol)?’ and ‘What’s on your bucket list?’ (i.e. the list of things you wish to do before you ‘kick the bucket’ or die). Some threads championed something that the initiator regarded as constitutive of personal or group identity, such as football team fandom or a liking for a ‘national’ dish. A very few threads raised questions about cultural conventions (‘What gifts should you take when visiting people?’ ‘How do people in different countries commemorate their war dead?’) and changing social customs (e.g. attitudes to the introduction of non-smoking legislation in public spaces). All these discussion threads can be related to more or less substantial ‘transportable identities’ that invoke latent social attitudes and stances. While the topics raised online might seem superficial or trivial, they do have the considerable value of expressing, directly or indirectly, private aspects of the self that ‘official’ classroom discourse often overlooks (cf. Ushioda, 2011: 206). Such topics also cover ground not covered by more formal sources of information. In a post-telecollaboration interview with the coordinators, one participant described a particular discussion, which, for her, had been particularly memorable, of participants’ views on the appropriateness of taking dogs into restaurants. It is clear that this kind of discussion addresses and engages individuals’ stance on everyday issues of normalcy and otherness.

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Facilitating Telecollaborative Exchanges

O’Dowd (2012: 67–68) distils a rich pool of experience of coordinating telecollaborations into a list of 40 ‘can-do’ statements that fall into four areas: organisational, pedagogical, digital and attitudinal. Among the pedagogical competences that facilitate telecollaborations, he lists the following: The telecollaborative teacher can… • identify tasks for the online exchange which meet at least some of the participating classes’ curricula; • support students in discerning and reflecting upon culturally contingent patterns of interaction in follow-up classroom discussion; • apply their knowledge of the culture and language of the partner class to organise culturally and linguistically rich tasks for the exchange; • design tasks which support the activities of collaborative inquiry and the construction of knowledge; • integrate appropriate assessment procedures and rubrics which accurately reflect the activities which students carried out during their exchange; • explain clearly to students what is expected from them during an exchange – deadlines, performance objectives, learning outcomes, etc.; • integrate seamlessly and effectively the content and themes of the telecollaborative exchange into their contact classes (when they exist) before, during and after the exchange itself; • provide learning support for learners either through scaffolded guidance (in the classroom or in online tutorials) or through the provision of reflective tools, such as learning logs or journals. This is a useful, if slightly idealised, checklist that those who are creating, coordinating and facilitating telecollaborations might consult periodically during the process. Many of the bullet points have been addressed in this chapter; for example, task design will likely address desired language outcomes and the development of those ethnographic skills (e.g. systematic observation and interviewing skills) that promote the development of intercultural communicative competence; reflective follow-up sessions in class might address missed opportunities and support the identification of cultural patterns or interaction; and so on. Some bullet points (e.g. assessment issues) are addressed elsewhere in this volume (see further, Chapter 11), and others are self-explanatory. The Teacher’s Role

A recurring pedagogical issue in telecollaborations that aim to encourage curiosity and autonomous exploration is the question of how

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much the teachers or coordinators should intervene in learner interaction. Liddicoat and Tudini (2013) note that the situated identity of any ‘native’ or highly proficient speaker in an online exchange is also fluid; they may shift between peer (i.e. participant in the exchange) and authority (i.e. language teacher), with the options of simply participating in the exchanges or taking the didactic role of correcting, prompting, explaining and evaluating. In the telecollaborative projects that I have been involved with, after prompting learners to interact, the teachers have tended to minimise their own involvement in the ensuing discussions (cf. Anderson & Corbett, 2015; Corbett & Phipps, 2006). This is a decision that requires ongoing review and the exercise of judgement, as the option of either intervening or not can have positive or negative consequences. When the dynamics between learners are good, the participants will initiate and sustain lively and insightful discussions on topics the teachers could not have predicted. At other times, participants fail to spark extended discussion, and they may well neglect what seem to the teachers to be obvious opportunities for deeper reflection. It therefore does happen that a teacher might choose to intervene in an ongoing discussion in an attempt to provoke a greater degree of introspection amongst participants. In the popular, learner-initiated thread on ‘fish and chips’ (see Discussion Starter B and Responses B1 and B2), which the initiators mock-seriously presented as a campaign to raise international participants’ awareness of this national dish, one of the teachers intervened in the exchange: Intervention B Okay - I can’t resist the fish ‘n’ chips campaign. So - why do you all think fish and chips are so popular in the U.K.? And why is a fish and chips campaign important for intercultural communication? Just wondering .....

Extract from Response to Intervention B Hmm... Well, we said in the lecture that since we are an island we are arguably surrounded by fish and we have had a great fishing industry and tradition for centuries, and potatoes grow very well here, so we have the ingredients pretty much sorted.

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However, since potatoes are from S America - a link to our friends in Rio!! - chips are technically French, and according to one Professor […] we’ve pinched ideas from Jewish fish dishes, perhaps this dish is more intercultural than we like to imagine! I think this is partly why this campaign is important for intercultural communication: even if it has roots elsewhere, when something is so important for and internationally attached to a particular nation there is always some great tradition or story behind it and, from what I understand, traditions and social identity are what ‘culture’ is built on.

Here, the teacher’s intervention did prompt a local student to do some further thinking and research on the multicultural origins of the ‘national dish’ and, consequently, to address the heterogeneous and discursive construction of ‘culture’. The participant’s response maintains the sense of involvement with the peer community (‘a link to our friends in Rio!’) while presenting a set of statements whose tentative nature is indicated by hedging features (arguably, perhaps, I think, etc.). The intervention here, coming after a series of relatively unreflective postings, can be judged a success insofar as it prompted some further inquiry and deeper reflection; at other times, however, it must be acknowledged that the teachers’ interventions had the effect of bringing a lively discussion to an abrupt and premature end. The question of the extent to which teachers or telecollaboration facilitators should become involved in participants’ online discussions can be explored in post-course interviews. Opinions can be mixed: among the interviewees reported in Anderson and Corbett (2015), many appreciated the freedom and space to raise topics of their own, while others commented that they would have liked more direction and encouragement from the instructors, and some even expressed a desire to be obliged by the course coordinators to post messages. The status of the teachers was also viewed in different ways by participants: some were comfortable with the fact that the telecollaboration organisers could be just as unfamiliar as they were with certain cultural attitudes and practices, while others found it difficult to move beyond a traditional view of an instructor as someone with a certain level of knowledge and authority, with one commenting, reasonably, at the end of the course, that ‘you don’t really see your teachers as part of the group’. For the reasons discussed above, then, it is unsurprising that telecollaborations are often problematical projects to facilitate. The value of coaching between expert and novice telecollaborators is affirmed by Jauregi and Melchor-Couto (2017). Still, telecollaborations inevitably demand considerable energy, expertise and resilience from teachers, and

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no two projects unfold in exactly the same way. That said, their unpredictability and their richness make them a satisfying experience as well as an often frustrating one. And, although coordinating and aligning the pedagogical aims and expectations of a group of teachers can also be a time-consuming and equally frustrating endeavour, when the project does go well, the individual teachers involved can find themselves bonded into a satisfyingly collegial support group. Questions for reflection

The preceding two sections both centre on issues of learners’ and teachers’ various identities, and the behaviour and language that are related to those shifting constructs. • If you were participating in an online intercultural exchange, as an instructor, how would you express, through your posts, your own situated, discourse and transportable identities? • As an instructor in an online intercultural exchange, would you attempt to assume the role of peer or authority? Explain your choice and consider how you would present yourself thus to learners. Intercultural Communicative Competence and the Ethnographic Mindset

This and the previous two chapters have developed a series of themes relevant to the development of an ethnographic mindset, among both teachers and learners. This frame of mind is central to intercultural language education, as the exploration of and reflection on cultural orientations are fundamental to any conception of intercultural communicative competence. If we take the CEFR savoirs as a point of reference, ethnographies of the home and other culture increase one’s knowledge of the self and other; and ethnographic observation and interviewing skills and analysis involve the discovery of cultural information and the ability to relate and interpret meanings from familiar and unfamiliar perspectives. The frequently destabilising effect of such comparative explorations may prompt in the participants the relativisation of themselves, and respect for the attitudes of others, although, of course, without careful support from the teacher, it might not. Similarly, the comparative impulse of ethnographic activities can support the development of critical cultural awareness insofar as learner-ethnographers begin to question the reasons why hitherto taken-for-granted aspects of their ordinary lives are as they are. The influence of ethnography, then, as we have seen, can inform small-scale classroom activities such as systematic observation, concept training and critical incidents, while more ambitious projects that seek to elicit cultural information from informants require learners to practise

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interviewing skills and the analysis of the referential and indexical aspects of the responses, whether spoken or written. Virtual exchanges between telecollaborators further extend the potential for developing ethnographic skills outlined in Chapters 6 and 7, and they test those skills in the complex arena of computer-mediated communications. As Belz (2007: 158) argues, ‘research on telecollaboration indicates that intercultural competence can develop in institutionalised settings under the careful guidance of languacultural experts or teachers’. With the support of enthusiastic and alert facilitators, telecollaborations can encourage both home ethnographies and direct engagements with diverse members of other cultures. As a bonus, a record of the interactions is usually readily available for classroom reflection and analysis, without the need for hours of transcription. The mushrooming growth of telecollaborations over the past two decades is testament to its increasing importance in intercultural language education. Notes (1) Websites and their content are subject to change; however, at the time of writing (August 2021), three reliable and well-established ones are, at school level, the British Council’s ‘Connecting Classrooms’ project (https://connecting​ -classrooms​ .britishcouncil​.org/) and, at higher education level, UNICollaboration (https://www​.unicollaboration​.org/). For younger learners, a telecollaborative project has been devised that features the children’s book character, ‘Flat Stanley’ (http://www​.flatstanleyproject​.com/). (2) Here and throughout, the spelling and presentation of the original extracts are retained. Participants in this and other projects discussed consented to the use of their posts in later publications.

9 Developing Visual Literacy

This chapter turns from the extended discussion of practical ethnography and a focus on the skills of discovery and interaction (Chapters 6–8) towards a consideration of further ways of ‘decoding’ a culture, with reference primarily to the skills of interpreting and relating. In this chapter, we consider the visual representations of cultural information and how to ‘read’ them critically. Topics addressed include: • • • • • •

Defining visual literacy. Using images in the English language teaching (ELT) classroom. Understanding visual composition. Understanding the grammar and vocabulary of images. Combining visual and textual information. The iconography of English in non-anglophone countries.

Chapter 10 then continues the theme of interpreting and relating with a discussion of how to use literary, media and cultural texts in the intercultural language curriculum. From Ethnography to Semiotics

The preceding three chapters have illustrated how an intercultural approach to language teaching draws on ethnographic strategies of systematic observation and the elicitation of data via direct and indirect interviews, in both physical and virtual environments. Practical ethnography, directed towards the teaching and learning of language and intercultural communicative competences, can be practised by curriculum planners, materials writers and teachers, as well as learners themselves. The present chapter turns from ethnography to consider another discipline that is relevant to intercultural language education, that is, semiotics and, in particular, visual literacy. Semiotics, the study of non-verbal and verbal signs, can appear a complex discipline to understand and master (cf. Barthes, 1977; Eco, 1976). Nevertheless, a basic understanding of the practice of semiotics has much to offer intercultural language educators 174

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who wish their students to develop skills in interpreting and relating information (savoir comprendre) and critical cultural awareness (savoir s’engager). In our media-saturated world, most learners are immersed in an ever-changing flux of visual data, and so, by paying attention to and developing a critical awareness of how this data communicates messages to them, they can extend their interpretive skills. However, first of all, semiotics, like ethnography, must be made accessible in the classroom, and a growing number of textbooks and articles suggest ways of doing this (e.g. Bignell, 2002; Dondis, 1973; Goodman, 2007; Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006; Rose, 2016). This chapter draws on this literature in order to provide a basic introduction to the analysis of visual images and it suggests how teachers and learners can develop visual literacy in order to explore their own and other cultures. Images in ELT

There is, of course, a long-established history of teachers using images or ‘visual aids’ in the ELT classroom, from the days of photographs cut from magazines and laminated, to the internet-connected smartboard. There are obviously good reasons for using images in language education: they can be used at all levels of language learning, from beginners to advanced, and they can bring into the classroom those objects that would otherwise be outside it. Depending on the image chosen, visual aids can bring vocabulary to life, or they can act as input to learning tasks, such as a simple information exchange between a learner who has access to an image and a learner who does not. For many years, language educators have put an emphasis on the value of images as prompts for language practice and production; for example, Scrivener (2011) comments on the use of images in sequence to form ‘picture stories’: Traditionally, they have been used as a starting point for writing exercises, but they are also very useful for focusing on specific language points or as material for speaking and listening activities. Most picture stories seem inevitably to involve practice of the past simple and past continuous. (Scrivener, 2011: 350)

It goes without saying that photographs, drawings, cartoons and diagrams not only make ELT textbooks look attractive, but they also contextualise the language used in any given lesson, and they can make a grammatical concept like ‘tense’ or ‘aspect’ easier for learners to grasp by giving them a visual image, such as a timeline. Oral examinations often use photographs as cues for speech; for instance, candidates can be asked to describe the content of a picture, and to speculate about what happened before or after the instant that has been captured by the camera.

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Visual aids, then, are widely acknowledged to be a rich resource in ELT. Images are exploited in diverse ways for their language enhancement potential, but their cultural significance is comparatively neglected (though see some of the activities suggested in Goldstein, 2008). The exploration of the images produced in and by different cultures is a powerful way into intercultural language education, where the input to learning tasks can comprise of images produced by both local and other cultures. The analysis of images can draw upon pictures from a variety of sources, of which the following are only a few: • websites, including archives such as Google Images and Wikimedia Commons; • newspaper and magazine reports and features; • magazine and billboard advertising; • political campaign literature and advertising; • illustrations in ELT and other school/college textbooks; • travel agents’ literature; • paintings in art galleries; • postcards; • images captured by the learners themselves. Images can be used, for example, as data for the exploration of social issues in different cultures. Over time, learners may well come up with their own ideas, prompted by their observations and interests. However, in the initial stages of a course they might need guidance about themes that are likely to yield interesting results, for example: • How are certain age groups (e.g. men, women, children, teenagers) represented in advertising? • How are certain nationalities/ethnic groups represented? • How is authority/lack of authority constructed visually, e.g. by politicians, photojournalists or in advertising? • What is it that a society considers visually attractive? Are these qualities that are constant across all societies/periods of time? • What do fashions tell us about the values of the social groups that adopt them? • Are the photographs or diagrams used in news reports ideologically neutral illustrations of the content of the texts? • Are the pictures used in travel agents’ literature truly representative of the countries that they are advertising? • What kind of information about the English-speaking world is given in ELT textbook illustrations? • Can you track the social and cultural history of the content of a particular image (e.g. a kilted Scotsman) over time, using art books, textbooks, advertising illustrations? Did the image always refer to exactly

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the same group? What values did the image have at different times, and for whom (e.g. is the kilted Scotsman typically a crude barbarian, exotic primitive, imperial soldier, comic miser or romantic warrior)? In addressing such questions, learners will need to develop what is referred to in this chapter as ‘visual literacy’, that is, they will develop a systematic means of looking at visual images. They will use composition as well as content to construct potential meanings from the images, and they will need to acquire the linguistic resources to talk or write about the kinds of messages the images convey. This chapter gives guidance on how learners might develop these skills. The following sections are designed to give teachers suggestions about ways of exploring the analysis of images. In an Appendix at the end of this book there is an extensive checklist of questions that can be asked of images; the checklist may be used or adapted for class activities and projects. Questions for reflection

Consider your own use of images in your teaching, thus far. • What are the advantages that you find in the use of images? • Would you say that you use images critically in your teaching? If so, how? • Can you describe the skills that are involved in the critical interpretation of images by learners? • Can you identify some of the linguistic resources in English that would enable learners to interpret images critically? Reading Images as Messages

If visual images are messages, then it should, in principle, be possible to ‘read’ them and analyse them as textual constructions. The titles of articles and books on the analysis of visual images often directly play on this supposition: Barthes’ (1977) ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’ in Image/Music/Text; Fiske and Hartley’s (2004) Reading Television; Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design; and Goodman’s (2007) ‘Visual English’ explicitly invoke parallels between linguistic analysis and the interpretation of visual images. For example, in their influential primer, Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) state that: What in language is realized by locative prepositions is visually realized by the formal characteristics that create the contrast between foreground and background. This is not to say that all the relations that can be realized linguistically can also be realized visually – or, vice versa, that all the relations that can be realized visually can also be realized linguistically.

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Rather, a given culture has a range of general, possible relations which is not tied to expression in any particular semiotic mode, although some relations can only be realized visually and others only linguistically, or some more easily visually and others more easily linguistically. (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006: 46)

Kress and van Leeuwen’s general argument is that if visual images are, in fact, a way of sending messages, then they should be subject to some kind of analysis along linguistic lines, bearing in mind the historical and inherent differences in the use of the ‘semiotic modes’, that is, the visual versus the verbal message-bearing sign systems (for a critical discussion of this claim, see Forceville, 1999). From this perspective, we can argue, for example, that visual images have a ‘vocabulary’ and a ‘grammar’. The vocabulary of a visual image consists of its content or whatever is represented. Depending on the image, this may be a child, a mother, a beautiful young woman, a peasant in the fields, a sailing ship, an empty landscape, a busy urban street, a blueprint of a football stadium or a map of the world, or the night sky. Like vocabulary items, whatever is represented in images will have denotational and connotational meanings. These meanings are situated, and they can be compared and contrasted across different contexts. For example, Figure 9.5 shows a woman and child; this is its denotation. However, the very fact that a woman and child are shown together, and the spatial position of each in relation to the other, will prompt many viewers to assume that they are mother and child, and, moreover, they may prompt certain viewers, particularly those familiar with the Christian faith, to recall the many images of the Madonna and Child (e.g. Figure 9.6). Such associations can be considered part of the image’s potential connotational meaning. Images of children (e.g. Figure 9.7) will call up particular connotations, such as innocence and hope for the future, while images of suited businessmen (e.g. Figure 9.8) will conjure connotations such as authority and professionalism. Linguistic texts, of course, are not simply arbitrary assemblages of vocabulary items. For texts to make sense, the words have to be arranged in sequences according to linguistic conventions, or grammatical rules. In the same way, the elements that make up a visual image have to be arranged in conventional ways to allow the visually literate viewer to make sense of it. The ‘grammar’ of an image, then, is the meaningful relationships among the elements represented in the image. For example, if the image represents people and things, we can ask if one person or thing is acting on another, just as a subject acts upon an object in a transitive clause (e.g. ‘The woman is holding the child’). If there is only one person or one thing evident in the image, or if the elements in the image are not acting on each other, we can think of the meaning as being analogous to that expressed by an intransitive clause, that is, a subject and a verb that do not have an object (e.g. ‘The child smiles’). Again, it

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may be necessary to clarify what we are doing here: we are not saying that images are clause types, but we are arguing that visual images can be used to construct similar kinds of message as clauses. Therefore, they can be subjected, up to a point, to a similar kind of analysis, an analysis that relates different types of form (in this case, visual forms of representation and composition) to meanings. The remainder of this chapter will focus mainly on presenting an elementary grammar of the image, based largely on the principles outlined in much more detail by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006). As they acknowledge, some of their visual grammar presupposes a Western orientation towards the image. For example, the fact that Western writing systems operate from left to right influences the way Westerners understand the composition of images. The association of the upper part of the frame with the ‘ideal’ as opposed to the ‘real’ at the bottom is also influenced by religious art, which conventionally situates heaven in the upper part of the visual space. However, there may also be a more basic cognitive association of the upper visual space with the ideal, associations related to metaphorical conflations of ‘upness’ with ‘goodness’ (cf. Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). The tools of analysis that Kress and van Leeuwen suggest can certainly be critiqued, but, at the very least, they can be adapted to provide a useful departure point for the description, explanation and discussion of images. Questions for reflection

Take a close look at an advertisement on a poster or in a magazine. • Describe the content of the image in terms of the denotation and connotation of the elements that make it up. • Explain the possible effect on the meaning of the image, if you changed the spatial relationship of the elements within it. Understanding Composition

We begin our exploration of the grammar of images by considering the composition of the image as a whole; in other words, we shall consider the relationship of the elements of the image to each other, and the effect of how they are positioned in the overall image. Any single image can be interpreted in terms of the different areas that are available within the frame: left/right, centre/margins and top/bottom. The positioning of an element within one of these areas gives that element a particular meaning in relation to the position of the other elements (see Figure 9.1). The meanings of the elements of the visual space are illustrated in all of the images discussed below; however, they are perhaps seen to their fullest in Figure 9.2, ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ (c. 1558) ascribed to Pieter Brueghel the Elder. This painting illustrates the well-known Greek myth of the master artisan,

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Figure 9.1  The meaning of visual space (Adapted from Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006: 197)

Figure 9.2  ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ (c. 1558) ascribed to Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1526/1530–1569) from the Musées Royaux des Beaux Arts, Brussels, Belgium

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Daedalus, who crafted himself and his son, Icarus, a pair of wings to enable them to escape from Crete, where they were being held prisoner. The wings were held together by wax, and Icarus, by flying too close to the sun, caused the wax in his wings to melt, with the result that he fell into the sea and drowned. One of the stories retold in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, this myth has been revisited many times over the centuries and the painting of it is itself the subject of a poem by W.H. Auden, ‘Musée des Beaux-Arts’, as well as poems by William Carlos Williams and Michael Hamburger. Brueghel’s painting illustrates all of the elements of Kress and van Leeuwen’s compositional framework (Figure  9.1) in relation to each other. The viewer is positioned in front of a peaceful seaside landscape; in the foreground, on the left, a ploughman is tilling the land. Behind the ploughman, centrally situated, but removed to the near background, is a shepherd, who is looking skyward, his dog sitting by his side and his sheep scattered around him. On the top left, in the distant background, is an idealised, shining city, bathed in light, and, on the top right, the viewer can see a far shore. On the lower right-hand side, someone is fishing on the near shore, and beyond him a beautiful sailing ship moves from right to left. Nobody within the image sees Icarus, the nominal subject of the painting, whose leg is just visible between the ship and the shoreline. As Auden observes in his poem about this painting, the artist has marginalised the fall of the over-ambitious aeronaut. The context of Icarus’ fall (from ‘ideal space’ to ‘reality’) is given by the elements left and centre: the inhabitants of the distant city and the nearer landscape, human and animal, carry on with their daily routine, unaware of the tragedy that has just befallen. The composition of the painting, then, both narrates the story and conveys a sense of irony: the ‘hero’ of the myth is marginalised and almost completely obscured, while the peasants at the centre of the image, ploughman and shepherd, are oblivious to his fate. According to Kress and van Leeuwen, in many images there are lines that they call ‘vectors’, often diagonal, that lead the viewer’s eyes from one part of the image to another. Vectors can be created and reinforced in a number of different ways: they may be imagined by following the gaze of one character to another, by following the gesture of a character, through the pose of a character or by the angle of some kind of instrument, such as a staff, a walking-stick or a rifle held by a character. In Figure 9.2 there are a number of vectors, all giving a sense of disconnection: the ploughman looks down while the shepherd looks up, his staff angled away from him. The dog looks forward and the sheep graze in various directions. The fisherman looks and points in an entirely different direction, and none sees the disappearing legs of Icarus, which are bent in the opposite direction to that in which the ship is sailing. Nobody in the painting looks out at the viewer; the viewer is thus placed in a privileged position: unseen, the viewer sees what the people represented in the painting do not.

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This brief description of ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ illustrates how the different elements in a visual image contribute to its overall ‘message’. Obviously, in a painting of this kind, how the viewer makes sense of it also depends on his or her cultural knowledge; the interpretation depends not only on noticing how the elements of the painting are combined in the visual space, but also on the viewer’s awareness of the Greek myth, and arguably also narratives such as the Christian story of the Fall of Man, with representations of Christ as both a shepherd and a ‘fisher of men’. A modern viewer of the painting might understand it in part in relation to the 20th-century poems by Auden, Carlos Williams and Hamburger. A critical understanding of the image, then, depends partly on how the viewer makes sense of what is in it, and also on the cultural knowledge the viewer brings to the image. Descriptive Images

Not all images invite the viewer to respond in the same way. In descriptive images, there is a single element in the image, which usually does not interact with the viewer, for example, by containing a person or an animal that makes eye contact with him or her. One such example is the photograph of the sculpture of the Buddha at the house of the ‘Resident’ in Kediri, Indonesia (Figure 9.3). As with similar images of the Buddha, the figure is alone, eyes downcast or closed, and his meditative pose creates a closed circuit. There are no vectors pointing outward from this image: the Buddha is self-enclosed, self-sufficient, quite literally at one with himself. He is presented both as a sculpture and in the photographic image of that sculpture, as an object for our contemplation and, presumably, in this case, the disciple’s emulation. His calm, meditative state is something for the viewer to aspire to. Some images, such as in Figure  9.3, or elements of an image, may be symbolic: they are presented for the viewer’s contemplation either because they are particularly significant or because they have a particular cultural value. A portrait of a scholar often has a book as an accompaniment, symbolising the acquisition of knowledge; a portrait of a musician will likewise often include a musical instrument. Viewers who are familiar with Buddhist iconography will recognise that the gesture in Figure 9.3 is that of the varada mudra: the left palm lies in the Buddha’s lap while the right hand, palm up, faces outwards to the viewer. This attitude symbolises generosity, with the five fingers representing the ‘five perfections’, namely generosity, morality, patience, effort and concentration (Ghori & Chung, 2007). Viewers, then, will again interpret images with reference to their cultural knowledge. A portrayal of a man and woman alongside a bitten apple will prompt interpretations based on Christian symbolism. A bitten apple reappears as the logo of Apple computers, not only wittily

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Figure 9.3 Photo of Buddha sculpture at the house of the ‘Resident’ in Kediri, Indonesia

suggesting that the company offers a taste of forbidden knowledge, just as the religious symbol does, but also illustrating the secularisation of Christian symbolism in Western culture. Often, in an image, the symbolic element will be lit specially, or pointed at or presented in the foreground of the picture, as the Buddha is in the photograph. On a Mac computer screen, the Apple icon appears in the top left: marginal, perhaps, but also in the ideal/given position, a position of power from which all else on the screen proceeds. A symbolic ‘mood’ can also be given to an image by softening the focus, or by controlling the colour or contrast. A cold blue tone might be given to an institutional setting, or a warm, rosy glow to a domestic setting. The monochrome photograph of the Buddha shows the sculpture in high contrast against a dark background, its illumination arguably suggesting the Buddha’s enlightenment. By contrast, in classic Hollywood movies and some television dramas, certain characters, usually women, are portrayed in soft focus at key moments. In the film Casablanca, for example, Ingrid Bergman, the leading actress, is shown in soft focus at moments of heightened romantic emotion. In the 1980s soap opera,

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Dallas, a similar technique was used to portray Barbara Bel Geddes, who played the matriarch of a family of Texas oil tycoons. In this case, the symbolic softening of her features might be interpreted not as indicating romantic interest, but as mediating maternal values that acted as a counterbalance to the ruthless materialism of her offspring’s generation. The different examples of soft focus serve to remind us that the elements that construct visual images do not have fixed, predetermined meanings. They suggest meanings through conventions that are assigned to them by a culture, and so they are amenable to change and adaptation. When considering the significance of an image, we must pay attention to its context and to the purpose for which it is being presented to us. Narrative Images

If descriptive images have a single element that normally does not interact with its environment or the viewer, then narrative images portray actions. Since still images do not actually move, these actions are represented via vectors, those lines that lead the viewer’s eyes from one part of the image to another. One powerful way of creating a vector is by inviting the viewer to follow the direction of the gaze of a human or an animal represented in the image. The character represented in a narrative image might be looking directly at the viewer, or the object of the gaze might be elsewhere, within or beyond the frame of the image. These different vectors have different meanings. Eye contact with the viewer might be interpreted as demanding or inviting some kind of response. A smiling or seductive facial expression might invite social affiliation, while a frown might demand that the viewer back away. A more neutral expression might be interpreted as an enigmatic demand or invitation, a challenge to puzzle out what the character represented wants or thinks. Gazes that alight elsewhere also have different possible meanings. Figure 9.4 is a print of a Scottish highland soldier and slave, in North America. It was published in England in 1790 and is thought to be an advertisement for tobacco products. The soldier, who occupies a central position in the foreground and so is the focus of attention, is taking snuff while the slave is smoking a pipe in the background, which also features barrels of tobacco leaves. The slave is on the left, and his smoking contextualises the other two key elements of the picture. The barrels of tobacco on the right comprise the ‘new information’, the product that is being advertised. While this is a narrative image, in that the characters represented are presented in action, there is no eye contact between the slave and the soldier nor between either of those characters and the viewer. As in ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’, we are presented with separate individuals who do not cohere into a group, although here the couple is visually linked, both by the tobacco products they are consuming and by

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Figure 9.4  Advertisement for tobacco (1790), featuring a Highland soldier and a slave

the elaborate feather head-dress each displays, which parallel the shape of the tobacco leaves. Both characters in this advertisement, we might argue, represent the ‘exotic’ other to the English tobacco-buying public of the 18th century. Highland regiments served in North America at the time and, since the destruction of the Scottish clan system in the latter half of that century, kilted highlanders were becoming strongly associated with bygone romance and the fashionable concept of ‘the noble savage’. A more recent analogy would be with a rugged, outdoors figure such as the ‘Marlboro Man’ cowboy who appeared in 20th-century cigarette advertisements. Here, the exotic ‘savages’ are both presented for the pleasure that the viewer will take in their different states of dress and undress. We gaze at them, but they do not return our gaze. The absence of eye contact with the viewer puts the viewer in a distant,

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observational position, as with the photograph of the Buddha. The viewer can dispassionately consider the relationship between the characters, who ignore each other, and we can speculate about what it is, out of frame, that they might be gazing at. Perhaps, rather than gazing at anything in particular, the two characters have withdrawn from their surroundings, presumably, in this case, under the influence of the narcotic. Narrative images, then, are composed of various elements in some kind of relation or interaction with each other and/or the viewer. They may or may not interact directly amongst themselves or with the viewer, but viewers are invited to use their interpretive skills to make sense of their relationship. Centre-oriented Images

One way of applying the framework in Figure  9.1 is to consider whether any given image is centre oriented or whether it has a left-right orientation. Centre-oriented images have a focus and optional marginal information, while left-right oriented images create a context on the left from which newer information on the right proceeds. Like the advertisement for tobacco, the poster shown in Figure  9.5 is clearly centre oriented. This is a North American advertisement from 1918, an appeal to the viewer to donate aid to victims of famine in an area of what is now Syria and the Lebanon. As a result of a naval blockade during World War I, sanctions on the movement of food and crop failure, it is estimated that 200,000 people starved to death in this area between 1915 and 1918. The poster appeals directly to the viewer through its text and visual image, both of which are centred, with no marginal distractions. The first line of text, in red capital letters, addresses the viewer directly through the possessive ‘your’: ‘Your bit saves a life’. (A ‘bit’ is a colloquial American expression, technically for the sum of 12 and a half cents, but often used to express a negligible amount.) This statement is in the top part of the poster, representing the ideal, namely, the claim that even your most negligible donation will have a profound impact. From the direct appeal to the viewer, the poster moves to a statement that is in a smaller font size, in black upper and lower case, stating the situation to be addressed, but focusing only on the women and children at risk. This line of text is illustrated by the image of a robed woman holding a child, who is reaching out to the viewer. Both gaze directly at the viewer with troubled facial expressions, creating vectors between themselves and the viewer. The demand on the viewer, created by the gaze of the woman and child, is verbalised in the line below, again in red: ‘You can’t let us starve’. The bottom three lines of the poster – representing the ‘real’ – give the details of the campaign and its address. These are in black, in varying but relatively small font sizes, with the name of the city and the abbreviation of the state in capitals.

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Figure 9.5  North American poster for Armenian and Syrian Relief Campaign (c. 1918)

Together, text and image send out a powerful appeal, alternating between assertion and demand, with the typeface used to modulate the emphasis given to particular parts of the message. Many of those suffering were Armenian Christians and, for those viewers in North America familiar with Christian iconography, the woman and child no doubt recall many similar images of the Madonna and Child, one of which is illustrated in Figure 9.6. It is one of many representations of the Madonna and Child painted by the 15th-century Italian artist, Giovanni Bellini. While there is no evidence that the anonymous artist of the famine appeal poster was directly influenced by any given portrait of the Madonna and Child, it is still instructive to consider how these similar images construct their messages. Both show a centre-oriented image of a robed woman, implicitly the mother, from the waist up, holding a

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Figure 9.6  Madonna and Child by Giovanni Bellini

child to her right. However, the mother and child in Figure 9.5 gaze at the viewer, demanding a response, while the Madonna and Child in Figure 9.6 gaze at each other in, presumably, mutual adoration. In the latter case, there is no direct engagement with the viewer, who is an onlooker to the scene. The expected response to this Bellini Madonna and Child is, for the devout Christian viewer, to meditate on the relationship between Christ, the human manifestation of the divine, and the mother who gave birth to him. The expected response to the famine appeal is, arguably, to recognise the divine in the starving mother and child, and to act on this recognition by giving even a negligible donation. While the purpose of each image is different, and while each constructs a different form of engagement with the viewer, they share a centre orientation and thus a focus on the symbolic relationship between two characters, the mother and child, and all the Christian and secular connotations that attach to those characters. Left-right Images in Dialogue

Other images move from left to right, contextualising one part of the image in relation to another. This movement can be illustrated by two political billboards from the 1998 campaign to elect a governor for the

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Figure 9.7  Billboard for 1998 Covas campaign

Figure 9.8  Billboard for 1998 Maluf campaign

state of São Paulo in Brazil. Two of the rival parties, led by Mario Covas and Paulo Maluf, produced two contrasting images that effectively constructed a dialogue between the campaigns (Figures 9.7 and 9.8). There are numerous compositional similarities between these two images: both construct their message from a combination of text plus an image of a single person, a child in Figure 9.7 and the business-suited candidate, Paulo Maluf, himself in Figure 9.8. It is clear why a political campaign will choose an image of a child: the connotations of this choice include innocence, idealism and hope for the future. The innocence and idealism of the child in Figure 9.7 are reinforced by the main text in the billboard, which translates as a direct address to the viewer, who is put in a particular reading position: ‘Father, do you think it is right to lie?’. The child on the left side of the poster contextualises this question: the boy is shown in close-up, directly facing, looking up and gazing straight at the viewer, who is thus projected into a particular relationship with him. As Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) observe:

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One can, and perhaps should, always ask, ‘Who could see the scene in this way?’ ‘Where would one have to be to see this scene in this way, and what sort of person would one have to be to occupy this space?’ (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006: 143)

The question on the right of the billboard in Figure  9.7 is therefore understood in terms of the viewer’s paternal responsibility to this child. The text on the billboard then addresses the viewer again, but this time from the stance of moral authority: ‘Respond with your vote’, followed by the candidate’s name and the number to be selected during the voting procedure. The bottom of the billboard (the space of the ‘real’) presents the campaign slogan, ‘Vote well. Vote Covas’. By contrast, the Maluf billboard puts the text on the left (‘Ele faz’ can literally be translated as simply, ‘He does’, but is more accurately rendered as, ‘He gets things done’). In this example, it is the text that contextualises the image, which answers the implicit question, ‘Who gets things done?’ The answer to that question is, of course, the candidate, who is featured right of centre (possibly a visual echo of his position in the political spectrum). Textual information on how to vote is then presented as new information on the far right. Instead of looking up at the viewer, as the child does in Figure 9.7, the figure of Maluf looks down at the viewer, his body angled slightly away from us. Those who follow Kress and van Leeuwen’s framework for interpreting visual images might argue that, by addressing the viewer from one plane while occupying another, the figure expresses an authoritative stance. In medium close-up and slightly angled, Maluf gazes down, directly at the viewer, from his own plane of existence, like a political commentator on television who turns to address the camera with an authoritative aside. Figures 9.7 and 9.8 draw on visual codes to construct authority in different ways. The Maluf campaign invites the viewer to accept the candidate’s authority; the Covas campaign invests the viewer with parental authority, but then demands moral action of a specific kind as a consequence of that investment. The perspective of each image also constructs authority: changes in the vertical axis are related to power while changes in the horizontal axis are related to the viewer’s involvement with or detachment from the image. If the viewer and character are face to face on the same plane, there is a high degree of involvement (as in Figure 9.5). If the character has turned away, or if a scene is depicted from an oblique angle, the viewer becomes more distant from it as the representation is no longer part of his or her world, as in Figure 9.3, which shows the Buddha in a world of his own. A character who meets the viewer’s gaze but who turns away to another plane might be interpreted as coy, or inviting – there may be a tension between a demanded response and a withdrawal to another plane, or an invitation to join the character on his or her plane.

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The two campaign posters, then, are similar in the compositional elements chosen to construct their message, but they differ in the realisation and spatial organisation of those elements. The contrasts can be summarised as: • • • • • •

Child versus adult. Extreme close-up versus medium close-up. Looking down versus looking up. Directly facing versus slightly angled. Image + text versus text + image + text. Question versus assertion.

These two images were also originally constructed not only as individual messages but as part of a political discourse in a particular place at a particular time. One of the issues concerning politicians and voters in Brazil during this period – and, indeed, since – is how to deal with the widespread corruption that is often manifest in Brazilian political and economic life. The Covas campaign chose the strategy of appealing to the responsibility of the voters as parents whose actions will determine the moral compass of the next generation (another billboard advertisement in the same campaign showed a young girl asking the question ‘Mother, is it okay to steal?’). The Maluf campaign chose to counter this strategy by appealing to the efficiency of their candidate: he is the authoritative father figure who will fix things for the voter. The billboard advertisements are in dialogue with each other as well as with the viewers; they are part of a political discussion of whether corruption is allowable if candidates are effective in serving the voters, a debate that extends, in time and space, well beyond this particular gubernatorial campaign. In Kress and van Leeuwen’s framework, the left-right orientation that is found in many images can be interpreted in relation to the organisation of the written sentence, which, in most Western languages, is read from left to right. This conventional organisation means that, for readers of those languages, contextual and ‘given’ information tends to appear to the left and new information tends to be given on the right. If teachers are working with learners who are not speakers and readers of languages whose sentences are read from left to right, there is room for experimentation – how do they ‘read’ those images that, like Figures 9.7 and 9.8, have a strong left-right orientation? Questions for reflection

The preceding sections have illustrated ways of ‘reading’ descriptive images and narrative images with a central or left-right orientation. Look again at the advertisements you chose to look at earlier.

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• Would you classify them as descriptive or narrative images? Explain your choice. • Discuss the meanings created by the orientation of the image, that is, as centrally oriented or as having a left-right orientation. • Discuss the meaning of any vectors you identify in the image (including any vectors that create a direct address to the viewer). • Discuss whether or not the viewers require a particular cultural knowledge to understand the advertisements. Fashion and Style

So far, we have looked at various aspects of the composition and content of images, including the selection of elements (such as child versus adult), their positioning in the visual frame, how they interact with each other and the viewer via vectors created by the gaze and other means, and the impact of factors such as perspective (e.g. are they near or distant, or looking down or up at the viewer?). Part of the ‘vocabulary’ of a visual image is the fashion or style adopted by characters in the scene presented. The very expression ‘dress code’ implies a set of behavioural rules governing the clothes that people wear, a code that can be interpreted as a meaningful system (cf. Barthes, 1983). Just as language can be formal or informal, so can clothes; just as certain forms of address or particular expressions are appropriate to some contexts and not to others, so certain styles of clothing are more likely to be worn in some situations than others. Our clothing is one way in which we give messages about the relationship between the individual and the wider community. Business people tend to dress in similar ways; men tend to dress differently from women; the rigid hierarchical communities of the military are coded into the design of their uniforms. Conventions, of course, change and vary across cultures – for many, school uniforms today are more likely to comprise of sweatshirt and jeans rather than blazer, white shirt and tie, and grey flannel trousers or skirt. Youth subcultures are renowned for ‘spectacular’ styles of clothing, partly because the adoption of such styles is consciously or subconsciously a challenge to ‘mainstream’ society or ‘the establishment’, that is, the culture organised and governed by a privileged minority of their elders. As noted in Chapter  2, Hebdige (1979) remains an influential study of the evolution of British youth subcultures from teddy boys to punks, and, in Hebdige’s discussion, dress codes play a prominent part. Like others (e.g. Cohen, 1980), he draws attention to the exaggerated proletarianism of skinhead culture: the leather Doc Martens boots, jeans, braces, button-down shirts and shaved heads forming a caricature of the norms of working-class clothing. The xenophobic chauvinism of the skinhead stereotype is an extreme version of a more muted working-class

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stereotype. Punks, on the other hand, constructed themselves according to a different visual code (Hebdige, 1979): Conventional ideas of prettiness were jettisoned along with the traditional feminine lore of cosmetics. Contrary to the advice of every woman’s magazine, make-up for both boys and girls was worn to be seen. Faces became abstract portraits: sharply observed and meticulously studied portraits in alienation. Hair was obviously dyed (hay yellow, jet black, or bright orange with tufts or green or bleached in question marks), and T-shirts and trousers told the story of their own construction with multiple zips and outside seams clearly displayed. Similarly, fragments of school uniform (white bri-nylon shirts, school ties) were symbolically defiled (the shirts covered in graffiti, or fake blood; the ties left undone) and juxtaposed against leather drains or shocking pink mohair tops. The perverse and the abnormal were valued intrinsically. (Hebdige, 1979: 107)

If skinhead culture mocked the mainstream by taking some of its more reactionary elements to an extreme and aggressively championing them, then punk culture outraged the mainstream by taking its norms and trashing them. For Hebdige, however, part of the value of punk culture was that, by systematically debunking the mainstream norms, by giving intrinsic value to the ‘perverse and abnormal’, punk usefully demonstrated the fact that mainstream values were themselves not natural, but rather the construction of a particular bourgeois culture. Punk style, at least in its earliest manifestations, can be interpreted as one in a series of rebellious acts of political subversion that challenge bourgeois, capitalist ideology. How far punk and other rebellious youth subcultures succeed in this subversion is open to question. Youth subcultures are endlessly reinventing themselves, partly in response to mainstream capitalism’s resilient ability to appropriate and commodify its most commercially exploitable aspects. Punk style moved fairly rapidly from the streets and suburban bedrooms to the catwalks of haute couture, and, in music, from independent to multinational record labels, where it enjoyed an enduring existence. Figure  9.9 is a photograph, taken in 2012, of Gendou Missile, a Japanese punk band, active from the mid-1980s. Figure  9.9 is another centre-oriented image, with the band as the focus. Three of the four band members stare down at the viewer from a position of power, with facial expressions ranging from aggressive to relatively friendly. Their fists are clenched or their hands are placed assertively on their hips. The hair of the three standing band members is colourfully dyed, in what Hebdige, in the quotation above, describes as typical punk style, that is, in bright, unnatural colours. The clothes are a bricolage of studded leathers and leopard-skin, with lots of metal evident.

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Figure 9.9  Japanese punk band, Gendou Missile, in 2012

The background is a collage of graffiti tags, posters and announcements. Punk style is recycled here as a commercial brand for the consumption of nostalgic listeners of Hebdige’s generation and for any younger fans attracted by the ‘exotic’ paraphernalia. The fashion and styles adopted by characters in images, then, is a potent resource for telling the world the culture with which the character affiliates. The viewer may share, or aspire to share, the same culture as those represented in an image, or the image might repel, challenge or shock the viewer. Advertisements are particularly adept at using the styles of the characters represented to target particular client groups, and an analysis of the fashions and styles used in advertisements can be revealing about the cultural norms operating in a given place at a given time. For example, the highland soldier in Figure 9.4 wears a kilt, a mode of dress that changed its signification in the 18th century, when this advertisement for tobacco was printed. Before the Jacobite uprisings of 1715 and 1745, the kilted Scottish highlander was generally considered a remote barbarian by the rest of Britain, including the inhabitants of southern, lowland Scotland. After 1745, and the defeat of the Jacobites, the kilt was banned in Scotland for a period, as it was one of the emblems of rebellious Gaelic culture. For this period, it was only legally worn by serving soldiers in the Scottish regiments of the British army, and so the garment began to be associated with the military. Eventually, the kilt

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began to symbolise the passing of a way of life, and, by the end of the 18th century, it was being interpreted as a symbol of a more primitive and therefore more natural form of existence. A process of romanticising highland Scottish culture began, and today the kilt has become a national icon, a symbol of Scottish kitsch for some, but a fashionable item of clothing for even lowland Scots and others to wear, particularly at times of celebration, such as weddings and graduations. By asking of an image the simple question, ‘What is he or she wearing – and why?’, learners can thus begin a process of sociocultural exploration. Objects and Settings

Obviously the range of non-human representations is too great to be able to give more than a few suggestions here about how to understand and interpret them. Much of the foregoing discussion of composition applies to things as much as people: objects and settings in the visual frame can be regarded as given/new information, ideal/ real, central/marginal, and they can be seen from a direct, head-on perspective as part of our world, or they can be situated obliquely on an alternative plane of existence. They can be portrayed in close-up, and sometimes they can be so close as to be unavoidable or oppressive. Alternatively, they can be shown at a distance, coolly, observationally. The grammar of the visual image thus applies to objects and settings as well as to people. Though objects may come in a multitude of shapes and sizes, there are three basic shapes – the circle, the square and the equilateral triangle – that are often associated with particular meanings, ‘some through association, some through arbitrary attached meaning, and some through our own psychological perceptions’ (Dondis, 1973: 45). It might be asked to which of these three basic shapes you ascribe the following meanings: • dullness, honesty, straightness and workmanlike qualities; • action, conflict, tension; • endlessness, warmth, protection. Dondis (1973: 45) suggests the above meanings are associated, respectively, with the square, the equilateral triangle and the circle. While these shapes may or may not be universally associated with those particular meanings, images that make use of these shapes might be interrogated with respect to the associations they evoke for learners. Certainly, objects as apparently neutral as automobiles can be gendered, if the manufacturer perceives that the main market for the car consists of female drivers, The way the car is designed, the choice of colours, the way it is described verbally and shown visually, all may appeal to what a given culture considers to be female rather than male tastes.

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Settings too have cultural connotations. An exploration of the ways in which the travel industry represents tourist destinations is an obvious means of investigating how a location is stereotyped, packaged and sold to people of other cultures. McCrone et  al. (1995) observed that there was a period, relatively recently, when the main Scottish tourist agency deliberately airbrushed people out of their poster images of mountains and lochs, in order to promote a tourist-friendly image of the country as an unspoilt, romantic wilderness. The fact that most of Scotland’s population live in lowland urban centres does not alter the power of the imagined landscape of highland Scotland to act as both a signifier of national identity and a commodity for consumption by tourists from within and beyond the country being represented. It will be clear from the illustrations discussed that all images have a cultural history. Images of cars targeted principally at women, for example, have resulted from historical developments in the market economy that mean that the automobile industry recognised that its commercial interests were best served by identifying specialised niches (e.g. the family, the business traveller, the independent woman) and designing and promoting its products accordingly. Any image used in the intercultural language classroom can therefore be subjected to analysis in terms of the evolving cultural assumptions that have shaped its form. Constructing the Natural

All visual representation is essentially non-naturalistic. Even photographs are not ‘mirrors on the world’. They use a certain degree of focus, colour saturation and tonal contrast to heighten or lower the degree of naturalism conveyed by the image. As Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) demonstrate, the concept of the ‘natural’ in photography is socially constructed and partly dependent on available technology, rather than on how the eye perceives phenomena such as colour. Too saturated an image seems ‘hyper-real’, as in the wish-fulfilling fantasy of the world of Hollywood’s golden age of cinema. Rose (2016: 27–32) also points out that technological possibilities and constraints contribute to our understanding of photographic images. The long exposure time required in early photography meant that most human subjects had to be posed in studios, often seated or holding onto some object for stability, whereas later cameras allowed for outdoor ‘snapshots’ that seemed to better capture the spontaneous and ‘natural’. What is considered natural also varies according to context. Long after photography in other media was ‘naturally’ in colour, the technological costs restricted photographic reproduction in most newspapers to black-and-white. The first introduction of colour into newspapers was in the ‘trivial’ tabloids, rather than the ‘heavyweight’ broadsheets. As colour became the preferred mode in the tabloids, the broadsheets

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only slowly moved towards colour images. Monochrome images were thus considered ‘natural’ for serious subjects. Although they became associated with serious documentary realism, monochrome images are in another way unreal – they do not represent the world as we actually see it, or even how we can now capture it by means of a smartphone. Monochrome images are therefore now an affectation, a pose that signifies documentary realism. In painting, what has been considered ‘natural’ has shifted even more radically during the past two centuries. A crisis in representational art followed the invention of the photographic camera. Impressionism, pointillism and cubism, among many other art movements, sought to challenge and reinvent the natural. Representational art no longer sought to give the illusion of documentary realism, but rather it explored the impression the world made on the senses, or it reproduced the way the world presents itself to the eye as points of light, or it schematised the world according to its underlying geometric design. Representational art is never, of course, a transparent, neutral, unproblematical medium for the transmission of information – not even photography. All visual images interpret the world as we see it – if only by selecting the items which are deemed worthy of note and arranging them in the visual space. There is no objective ‘natural’ way of doing this – the natural is determined, as we have seen, by the available technology, habits of viewing, individual expectations and each person’s history of looking at countless other images. All of these factors are culturally constructed and subject to negotiation and change. Questions for reflection

• Consider the style of clothes that you, your colleagues and your learners wear to class. Discuss the possible messages that people, consciously or unconsciously, convey through their choice of clothing. • What kind of resources are available to you (e.g. particular websites such as Fashion History: https://fashionhistory​ .fitnyc​ .edu) if you wished to place fashion choices in a historical context? • Pay particular attention to the objects and settings in an image of your choice. Explain the kinds of association they have for you. • Compare a ‘stylised’ and a ‘natural’ image. Explain what it is, exactly, that gives the images those qualities for you. Visuals and Text

The ‘language’ of visual images is less specific than that of verbal language, in that, unless the visual images have developed into a complex system of signification, as in hieroglyphics, the message of the visual text will be open to numerous interpretations by the viewer. The process of interpretation is normally below the level of consciousness – if anything,

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we pay attention to the ‘what’ of the image rather than the ‘how’ of the way it gets its message across. The viewer’s interpretation largely depends on implicit knowledge of conventions and the ability to deduce meanings from context. However, as we have seen in Figures  9.5, 9.7 and 9.8, there are times when the image is presented in conjunction with language – when words guide us in how to interpret an image, or when they reinforce a message that might be obvious. In these cases, language becomes part of the image. The combination of image and language is perhaps most evident in advertisements, as well as in comic strips and cartoons, which may show us the thoughts and spoken words of characters depicted (cf. Figures 9.5 and 9.7). Facial expressions that would otherwise remain enigmatic become more comprehensible in the light of the supplementary text. Headlines and captions narrow down the options for interpretation, in a way that is open to interrogation, particularly when used with photographs in advertisements, political propaganda or allegedly ‘neutral’ newspaper reports. It is, for example, highly unlikely that, when he was photographed, the child shown in Figure  9.7 was actually saying the utterance attributed to him. The message of the image is a marketing construction. When language is used in combination with visual images, it is important not simply to see one medium as merely illustrating the other: both media construct messages independently and what is ultimately communicated will depend on the interaction between them. It is therefore important to consider the dialogue between the visual and the verbal. To return to the two Brazilian campaign billboards (Figures  9.7 and 9.8), we observed above that the positioning of the text and visual image differs in the overall visual composition. As we have seen, in the Covas poster, the close-up of the child contextualises the verbal message, which is interpreted in the light of the image; while in the Maluf poster, the verbal message comes first, and is ‘anchored’ and explained by the visual portrait of the candidate, which functions as the referent of the initial pronoun, ‘ele’ (‘he’). It is also useful to consider whether the text is separated from the image, as headlines and captions are separated from photographs, drawings or paintings; or whether the text intrudes, overlaps or is superimposed on the image, or vice versa. The choices made here will determine the degree of ‘connectedness’ of text and image (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006: 26–27, 177–178). Text superimposed on an image, or vice versa, signifies a harmony between them, whereas, if text and image are set apart by framing, offset or tilted on separate planes, the signification will be a relative lack of connection – a disjunction between text and image, or between the world of the text and the world of the viewer. The politician in Figure 9.8, as we have seen, looks askance and down at the lowly viewer, who shares a plane with the text. It is a posture through which

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he simultaneously reinforces his authority and offers himself as an intermediary between worlds. By contrast, the text and image in Figure  9.5 share the same plane as the viewer – woman, child and text address the viewer directly. The interaction of text and language is therefore far from a simple matter, with one element simply illustrating or explaining the other. Rather, the positioning of the text with respect to the image becomes part of the message. The Iconography of English

A final point worth remarking on in relation to the intercultural classroom, particularly those located in non-anglophone countries, is the visual significance of the English language itself. The line between using a written alphabet or lexicon as part of the communicative practices of a literate culture and using those resources for their pictorial qualities can become blurred. Mediaeval manuscripts illuminated certain initial letters, particularly of valuable texts such as the Bible, and images and letters are often combined in manuscripts such as The Book of Kells. In Islamic art, inscriptions taken from the Qur’an form the basis of near abstract designs of beauty and complexity. Letters and words themselves are also images, after all, and languages evolve a range of styles of handwriting, calligraphy and font designs to present them to the reader. Written English words and phrases in isolation stand for the English language in general in a metonymic (part–whole) relation, and they can therefore be used both decoratively and to signify the connotations that English has in any non-anglophone culture, for example as the language of global economic, political, industrial and technological power. In Chapter  7, the idea of exploring the linguistic landscape of the learners’ locality was raised as a possible topic for ethnographic investigation, through observation and interview. The images collected by students can also be analysed semiotically, to explore how particular examples of English are used in public spaces. In non-anglophone cultures, wealthier, urban, commercial areas often abound with examples of English in shop signs, product names and advertisements, either to attract tourists or to give a sense of cosmopolitanism to locals. It is important to note that the use of English, in many cases, is to appeal to non-English speakers, as in the case of the Japanese energy drink, ‘Pocari Sweat’ (Figure 9.10), which was so named because the concept of ‘sweat’ in Japanese culture carries connotations of health and hard work. Ironically, when the drink was marketed in the US, its English name was dropped (Taylor, 1992). English is often adopted in non-anglophone linguistic landscapes because it is a language associated with wealth, power, entertainment, science and youth culture, among others. However, resistance to this

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Figure 9.10  Billboards in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, in August 2020 (Photograph by Lynuetyeang [Creative Commons licence])

image can also be found. A witty critique is found in a Brazilian billboard advertising a franchise chain of cafés that specialise in a kind of local delicacy, pão de queijo, literally, ‘cheese bread’ (Figure 9.11). The billboard has a left-right orientation: the image on the left shows a cup of coffee surrounded by a selection of the pastries typical of the franchise, each in a paper bag bearing the logo of Casa do Pão de Queijo. The visual image contextualises and explains the text on the right, which is superimposed over the faint image of a cook, who might be supposed to be saying the words, which are in a mixture of Portuguese and English. The upper text, in italics, can be translated as, ‘It’s fast. It’s food. But it’s not fast-food’. The bottom text gives the name of the franchise with the slogan at the very bottom, also in italics, which can be translated as, ‘It’s too good’. This billboard represents an acknowledgement of the power of English, even while anglophone culture is being challenged and subverted. The advertisers have appropriated English to state the superiority of local, Brazilian snacks over the produce of their competitors: the local produce is simply swiftly delivered, while the (implicitly American) competitors’ fast food is, presumably, junk. The English used here is, again, not directed at anglophone speakers in Brazil, but at local consumers. The English language is now part of the public linguistic landscape

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Figure 9.11  Billboard advertisement for Casa do Pão de Queijo in São Paulo, Brazil

globally, but that does not mean that its role cannot be challenged or contested or appropriated ingeniously for local ends. Questions for reflection

• Identify examples in local, public places where text in English is integrated with visual images in public spaces. • Explain how you might encourage learners to undertake a project that combines an ethnographic and a semiotic analysis of the use of different languages in your local public spaces. Checklist: Interrogating Images in the Intercultural Classroom

The present chapter so far has illustrated how some of the implicit conventions of ‘visual discourse’ can be made explicit and then used in the interpretation and explanation of visual images. These conventions are the basis for a checklist of questions, given in the Appendix (located after Chapter 12), that learners might use to probe the cultural meanings of visual texts. It is offered as a practical guide that teachers and learners can sample from and use to ‘interrogate’ an image. Not all the questions apply to every image that the instructor might use. Some, too, are more appropriate for more proficient and mature learners, while others can be used with learners of any age or level of proficiency. The checklist in the Appendix is offered as a guide to issues to consider when attempting to understand the images that permeate different cultures.

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Conclusion

An intercultural approach to ELT requires the fostering of the skills of relating and interpreting, and critical cultural awareness, as well as the skills of discovery and interaction. Teachers can therefore usefully explore how culturally situated messages are constructed through visual images, often in association with verbal text. The exploitation of visual materials to foster critical cultural awareness is particularly attractive because it extends practices familiar to many teachers who currently use images to promote comprehension and to prompt the production of spoken and written English. By reaching towards more explicit forms of analysis and interpretation, we move our students into the arena of intercultural learning. This chapter has focused on the analysis and interpretation of still images, giving examples of how certain images might be analysed critically. Such visual materials can be supplemented by other phenomena from different cultures – media texts, literary texts and certain ‘ways of behaving’ that are characteristic of particular groups. These phenomena are the focus of Chapter 10.

10 Using Literary, Media and Cultural Studies

In Chapter 9, we considered the use of visual images as a rich resource for developing the intercultural skills of interpreting and relating. This chapter continues that theme and extends it further into the area of critical cultural awareness. To do this, the chapter explores a broad set of related subjects, namely the application in the intercultural classroom of strategies and insights from the disciplines of literary, media and cultural studies. Topics addressed include: • • • • •

Texts, interpretation and English language teaching (ELT). A model of discourse production and processing. Raising critical cultural awareness. Using literary, media and cultural texts in the intercultural classroom. Contrasting mediated and unmediated discourses.

Texts, Interpretation and ELT

Although they are well-established academic disciplines in their own right, literary, media and cultural studies are historically related, and they share, up to a point, certain methodologies, practices and controversies. Moreover, notwithstanding their discrete academic origins, many of these methodologies and practices, and some of their attendant controversies, have spilled over into related areas of education, including ELT. This chapter begins by developing the brief account of literary, media and cultural studies offered in Chapter 2, and then suggests in more detail how intercultural language educators might draw upon these disciplines as resources for developing critical cultural awareness in particular. English literary studies now command such a central place in the arts and humanities that it is salutary to remind ourselves that, as a university discipline, it is a relatively recent curriculum innovation. Crawford (1998) traces the subject’s origins to the founding of professorial chairs in eloquence, rhetoric and belles lettres in the 18th-century Scottish universities, and he relates that it was not until the late 19th century that English literature became widely taught in 203

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English and American higher education. Media studies is even more recent, emerging gradually in the wake of broadcasting technologies, and achieving a wide institutional acceptance as a legitimate university subject only in the final three decades of the 20th century. Cultural studies is also a youthful discipline, evolving in Britain, at least, from a cross-fertilisation of sociology and literary studies in the 1950s and 1960s, and even today it is not represented as an independent programme of study in many universities at undergraduate or postgraduate level. When cultural studies is taught, it is usually within an undergraduate literature, media or sociology programme, or, at postgraduate level, in interdisciplinary ‘centres’ or ‘schools’. The discipline in the UK is sometimes branded ‘British’ cultural studies, to distinguish not only its content, but also its methodological and disciplinary concerns from those of its North American counterpart. ‘British’ cultural studies has, nevertheless, been effectively exported elsewhere, for example to Australia (Turner, 2003) and Brazil (Cevasco, 2003). Despite the ‘British’ label, the concerns of British cultural studies are as much with American as British society and culture, and its scholars are influenced by European intellectuals such as Marx, Gramsci and Foucault. As literary, media and cultural studies have developed over the past decades, the disciplines have undergone various crises of identity and substantial refashioning of their core beliefs and mission. English literature was transformed from a subject concerned with vernacular (i.e. nonLatin) rhetoric into a discipline whose teachers promoted themselves as no less than the guardians of civilised values, values that were themselves embedded in a ‘great tradition’ of writing in English. The energies of the discipline of literary studies were, and in some places still are, directed towards discriminating between those works that enshrine allegedly ‘universal’ values that deserve to be praised and preserved (i.e. in ‘canonical’ texts) and those works that do not. Literary critics from F.R. Leavis to Harold Bloom have assumed the mantle of protector of the Anglo-American and European literary heritage, and, by extension, of the entirety of Western culture (e.g. Bloom, 1994; Leavis, 1948). As the 20th century progressed, the criteria for inclusion in and exclusion from the literary canon were increasingly contested – the celebration and marginalisation of certain texts were seen as motivated more by factors such as the privileging of a particular class, gender and race than by their embodiment or lack of ‘timeless’ or ‘universal’ values. The study of ‘English’ literature itself thus became politicised and was seen as one way in which middle-class, white males withheld power from groups such as the working classes, women and other races and ethnicities. The discipline became engaged in examining and subverting the processes of inclusion and exclusion, developing strategies of ‘resisting’ canonical readings of texts and exploring the ways in which literary texts

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interact with wider social processes. Texts were increasingly studied for the ways in which they dramatise power relations between different social groups (e.g. Tyson, 2001). In some ways the rise of media studies can be seen as a reaction against the ‘high cultural’ or elitist tendencies of earlier, traditional English literary studies. The mass media are undoubtedly influential and deserving of academic study; however, given their relative novelty, ephemerality (at least, before video-recording, digital capture and streaming) and undoubted popularity, it was difficult to make the case that cinema films or television programmes enshrined the ‘universal’ and ‘timeless’ values of a great tradition. Media studies therefore had to find a different rationale for its existence. One central concern of media studies was and to some extent still is the ‘effects’ of media products on their audience. From an early and pervasive assumption that media products were dangerous propaganda that corrupted the minds of their consumers, for example by drawing working-class audiences into an oppressive capitalist hegemony (cf. Wiggershaus, 1994), scholars of media studies have developed a sophisticated model of how individuals and groups actually process and position themselves in relation to the programmes and films that they consume. In comparison with English literature, which still, by and large, privileges the reader’s individual encounter with the work of art as part of a process of personal development, research in media studies locates the text and its audience in a social dynamic. The media scholar is as likely to explore other people’s responses to the programme or film in question as his or her own, and to relate those responses to the form and the perceived ideological orientation of the text. For example, scholars of the media will explore how different social classes, different genders or different age groups respond to current affairs programmes, or how viewers with varying sexual orientations will interpret soap operas or genre films. The student of the media therefore learns how to research the ways in which different groups make sense of and evaluate texts that are themselves the result of complex technological and collaborative processes of production (cf. Ouellette, 2013). Cultural studies embraces aspects of both literary and media studies and further expands the notion of ‘text’. In literary studies, the text is the novel, story, play or poem under scrutiny; in media studies the text is the radio or television programme, cinema film or popular song, website or podcast, newspaper report or editorial. In cultural studies, any social practice or form of behaviour can be read as a text to be decoded. ‘Texts’ in cultural studies can be sporting events, dances, fashions or practices like shopping or cooking. As one of the founders of British cultural studies, Raymond Williams (2014 [1958]), insisted, ‘culture is ordinary’, and so it follows that the ordinary practices of individuals and groups in

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society can be ‘read’ in order to show how a culture’s values, beliefs and attitudes systematically pervade and organise everyday life. This is not, as we observed in Chapter  2, to argue that a culture is an essentialist, pre-existing or determining factor in people’s behaviour: as with the conversational genres discussed in Chapter 5, everyday social practices are a way in which individuals dynamically negotiate with others their shared values, attitudes and beliefs. These three academic disciplines – literary, media and cultural studies – are relevant to intercultural language teaching and learning in several ways. First, there is a shared concern with texts. The goal of the language teacher is to help learners to understand and produce spoken and written texts (in the sense of linguistic constructs or media products) and to cope with, mediate between or even participate in ‘cultural texts’ (understood as social practices). The text, in both its narrow and broad senses, is as central to ELT as it is to all the above disciplines. Another interest common to all these areas of activity is the critical interpretation of texts. Communicative language teaching laid a particular emphasis on learning strategies for the development of the ‘four skills’ of reading, writing, speaking and listening. Literary, media and cultural studies have, together, refined a sophisticated set of strategies that are particularly crucial to reading and listening, and also impact upon speaking and writing, namely, strategies of critical interpretation. Critical interpretation involves using our cultural knowledge and reasoning to go beyond the words in the text, in order to reach a deeper or richer understanding of them. Critical interpretation also considers issues such as how the text being read manifests an ideological position and how it invites readers to challenge or accept a particular set of social relations. In order to foster the crucial skills of interpreting and relating, while raising learners’ critical cultural awareness, the intercultural language educator, then, can draw upon the insights that scholars of literary, media and cultural studies have given us about the nature of the text and how it is articulated and consumed. To understand how to do this, it is useful, first of all, to consider models of text and discourse processing. Questions for reflection

• Explain why, in your opinion, anyone (specifically a language learner) would wish to study a poem, a television soap opera or a social practice such as folk dancing. • From your own perspective, explain what makes a given poem, television programme or form of dance more valuable or ‘better’ than another. • Compare the similarity and differences in ways of writing critically about literary and popular fiction, film or television and dance or fashion.

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Encoding and Decoding: A Model of Discourse Production and Processing

One question that has loomed large over literary, media and cultural studies concerns who has authority to decide what a text means. In the earlier days of academic literary studies, scholars assumed that canonical literature emerged from the sensibility of the artistic genius, and so students had to be trained to explain how the text conveyed this sensibility. They thus developed the ‘good taste’ required to discriminate between works displaying literary excellence and mediocrity. This view of literary studies put the author in charge of determining meaning, and the role of the reader was to learn to appreciate the ‘right’ authors (cf. Richards, 1929). However, as literary studies evolved, scepticism grew about whether the intentions of the author could be inferred by a reader from a text alone. Therefore, the text itself became the authoritative object of study, and a set of strategies called ‘close reading’ was developed. Close reading paid attention to the possibility of multiple meanings in literary texts. Students learnt to attend to formal features, such as rhyme, alliteration and metaphor, which might contribute to this multiplicity of meaning. A preferred reading was still considered to be inherent in the text, and the job of the discriminating reader was to use his or her training in close reading skills to tease it out and persuade a more general audience of its validity (e.g. Brooks & Penn Warren, 1938, 1943). Later still, there was another shift, this time towards giving the reader authority over the meaning of the text (e.g. Fish, 1980). Nowadays, it is broadly accepted that the reader actively constructs meaning in dialogue with the text – and a skilled reader might even ‘deconstruct’ a text, if he or she offers a plausible reading that goes against established or dominant meanings (cf. Montgomery et al., 2007). In media and cultural studies, even more so than in literary studies, auteur theory in cinema studies notwithstanding, the viewer or text-processor has generally been accorded a privileged position in the determination of meaning. Ethnographic studies have regularly been undertaken to observe and account for the different ways in which individuals and groups ‘consume’ media and cultural products. Ethnographers sit, digital recorders and notebooks at the ready, while their subjects watch television programmes or participate in cultural activities, such as dancing or sports events. The principal question motivating the ethnographers is ‘how are the subjects making meanings out of the “texts” (e.g. soap operas, dances or football games) with which they are engaging or in which they are performing?’. Clearly all three parts of the discourse equation (that is, author, text and reader) are important in the communicative event. The author has some control over the meaning to be conveyed, although the direct transmission of his or her meaning is impossible to achieve, and so some

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‘fuzziness’ is inevitable. The text itself is a meaningful construct and it usually invites a particular interpretation, most probably in the way that the author intended – this privileged interpretation is sometimes known as the preferred or ‘dominant’ reading. The reader or viewer, however, brings to the textual blueprint a set of expectations and reading conventions that might differ from those of the author and so the construction of meaning will always, to some extent, be an individual matter. A sophisticated reader might challenge the perceived ideological assumptions – the implicit value system – of the dominant reading, and so come up with a ‘resistant reading’, that is, a reading that subverts the attitudes and beliefs that the author probably intended to convey. The media scholar, Stuart Hall (1980) devised a diagram of ‘encoding and decoding’ to capture the tripartite structure of the communicative event. In a subsequent interview, Hall (1994) complained that his earlier diagram showed only half of the process, and so Figure 10.1 is an adaptation of the diagram, in accordance with his later wishes. Hall’s model of encoding and decoding shows a cycle of discourse production and processing: first the encoder (Participant X) constructs a text, bringing to it certain cultural assumptions (frameworks of knowledge) and working within the constraints of relations of production and technical possibility. Thus, some individual encoders speak and write, or take photographs, while others will publish books, or make films, or produce audio recordings in collaboration with others. The result of encoding is a coherent product (Text A) that may exist as words or images, or a combination of the two. This text is then decoded, that is, processed by Participant Y according to his or her frameworks of

Figure 10.1  Model of discourse production and processing (adapted from Hall, 1980, 1984)

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knowledge, relations of production and technical infrastructure. Thus, a play written in the early 17th century for live performance on stage in London might now be processed by 21st-century viewers on a cinema or television screen, either as a prerecorded film or as a streamed live performance. The changes in language, cultural context and technological delivery between the 17th and 21st centuries might well alter the way it is received and understood by its different audiences. The complete encoding–decoding cycle depicted in Figure 10.1 shows that decoders are also encoders, that texts are created and processed and then the resulting interpretations form the basis for further discourses. Someone who views a play or a film might talk to someone else about it, write a review of it (for a news site or a personal blog, depending on the relations of production and the technical infrastructure available), make a tribute to it, a parody of it or even embark on a remake. In other words, Participant Y responds to Text A by encoding a further text (Text B) and this too becomes available to be decoded by others, ad infinitum. The appearance of a review or a parody of Text A might also lead decoders of the original text to revisit it, and perhaps revise their understanding or evaluation of it. In other words, the process of encoding and decoding every text we construct or encounter is conditioned partly by our previous exposure to other texts. In Figure  10.1, Participants  X and Y can be seen as variables: the same two people obviously need not always be involved in the encoding– decoding chain of discourse. The concept of ‘text’ here is not restricted only to speech and writing but can be any media text, or any form of patterned social behaviour, such as dance or fashion. The main point of the diagram is that the production and reception of discourse are always achieved in a social and cultural context and are dependent on what we have already heard and said, seen and written. The meanings that we can convey and what we understand are also dependent on what we know and believe (frameworks of knowledge), audience expectations and collaborative possibilities (relations of production) and the technical means of communication at our disposal, from paper and pen to a video camera, computer console or television or film studio (technical infrastructure). To display critical cultural awareness, we need, in principle, to be able to bring different sets of skills to the analysis of each part of the encoding–decoding process. We can use our intuition and research skills to seek to understand the motivations and constraints upon the encoders (e.g. by drawing on auteur theory, or biographical criticism), we can use our interpretive skills to unpack the possible implications of the text itself (e.g. by performing semiotic analysis, or close reading) and we can observe the impact of the text on the audience and how its members proceed to decode it (e.g. drawing on ethnography, or reception theory). Whatever critical instruments we bring to bear on the individual elements of the encoding–decoding process, we must bear in mind that any one

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element only shows part of the cycle. Moreover, we must also remember that any model of the communicative event can only ever be a simplification and organisation of a complex reality. However, exactly because it is a simplification and organisation of complex issues, a model such as Hall’s can help us to clarify our perceptions and thus it can inform the design of intercultural language learning tasks. Questions for reflection

• From your own experience, at school, college or university, or from your own reading, describe the elements of the encoding–decoding cycle that have normally been the focus of literary, media or cultural studies. • If you wanted to study a novel, film or style of fashion, which elements of the encoding–decoding cycle would you be mainly interested in focusing on? Explain your answer. • Discuss how different ‘frameworks of knowledge’ might account for the differences in response to any given cultural product by people of a different nationality, age, gender, race, ethnicity, etc. Cultural Texts, Critical Interpretation and ELT

The history of using cultural texts in ELT parallels the history of using such texts in anglophone education more broadly. As we have seen, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, students of English literature, at home and abroad, were exposed to representatives of the ‘great tradition’, in order to transmit the universal and timeless values of ‘civilised’ anglophone culture. This process can now be interpreted as the imposition by a predominantly white, male, middle-class value system of a literary canon; in an overseas (and especially in a post-colonial) context, the process can also be viewed as part of an imperialist project (cf. Phillipson, 1992), however well-intentioned its proponents might have thought they were being. As the tide of the British Empire ebbed in the 1950s and 1960s, and a greater diversity of scholarly voices made themselves heard, different approaches to the teaching of literature in ELT also gradually evolved. For example, Henry Widdowson (1975, 1992) promoted stylistics as a linguistically informed ‘close reading’ of texts designed in part to enhance learners’ understanding and appreciation of the creative potential of the target language system. Contributors to Brumfit and Carter’s (1986) collection challenged the ethnocentric bias of ‘the great tradition’ and argued for the recognition in ELT of literatures representing World Englishes, for example from Africa, the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent. Later, educators such as McRae (1991) and Lazar (1993) stressed what the former dubbed ‘literature with a small l’. In these books, noncanonical literature as well as canonical literature is recommended to

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language teachers, in part as a means of understanding the mindset of a range of English speakers, that is, as a way of accessing other people’s frames of knowledge, values and presuppositions. The latter aims are clearly relevant to intercultural language education and, in particular, the development of critical cultural awareness. Compared to literary studies, media and cultural studies have a comparatively shorter history in ELT and their impact has been shallower than that of literary studies. Many of the contributors to Susan Bassnett’s (1997) collection of chapters on British cultural studies and language education focus on literary texts, though at least one (Durant, 1997) is concerned with the selection of a broader set of text types for cultural exploration. Some course books have attempted to cover their area systematically; for example, The Media (Edginton & Montgomery, 1996) offers advanced English learners a sophisticated approach to the study of anglophone advertising and news reports in the press and television, while Cambridge English for the Media (Ceramella & Lee, 2008) exposes intermediate English learners to language that is useful for working in the media industry. However, most learning materials take the ‘resource book’ approach to combining language activities with exploration of media and cultural texts. For example, Sherman (2003) offers a range of tasks for using video in the classroom, while Goldstein and Driver (2014) update the technology to embrace digital sources of video materials. As noted earlier, Corbett (2010) offers a range of small-scale ethnographic activities that explore cultural practices and identities, and Gill and Čaňková (2013) provide a number of activities that explore intercultural topics at an elementary level. In particular regions, groups of educators have collaborated to develop resources for particular regions, such as the Intercultural Resource Pack: Latin American Perspectives (Morgado de Matos et al., 2007). Like their literary counterparts, the ELT materials mentioned here vary in the degree to which they focus explicitly on media and cultural texts as primarily supporting the teaching of language. However, all of them, by the very fact that they necessarily engage with the processes of encoding and decoding frameworks of knowledge, offer the possibility of addressing the development of critical cultural awareness. Defining ‘Critical Cultural Awareness’

Despite the fact that it is often appealed to, the exact meaning of the adjective ‘critical’ can be vague. It is found in phrases such as ‘critical thinking’, ‘critical theory’, ‘critical pedagogy’ and ‘critical cultural awareness’. For McPeck (2016), critical thinking is characterised by a reflective scepticism towards accepted ways of thinking, and, if they are found wanting, an openness to solving problems in unconventional ways that are still dependent on the intelligent use of available evidence.

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Critical theory, however, is a tradition of social and media analysis that stretches back to the Frankfurt School, established in the late 1920s. Critical theory is concerned with interrogating social assumptions, such as the idea that the news media serve democracy, or that the free market is best placed to serve individuals’ economic needs. Critical theory aims to expose ‘the disjunction between ostensible claims and what actually happens, which is where the potential for new more rational forms of thought and action might appear’ (How, 2003: 5). Critical theory therefore seeks to educate subjects in order to transform their understanding of society, and so liberate them from oppression. Critical pedagogy draws on critical theory alongside other frameworks, specifically to pursue democratic education. As we saw in Chapter 1, a central figure in critical pedagogy was Paulo Freire (1996: 183), the Brazilian educator who rejected the idea that mass education should be directed at producing workers for the capitalist economy, and argued that, instead, teachers should enable their learners to achieve an understanding of their role in society such that they ‘will refuse to become stagnant, but will move and mobilize to change the world’. Educators such as Henri Giroux (1989) and Manuela Guilherme (2002) have developed Freire’s work, Guilherme in particular advocating that intercultural language education should be directed towards developing ‘critical citizens’ who have the qualities and skills required to effect progressive changes in democratic societies. The critical turn in intercultural language education is strongly influenced by Freire, Giroux, Guilherme and others, and is explored by the contributors to Dasli and Díaz (2016). Guilherme’s concept of critical citizenship is an extension, in some ways, of Byram’s (1997b, 2008) understanding of ‘critical cultural awareness’ as one aspect of intercultural communicative competence. Byram (2008: 233) defines critical cultural awareness or political education as ‘an ability to evaluate and on the basis of explicit criteria perspectives, practices and products in one’s own and other cultures and countries’ and suggests that the main objectives of teaching it are to: • identify and interpret explicit or implicit values in documents and events in one’s own and other cultures; • make an evaluative analysis of the documents and events that refers to an explicit perspective and criteria; • interact and mediate in intercultural exchanges in accordance with explicit criteria, negotiating where necessary a degree of acceptance of them by drawing upon one’s knowledge, skills and attitudes. In this formulation there are elements of critical thinking, particularly in the emphasis given to analysing perspectives, familiar and unfamiliar, using explicit and rational criteria. There are also traces of critical theory in the implicit purpose of making an evaluative analysis of documents

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and events; and critical pedagogy in the objective of mediating and negotiating between ideological perspectives. The critical elements may, to some extent, be implicit in the stated objectives – for example, we might assume that the negotiation of ideological perspectives in intercultural exchanges is to argue rationally for a more equitable state of affairs, or a more democratic perspective, than has hitherto prevailed. As with other formulations of intercultural communicative competence, this particular savoir is subject to the teacher’s interpretation and needs to be fleshed out and more sharply defined in practice. It is to the practical application of literary, media and cultural texts in the intercultural language classroom that we now turn. Questions for reflection

• Explain your own understanding of the meaning of ‘critical’ in critical thinking, critical theory, critical pedagogy, critical citizenship and critical cultural awareness. • Describe what a critically aware learner should be able to do with texts and the kind of linguistic resources that he or she would require, in order to be able to do it. • Argue for or against the claim that the study of literature, media and cultural practices should help to promote critical cultural awareness. Literature in the Intercultural Classroom

As noted above, literature has enjoyed mixed fortunes in ELT, owing to developments both within literary studies and the ELT profession. Just as literary studies passed through a crisis that contested the status of the ‘great tradition’ of the Western canon, ELT was moving towards syllabuses determined by the instrumental needs of learners – and, given the nature of literature, it was difficult to argue for creative work as a priority in instrumental, needs-driven language curricula. In short, it was difficult to claim that learners needed to study literary texts. Since then, however, ELT has moved to a more eclectic approach to syllabus design which has allowed for more diverse content, but nevertheless, even a prominent advocate of literary studies in ELT has acknowledged that ‘the role of literature in language teaching remains contentious, owing to widespread differences in interpretation of the precise nature of that role’ (Maley, 2001: 180). In intercultural language education, the role of literature (like that of media texts and cultural practices) may primarily be to illustrate the implicit or explicit value system of different cultures, and how those values are communicated, with a view to developing critical cultural awareness. To this end, Pulverness (1996: 11) argues that the selection of texts for classroom use should focus on the kinds of cultural information that literary texts can dramatise:

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• • • •

period culture, ‘the whole way of life’; social attitudes and values, e.g. the class system, or le vice anglaise; political values, e.g. the state of the nation; language and manners, which can be illustrated as ‘soundbites’.

In the novels and plays that Pulverness primarily discusses, the utility of literary texts is that their content can vividly illustrate the value systems that permeate an entire society, from rich to poor. They can dramatise, for example, the lived relationships between classes, genders and ethnicities. One task that he suggests is that learners trawl literary texts for ‘soundbites’, quotations that vividly sum up the spirit of an epoch or that encapsulate profound social changes. For example, the 19th-century Conservative politician, Benjamin Disraeli, was also an author, and in one of his novels, Sybil, he describes the divided condition of England in the mid-1800s. In a famous ‘soundbite’, one character describes the country to the young hero, Egremont, as: ‘Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws’. ‘You speak of –’ said Egremont, hesitatingly. ‘THE RICH AND THE POOR’. The ‘two nations’ soundbite is still echoed today in expressions like ‘one nation conservatism’ which implies that the modern UK political party serves, or should serve, the interests of both rich and poor. The paragraph itself is useful for intercultural studies: one activity might be to consider whether the description is still true, or whether ‘the rich and the poor’ might be substituted by other groups in a given society ‘between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy’. The durability of such soundbites in contemporary discourse can also be tracked using online corpora. For example, the News on the Web (NOW) corpus of online international news sites in English shows that there were intermittent uses of expressions related to ‘one nation conservatism’ until the second half of 2019, when there was a sudden surge of occurrences (see Figure 10.2) that gradually subsided again. The possible reasons for this (e.g. a general election and the departure of Britain from the European Union) can be explored by a closer investigation of the occurrences. A more detailed analysis of the NOW corpus also shows that, while the British press is by far the most frequent source of the phrase in the texts

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Figure 10.2 Frequencies of occurrence of ‘one nation conservatism’ in NOW from 2010 to mid-2021 (see https://www​.english​-corpora​.org​/now/)

collated, the expression ‘one nation conservatism’ is used internationally in anglophone journalism. The corpus is updated daily, but between January 2010 and the time of writing, in mid-2021, it had been used 55 times in British news sites, 15 times in US news sites, twice in the Republic of Ireland and once each in news sites based in India, Malaysia, Australia, Hong Kong, Tanzania, Canada, South Africa and Nigeria. This example of a single soundbite illustrates the ‘encoding– decoding’ cycle discussed above: learners can use online sources to research the writing of Disraeli’s novel, and to suggest how his biography, politics and creative work were related (encoding); all or part of Sybil might then be read to explore learners’ responses to a 19th-century ‘condition of England’ novel (decoding); and then corpus-based tasks can illustrate how Disraeli’s soundbite continues to be echoed and recycled in international political discourse (re-encoding and re-decoding). Various educators have discussed different ways of using literature in intercultural language education (e.g. Burwitz-Melzer, 2001; Byram & Fleming, 1998: 143–221; Kramsch, 1993: 130–176). One example here illustrates how a systematic approach to encoding and decoding can inform the study of literature in the intercultural language curriculum. In a small-scale research project into the use of literature in a language course offered to an advanced group of learners at the University of Stirling, participants were given a new short story to read every two weeks, supported by worksheets and class discussion (MacDonald, 2000). The Stirling lecturers adopted a four-phase learning cycle from Gajdusek (1988) and a version of their procedure is adapted below (Table 10.1). In the Stirling project each story was covered in four hours, but this duration can be adapted to different circumstances. The four-phase cycle, based as it is on action research, offers teachers a valuable model for the use of literary texts of some length to explore a cultural value system in an ELT setting, and to monitor the effects of the readers’ explorations. The goals of the action research described in MacDonald (2000) were varied: to extend the learners’ linguistic skills and knowledge, to develop their cultural awareness, to learn something

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Table 10.1  Possible four-phase procedure for teaching literary texts Phase Classroom activities

Focus on…

1

Give out pre-reading activities to orient readers towards the themes and subject matter. Elicit readers’ own experiences of similar themes. Distribute the story for home reading.

Decoding: giving background information to contextualise the text.

2

Check comprehension with a question + answer worksheet. Discuss the story with a focus on point of view, character, setting (time and place), etc.

Decoding: focus on setting, character, plot and point of view. Elicitation of a personal response.

3

Small-group discussion of key topics, e.g. plot climaxes or twists, prose style. Follow-up group work that involves retelling the story from a different point of view, inventing new dialogue, dramatising an episode, etc.

Decoding: focus on style and others’ responses. Re-encoding: retelling or dramatising the text.

4

Follow-up work on the author and/or the social or political context of the story. Class discussion of the broader issues of the story and how representative it is of the author’s output.

Encoding, e.g. possible reasons for writing the story. Decoding: how the readers relate the story to the wider culture.

Source: cf. MacDonald (2000).

of literary theory (particularly stylistics) and to contribute to personal enrichment. Student feedback suggested that the learners felt that these goals were achieved. The four-phase cycle shown in Table  10.1 also allows scope for a staged development of what the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) Companion (North et  al., 2018: 116–118) describes as ‘a personal response to creative texts’ (in Phase 2) and ‘analysis and criticism’ (in Phases 3 and 4). It is clear that the four-phase model focuses mainly on the latter part of the ‘encoding–decoding’ cycle. The first phase activates the learners’ schemata and paves the way for the individuals’ discourse decoding strategies by triggering and shaping their frameworks of knowledge. The second part of the cycle, checking facts and comprehension, is again concerned with decoding, to the extent that the basic content of the story is understood and responded to. Phase 3 represents an opportunity to begin to compare the individual’s reading of the story with that of his or her peers, as different interpretations are discussed in small groups. An awareness of stylistic options is also encouraged here as learners retell the story in different ways or transfer it to another genre (e.g. fiction to drama). The final phase might extend the critical analysis of style and/or content by further discussion of the storytelling techniques and/or the values dramatised by the text, in relation to different cultural norms. There is also an opportunity here to divert attention to the encoding process – to research the author and his or her relation to the situation that is narrated in the story, and so to find evidence for informed speculation about authorial intention.

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Using Literature with Younger Learners

Most of the activities in this chapter, whether for literature, media or cultural studies, presuppose learners who are relatively mature in outlook and reasonably proficient in language level. It is possible to follow the principles suggested and adapt the level of text according to the age or language level of the students. While many literary texts are demanding in both the maturity and language level of the intended readers, others are not. An example of an apparently simple poem aimed at younger learners is Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Singing’ from A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885). Of speckled eggs the birdie sings And nests among the trees; The sailor sings of ropes and things In ships upon the seas. The children sing in far Japan, The children sing in Spain; The organ with the organ man Is singing in the rain.

The poem is disarmingly simple and will be evocative for all young (and older) readers today of a culture long gone: childhoods spent with access to nature, a time when sailing was the most adventurous means of travel, when organ grinders played music in the streets and Japan and Spain were unimaginably exotic countries. If the teacher considers this poem appropriate for a younger class, the four-phase cycle suggested in Table  10.1 can be used to guide activities that will both enhance children’s intercultural competence and enrich their language. At the decoding stage, the learners can be pre-taught key vocabulary (through visual images) and they might be told something about Stevenson’s life. In Phase 2, the text would be introduced, in this case in class, with comprehension and concept checks, e.g. by eliciting why birds would sing of nests and eggs while sailors sing of ropes ‘and things’ (i.e. to contrast domesticity with work). The third phase might be most challenging for younger learners, as it moves from content to style. The poem is written in two-line sentences, and each pair of sentences is linked to the others by rhyme – thus, the sings/things and trees/seas rhyme links the bird to the sailor and so on. But what connects all the characters in the poem? The answer is in the title: singing. The poem presents the act of singing as a universal pleasure, shared by birds and people of all ages, occupations and countries, near and far. The pleasure taken in music cannot even be dampened by the weather (and to illustrate this, the instructor might play a clip of Gene Kelly dancing in the film Singin’ in the Rain). Note that this ‘message’ is

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not spelled out in the poem; the reader, old or young, needs to construct it from the different images presented by the poet. In the second stanza, there is little cohesively to link the Japanese and Spanish children with the organ and organ grinder, other than the fact that they all sing. In the final, follow-up, phase of the lesson, the poem would be related to broader cultural concepts. The teacher might use the poem as a precursor to introducing the children to recordings from different musical traditions from around the world. Singing might be a universal activity, but musical styles vary across cultures. The children might also be invited to think about how the 19th-century poem would be updated for the 21st century. If singing is still a universal pleasure (and in some cultures singing might well be proscribed), what or who would they choose as examples, in order to show, today, how ‘universal’ it is? Would a bird still be the quintessential singing animal? What adult occupations are considered exciting and adventurous to contemporary children? Who can be heard singing in public today? What countries do today’s children find ‘exotic’ and ‘other’? The four-phase cycle as outlined in Table 10.1, then, can be adapted to the needs of younger learners. The cycle accords with the still-current tendency in literary studies to focus mainly on the ‘text decoding’ part of the discourse cycle. In current literary studies (unlike media or cultural studies), there is relatively little discussion of what the author really meant, or the author’s belief system – which would probably have been the primary focus of literature classes in the first half of the 20th century. The primary focus of literary analysis today is on understanding the creative potential of the linguistic system and on constructing contingent, continually revised and progressively deeper and richer meanings from literary texts in a series of structured discussions and reflections. This process can involve younger learners and linguistically simple texts. Questions for reflection

Think about the linguistic profile, ages and interests of your own learners. • Describe ways in which you would seek to engage them and enable them to cope with reading and responding to poetry, fiction and/or drama in English. • Explain how you would address the challenge of matching the maturity and proficiency of your learners with texts of an appropriate level. • Identify some texts – older and contemporary – that you might choose as sources of ‘soundbites’. • Describe how Malcolm MacDonald’s four-phase cycle might be adapted to put equal emphasis on encoding as well as decoding.

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Media Studies in the Intercultural Classroom

In media studies, like literary studies, different interpretive traditions are concerned with different phases of the ‘encoding–decoding’ process. In film studies, auteur theory focuses on encoding by privileging the role of the director in guaranteeing a coherent text by communicating a personal vision in the way he or she coordinates the enormous technical and human resources involved in making a feature film. Auteur theory has been challenged by those who insist that no one person can be held responsible for the ‘personal vision’ of such a complex media product, but, even in the challenge, the critical emphasis is on the encoding of the text, albeit as a collaborative process. Some auteur theorists have argued that a particular studio or even a ‘star’ actor is largely responsible for the style of a film and is therefore better placed than the director to be considered the guarantor of its coherence and overall tone. More recently, with the rise of streamed series on television, the ‘showrunner’ who coordinates director, actors, scripts and so on, has been accorded the title of ‘auteur’ (cf. Lackey, 2019). Auteur theory, then, focuses largely on the encoding phase of the discourse cycle by attempting to account for the thematic or stylistic elements of a media product by relating them to a personal vision or set of qualities, usually of the director, but sometimes of other key participants in the collaborative process. Strangely, the screenwriter is seldom considered to be an ‘auteur’, a fact that possibly underlines the non-literary aspects of the medium. While some branches of media studies focus on encoding, other traditions run parallel to ‘close reading’ or ‘stylistics’ in literary studies by focusing on the text itself. However, a ‘text’ that involves a rich array of visual and aural signs in sequence demands a set of interpretive strategies that differ from those used to decode words on a page. Film and television critics draw upon the multimodal discipline of semiotics to support their interpretations, particularly of the visual elements of a text (cf. Bignell, 2002). Semiotic analysts of films and television pay attention to factors such as visual composition (cf. Chapter 9), for example, whether an actor is shown in close-up, medium- or long-shot; the quality of the lighting in each scene; the colour coding of settings and characters’ dress; the fluidity of the camera movement; and how scenes are edited. All of these factors – and many others – are assumed to have an effect on audience response. For example, an intimacy is suggested when actors’ faces are shown in close-up, and we are less likely to identify with characters who are shown only in medium- or long-shot. If the actor’s face is lit from below, his or her features are distorted and he or she can look sinister. Rapid cutting is characteristic of an action movie, while long, leisurely takes slow the rhythm of a film. Kramsch (1993: 189–196, 211–223) reports on the exploration of the deep-rooted ideological messages conveyed by film

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conventions, in her comparison between a short French documentary on truffle-hunting and an American commercial for Coca-Cola. As noted in Chapters  2 and 6, a further important strand of media studies draws upon ethnography to focus not on the discourse encoders or the text itself, but on the discourse decoders, that is, the audience. Ethnographic media researchers are interested in how audience members position themselves in relation to the texts they consume: do they accept or resist the ‘dominant’ interpretations? Do people consume certain types of text differently? Obviously they do, as witness two viewers’ divergent evaluations1 on the Internet Movie Database website of the 1969 BBC television series, Civilisation, presented by Sir Kenneth Clark: 19  MARCH 2006 BY GRING0 Watching the series in China, it makes me all the more proud of my heritage. The last comment is a good one; let Clark introduce himself to you, just as one reads a Herodotus or Suetonius- to be in the presence of a knowledgeable and engaging friend. having visited many of the places shown, it’s also a marked benefit that the series was filmed in 1969, when travel was truly the domain of those seeking enlightenment before our days of package tours. And how clear and lucid are his discussions of culture and history! Often I found myself anticipating his next sentence from my own classes I teach, but am left feeling pedantic and plebeian by comparison.

2  NOVEMBER 2018 BY SPINTONGUES Actually, this is an old tired, imperial, colonial, Europocentric view of history and culture, unpleasantly presented and conveying nothing but the contents of British imperial trashbin, starting with the thesis that “humanity invented harmony.” Even more amazing to see this lack of taste and common sense from the BBC of “the golden period.” I grieve that it had not ended as a highway filler, as some truly great British TV programs had.

It is not difficult to speculate about the class positions of these two viewers and, indeed, how those class positions are constructed in part through their championing or rejection of this programme. Ethnographic interviewing of each viewer would confirm or challenge such speculation and add detail to the analysis. Ethnographic evidence of how and why viewers respond to media texts in the way that they do has enriched our understanding of the

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decoding process, although there is a continuing debate on the researcher’s role in interpreting this evidence. Rose (2016: 271) reports on the controversy that arose from Walkerdine’s (1990) observations of a working-class family’s viewing of the film, Rocky II. The researcher’s initial revulsion at the celebration of male violence was tempered by a later, more considered reflection on her initial emotional response. Lull (1990) recommends that the ethnographer adopt a non-judgemental approach to ethnographic observation; however, as Walkerdine acknowledges, a completely detached, neutral stance is, in practice, impossible for the researcher to achieve. The learner who attempts an ethnographic project on responses to media products needs to bear in mind that the investigation will be coloured by his or her own attitudes and values, and the challenge will be to mediate between the frames of knowledge that inform the viewers’ response and what might well be very different frames of knowledge that inform the researcher’s own response. Hall (1994) reminds us that the encoding–decoding process is cyclical, and anyone who wishes to discuss popular media products today needs to bear in mind the impact of audience research, marketing and fandom on the ongoing development of the product, especially if it is in an extended format, such as a television series or a film franchise. The encoding–decoding cycle can model, in an admittedly idealised fashion, the intimate and complex relationship between producers and consumers of media products, a relationship that seldom applies as strongly to the relationship between literary authors and their readers (although Stephen King’s satirical horror novel, Misery, does dramatise one reader’s direct influence over her favourite author, whom she holds captive in her home). As observed above, the techniques and concerns of media studies have, historically, had less of an impact on ELT than those of literary studies. Even so, the intercultural teacher and learner can appropriate and adapt some of the strategies of media scholars to serve their own purposes and interests. Like researchers in media studies, they can decide what their focus of interest will be: those who are interested in auteur theory will search out interviews with, say, directors or showrunners on websites or in film magazines. Those interested in the semiotics of film and television will have to learn the ‘discourse’ of visual signs from textbooks such as Bignell (2002). Those interested in audience responses can begin by addressing the diversity of opinions on viewer websites such as IMDb or Rotten Tomatoes, but a deeper ethnographic study will involve more extensive engagement with actual audiences. If they have the opportunity, learners might sit with a family and observe them watching, say, an English language situation comedy or drama, and note when they laugh or the comments they make during the viewing. Learners involved in virtual online exchanges (Chapter 8) might compare their own and others’ responses to internationally distributed films or globally streamed dramas or documentaries. More sophisticated projects might

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observe the responses of different age groups or genders to the same programme. The encoding–decoding model of discourse processing can therefore be used to structure the way that ELT courses organise materials and activities related to media texts. Attention to this discourse cycle obviously does not exhaust the possible ways of exploring media texts. For example, the fact that they are media texts, that is, that they ‘mediate’ a world view for the benefit of an audience, radically differentiates them from ‘unmediated’ texts that function in the private sphere, for the benefit only of those participating in the exchange. This aspect of media texts is discussed more fully in the final section of this chapter. Questions for reflection

• Discuss ways of discovering how your learners consume media products in English, e.g. films or television. • Explain how you might use this information as the basis for a more extensive study, by learners, of the media products they are particularly interested in, from the perspectives both of encoding and decoding. Cultural Studies in the Intercultural Classroom

‘Cultural’ texts obviously include literary and media texts; this section focuses on those forms of social behaviour that fall outside the definition of literature or the media, but which nevertheless can be read as ‘texts’, specifically dance and fashion. Other types of social practice, such as sport participation, spectatorship or fandom, might equally have been chosen as the basis for illustration. Cultural studies pays attention to the significance of such social practices, often taking a self-consciously rebellious stance towards the valorisation of such marginalised subcultural groups as punks, rastafarians, goths and soccer casuals (cf. Murdock, 1997: 180), and hitherto neglected practices as, say, tango-dancing, whose evolution as a global phenomenon is traced by Fitch (2015). Researchers into cultural studies have tended to favour as informants the relatively powerless in society: the working class, women, people of colour and youths (often in combination). There is no reason why subcultures involving, say, older, privileged, white males might not be subjected to similar inquiry; however, the critical nature of cultural studies favours a focus on the relatively marginalised and disempowered. Much of the methodology of cultural studies follows a similar pattern to that of literary and media studies: the social practices of a subcultural group are considered as a ‘text’ to be analysed and explained. Such research can again be related to the different stages of the ‘encoding–decoding’ discourse cycle. There is more of a problem in cultural studies than in related disciplines in determining the ‘author(s)’ and the ‘audience’ of a text. The

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originators and audience of, say, a style of fashion or a form of dance can be difficult to determine. Nevertheless, in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Hebdige (1979: 122–123) retains a concern with the encoders, by distinguishing between the ‘self-conscious innovators’, the ‘originals’ who develop a subculture and the ‘hangers-on’ who later appropriate the symbols of the subculture without consciously or deliberately advocating its ideology. This distinction is echoed in the complaints of Widdicombe and Woofitt’s (1995) informants about ‘plastic goths’, ‘pseudo goths’ and other ‘shallow’ or ‘inauthentic’ subcultural members. There is a concern in many subcultures, it seems, to legitimise the process of ‘encoding’: there is a sense in which a small group of authentic ‘auteurs’ whose behaviour and style are ideologically driven find their practices (‘texts’) taken up and imitated by a larger group, or audience, and in this process the core values of the originators are diluted or lost. McRobbie (1993) argues more positively for a fusion of the categories of production and consumption: the practitioner of fashion, for example, can combine and adapt ready-made garments and received styles to produce something ‘original’ that is then imitated and adapted in turn by others. The cyclical nature of the encoding–decoding discourse model is flexible enough to account for this process of bricolage (that is, the improvisatory use of given materials to make new meanings). In short, in cultural studies, the decoder feeds new encodings back into the discourse system and contributes actively to the dialogic evolution of texts. Values change, but that is in the nature of dialogue. In short, in cultural studies, the methods of analysis downplay the roles of auteur and audience as discrete categories, and they focus instead on the semiotic analysis of the texts, or practices themselves, alongside the ethnographic study of subcultural members who are considered to be both consumers and producers of meaning. Semiotic and ethnographic approaches to dance are illustrated by McRobbie (1993) and Thomas (1993, 1997). McRobbie studied the social practices of young female dancers at mass raves that flourished in Britain in the early 1990s. These events took place in large, disused warehouses and hangars, to the hypnotic sound of techno music, and were associated with the use of the drug, Ecstasy. Young women danced in hot pants and bra tops, and some wore babies’ dummies, or pacifiers, or whistles in their mouth or around their neck. The dances lasted for long periods, sometimes for several days, and tired dancers were provided with ‘chill out’ rooms where ice-lollipops were sold. In her analysis of the young women’s dress and behaviour, McRobbie (1993) uses the vocabulary of text analysis; for example, the dances and fashions ‘articulate’ social tensions: The tension in rave for girls comes, it seems, from remaining in control and, at the same time losing themselves in dance and music. Abandon

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in dance must now, post-AIDS, be balanced by caution and the exercise of control in sex. One solution might lie in cultivating a hyper-sexual appearance which is, however, symbolically sealed off through the dummy, the whistle or the ice lolly. The idea of insulating the body from ‘invasion’ is even more apparent in the heavy duty industrial protective clothing worn by both male and female fans of German techno-music, a European variant of rave. (McRobbie, 1993: 25–26)

McRobbie ‘reads’ the social practices (the enthusiastic dancing, the fashion accessories, the preferred foodstuff) in order to argue that a message is being constructed that opposes the overt child-like connotations of the pacifier and the ice-lollipop to the adult concerns of sexuality, and the threat of sexually transmitted diseases. She suggests that the adult world, and its anxieties, are acknowledged and held at bay through fashion and dance. However, detached from the voices of the participants themselves, the interpretations accorded by academic observers, no matter how sophisticated, well-intentioned and compelling, can be criticised as further impositions by the relatively powerful on members of marginalised subcultures. As noted in Chapter  7, Widdicombe and Woofitt’s (1995) ethnographic interviews with members of ‘spectacular’ youth subcultures contain numerous illustrations of those members’ irritation with outsiders’ interpretations of their activities and lifestyle. However, as Murdock (1997: 180) observes, if we consider semioticians’ interpretations as demonstrating the meaning potential of social practices (rather than demonstrating the meanings they necessarily have for the participants themselves), these ‘readings’ have the merit of defending subcultural behaviour from the charge that it is trivial and random. Arguably, the fashion and behaviour of the young women at raves are dignified or elevated by McRobbie’s analysis of them as part of a larger system of meanings that responds creatively to social pressures. Even so, to guard against charges that they appropriate the meanings of subcultural practices for their own ends, cultural studies researchers nowadays tend to combine their own semiotic analyses with ethnographic explorations. McRobbie (1993) herself makes a strong plea for a ‘thick’ ethnographic description of her subjects’ social practices. In another study of a different group of dancers, Thomas (1993, 1997) used ethnographic interviews to explore how a young, multicultural, mixedsex dance group saw themselves exploring issues of race and gender through their participation in a London jazz-dance performance group. Although some semiotic skills are in evidence in her analysis of three dances (Thomas, 1997), the data presented is primarily the interviews that elicit how the performers themselves interpret their dances. Thomas’ findings suggest that British culture feminises dance, so that the males in the group, while fiercely proud of their performance, were more anxious

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than the females about the extent to which they felt required to exhibit emotion on stage. She also found that the women of colour felt more constrained than their male counterparts by a white-dominated society that tended to stereotype them as sexual caricatures. Thomas’ methods of exploration, then, like most ethnography, privilege not her own interpretation of the dances but an analysis of how the dancers themselves articulate, directly or indirectly, their own understanding of their practices. In the 21st century, the consumption and production of cultural practices happens on a global as well as a local scale, and the ‘flow’ of practices such as dance and fashion across continents destabilises, to a certain extent, the concepts of margin and centre. Cultural theorists who attend to these ‘flows’ draw on the work of Arjun Appadurai (1993, 1998) who talks of different kinds of global movement or ‘scapes’, such as flows of people, whether refugees, migrants or tourists (‘ethnoscapes’), flows of technology (‘technoscapes’), flows of media (‘mediascapes’), capital (‘finanscapes’) and ideologies (‘ideoscapes’). Richardson (2019) demonstrates how the global production and consumption of jeans as a fashion item can be used in the classroom to illustrate these global movements. For example, with regard to ‘ethnoscapes’, Richardson (2019) observes: I introduced this scape by taking three differing perspectives on ethnicity in regard to jeans, two of the more obvious ones, ‘sweatshops’ and child labor, but also I want students to think beyond some of the more highly politicized (in the West at least) ideas around ethics and jeans production. So we also looked at artisan design and tourism, where I provided examples of recycled jeans that are made locally and that tourists can buy while on holiday. While it is useful to note the historical domination of the West, it is important that students understand that they should not situate minorities as ‘victims’ inasmuch as they are not passive recipients of the negative side of a specific power dynamic. It is also the case that in the West we must not apply our cultural norms to the rest of the world. (Richardson, 2019: 7)

In her analysis of the impact of the flow of people on the meanings evoked by jeans as a global fashion item, Richardson attends to the agency of different consumers and producers, the empowered as well as the exploited, in different circumstances. The meaning of the same item, available globally, varies according to local cultural contexts, and so interpreters need to bring their critical cultural awareness to local cultural norms. There are many possibilities as well as challenges in adapting extensive and sophisticated research in cultural studies to the intercultural ELT curriculum, particularly when teaching older teenagers and younger adults. One attraction of cultural studies to its many researchers, for example, is that it takes youth seriously, so the culture of teens and young adults can become the subject of exploration. There are certainly

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problems, as McRobbie and others note, when older adults are seen as ‘invading’ the arena of youth subcultures (anxieties that apply, in fact, to any outsiders who impose themselves on a subcultural community), as members may actively challenge categorisation and resist their behaviour being interpreted or exploited by others. However, sensitively handled, social practices can become exciting ‘textual resources’ for use in the intercultural classroom. The semiotic and ethnographic methods used in the analysis of literary and media texts – and indeed visual ones – can be adapted to explore subcultures, locally and globally. Obviously, for most teachers, there is usually only time available for smaller-scale projects; nevertheless, there is often scope for intercultural exploration of cultural or subcultural practices, even within the constraints of an ELT curriculum. Questions for reflection

The encoding–decoding model of discourse can help to structure and organise investigations of a subculture and guide relevant activities. • Identify a social practice that might interest your learners, e.g. a sport or leisure activity, or a practice that involves a particular style of dress or fashion. • Discuss, for your chosen social practice, how many of the following questions it is possible to answer, and explain how the answers fit into the encoding–decoding cycle. ⚬⚬ Who are the originators of the practices? ⚬⚬ Are the producers also the audience/consumers? ⚬⚬ What are the economic, technological and political constraints upon the production of styles and behaviours? ⚬⚬ What are the communication patterns between producers and consumers? ⚬⚬ What might the styles and behaviours mean, to the participants themselves and to observers outside the group? Mediated and Unmediated Discourse

‘Spontaneous’ discourse, such as casual conversations and even unscripted interviews of the kind discussed in Chapters 5 and 7, should not be confused or conflated with the kinds of conversation and interview that are represented in literature and the media. Many literary and media texts, and many, but not all, of the social practices considered in cultural studies, can be said to mediate in that the encoder interacts with the decoder via an apparent exchange between other participants. For example, in a drama performance, a playwright communicates with an audience via the interaction of characters on stage, or, in a television news broadcast, a reporter interviews a witness to an event for the

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benefit of television viewers. The fact that such layered exchanges are constructed with a (usually) non-participating audience in mind fundamentally changes the nature of the discourse found in mediated texts. In ‘unmediated’ or spontaneous exchanges, that is, when the participants and the audience are the same, friends might gossip to affirm their social and cultural identities, or an ethnographer will interview a subject for the benefit of his or her own research. In a play, novel, film or television broadcast, people are represented as conversing or being interviewed, but for reasons that go beyond the immediate negotiation of group values, or the curiosity of the individual interviewer. The author of a fictional or dramatic text might be satirising the characters portrayed, or using scripted dialogue to explain key plot points, while a news interviewer might probe the witness’ feelings about the event in order to evoke an emotional response in the television audience. The purpose of mediated texts is therefore different from that of unmediated ones, in that they are directed towards an, often unseen, audience. The distinctive nature of mediated texts means that we cannot simply apply the discourse conventions of unmediated texts to them. The ‘conversation’ between the guest and host in a televised chat show may seem in some respects to be like a conversation between old friends, but the presence of a studio audience and a wider viewing audience at home means that it has different goals, and so different rules and linguistic options will be chosen. The analysis of mediated discourse has to take into consideration those discursive features that are relevant to the status of the text as art, propaganda, entertainment or information that is considered to be in the public interest. The sections that follow briefly illustrate a selection of mediated texts from chat shows and broadcast news, partly because the staples of these media genres (i.e. ‘conversations’ and ‘interviews’) are mediated versions of the speech genres discussed in Chapters 5 and 7. Mediated Interviews

Media texts containing conversations and interviews are themselves varied in generic purpose: they range from ‘talk’ or ‘chat’ shows that feature personalities from the world of entertainment to current affairs interviews with politicians, ‘ordinary’ witnesses and correspondents from the news-gathering organisation. The purpose of the chat show is, in the view of Tolson (1991, 2001, 2005), to engage in ‘banter’ for the amusement of the studio and home audiences. In this kind of show, the host seeks to elicit from a celebrity personal information or opinions for the purposes of display, and the studio audience may take an active role in the exchange, for example by laughing at anecdotes, or whooping or cheering every mention of an actor’s popular roles. In addition, chat shows offer the possibility of exposure of some ‘private’ detail behind

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the public face of a known figure. The maintenance of this public face is what Tolson (1991) called ‘the synthetic personality’, and part of the function of the interviewer is to attempt to penetrate this façade to reveal the ‘genuine’ person concealed behind it. Tolson (1991) characterises the ‘chat’ in chat shows as follows: First, there is an often topical shift towards the ‘personal’ (as opposed to the institutional), or towards the ‘private’ (as opposed to the public). Secondly, this shift may be accompanied by displays of wit (e.g. foregrounded lexical ambiguities) or humour (double entendres, etc.). But thirdly, and this is the vital point, in any context, ‘chat’ always works by opening up the possibility of transgression. (Tolson, 1991: 180)

The privileging of ‘personal’ and ‘private’ topics can be seen in many chat shows across the world. A Brazilian example from the mid-1990s was the SBT series Jô Soares onze e meia, in which celebrities were often interviewed, in English or Portuguese, in front of a Portuguese-speaking audience. When broadcast, the show had subtitles, but evidently few in the studio audience actually understood English sufficiently to follow the exchanges between host and guest. This fact serves to accentuate the importance of the audience to mediated discourse. An interview by Soares (JS) with the late American film actor, Patrick Swayze (PS), first broadcast on the Brazilian channel SBT, in 1995, illustrates familiar aspects of the genre. The overall set-up gave a sense of informality to the exchanges: Swayze and Soares were seated close enough for the host to touch the guest (which he occasionally did; see Figure 10.3) and there was a mug of some kind of drink between them. Though a script was evident on Soares’ desk, he did not read from it overtly, and so an intimate and spontaneous atmosphere was maintained. Much of the exchange focused on the revelation of the personal or ‘pseudo personal’. For example, Swayze explicitly made the point that his career had been governed by his feelings, rather than by institutional or financial factors. JS: You’ve you’ve played ah very different roles…and ah you’ve played a bouncer, surfer, doctor, a dancer ah what makes you choose a role from a script? PS: For me, my heart. JS: Yeah. PS: Em I I choose roles by instinct. Em I feel very lucky that I lived through the Hollywood hit machine mentality you know – JS: Mmhmm PS: – where you make decisions only according to how much money something’s going to make at the box office.

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Figure 10.3  Jô Soares interviews Patrick Swayze on Jô Soares onze e meia (SBT, 1995) (https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=i8GeH5oXIw8; accessed 4 May 2020)

JS: Mmhmm PS: You know, I need to do roles and characters that are going to further me as an actor and are going to open my heart up in some way … you know like that’s the reason I did a film like Dirty Dancing, like Ghost, like eh, like eh eh like To Wong Foo, you know because it’s not a movie about drag queens, it’s a movie about human beings and people and the dignity we all possess and everyone deserves a chance at happiness no matter who we are. Swayze’s responses to Soares questions conform to Tolson’s view that chat shows encourage the personal as opposed to the institutional: the actor presents himself as a person who was guided in career choices by his heart, his instincts and his desire to improve as an actor. The studio audience is uncharacteristically silent throughout the exchange (whereas a British or American audience might well have cheered the mention of Swayze’s films). It is left to the host to backchannel by giving encouraging minimal responses. The silence of the audience is even more apparent when Soares, touching Swayze’s arm, attempts to move into transgressive territory, and Swayze counters with humour. JS: [touching PS’s arm briefly] When you started as an actor, because of being a dancer, did people think that you were gay, because of all the enormous prejudice that – PS: Well … my point of view is [deep voice] let ’em call me gay [JS laughs volubly; audience murmurs] and see what happens.

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JS: [Still laughing] No pro – and see what happens! And you you study martial arts too. PS: All my life. There are a number of points in this exchange that merit comment. First, in passing, we see another example of the ‘feminisation’ of dance, referred to by Thomas above, which, possibly in combination with Swayze’s earlier reference to drag queens, prompts Soares’ question about perceptions of Swayze’s sexual orientation. This subject is laden with the potential to broach the chat show convention of revealing a secret self behind the public façade, and its sensitive nature is evident in Soares couching the question between two justifying subordinate clauses (‘… because…because…’.). Swayze chooses to deflect the question with a humorous response, adopting a macho voice to challenge the implication. The uncomprehending studio audience understandably fails to respond to the humour, again leaving Soares to respond with his own loud laughter, which can be interpreted as an attempt to model the studio audience’s response, or to compensate for the lack of it. The host’s follow-up question is irrelevant except insofar as it confirms Swayze’s masculine image, and so the host mitigates the attempted transgression. Soares then abruptly switches topic to introduce a clip from Swayze’s most recent film. Mediated interviews in chat shows, then, are, like ethnographic interviews, clearly about much more than the simple exchange of information and ideas. A chat show host often knows in advance the answers to the questions they will ask the guest and the exchanges are constructed to evoke a response from the studio and home audiences. The host’s own exhibition of laughter or concern can indeed act as a model or prompt for the studio and home audience’s responses. Furthermore, when the guest discloses information, it is not necessarily ‘sincere’ but should be interpreted within a set of conventions whereby the interviewee seems to be revealing telling aspects of his or her ‘real’ personality. In fact, this may well be a ‘synthetic’ personality for public consumption, and part of the chat show ‘game’ is for the host to appear to transgress convention at times, in an attempt to offer the audience a glimpse beyond or behind the guest’s public persona. The countering of such transgressions, which often involves humour and the display of wit, leads to the banter that is characteristic of the genre. While chat shows illustrate one type of mediated exchange, current affairs interviews on broadcast news programmes illustrate very different types. In a detailed linguistic analysis of the features of English language broadcast news programmes, Montgomery (2007) argues that interviews are an optional supplement to ‘core’ news items. They generally take place after a news report, when the news anchor might turn away from the television audience and address someone else, either in the studio or on a screen.

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Montgomery (2007: 147) explains that there are four main types of news interview: the accountability interview, in which a public figure or institutional representative is held to account; the experiential interview, in which a witness to a news event gives a personal perspective on it; the expert interview, in which someone gives an informed perspective on an aspect of the news; and what he calls the affiliated interview, in which reporters, correspondents and editors who are employed by the broadcast institution give their take on current events. Montgomery demonstrates that each kind of interview is characterised by distinctive discursive conventions: in the accountability interview, for example, the views and values of the interviewee might be challenged in a way that is not likely to happen in experiential or expert interviews. In affiliated interviews, the correspondent has licence to speculate in a way that would not be possible in the main news report. Montgomery also argues, following Habermas (1979, 1990), that the viewing audience conventionally subjects these four interview genres to different ‘claims to validity’. In short, we expect a valid exchange to constitute truth, sincerity and/or appropriateness (or ‘taste’), to which Montgomery (2007: 219) tentatively adds the quality of ‘well formedness’. Some interviews might project all four claims, but some types of interview might privilege one above the other; for example, we might forgive a witness for not having access to the overall truth of an event, if he or she presents a sincere account of his or her understanding of it. We might also excuse a greater degree of rudeness or directness from a news anchor in an accountability interview than in an expert interview, where it would be considered in poor taste. As an illustration of the linguistic and discursive features of the accountability interview, consider the opening exchange between a BBC Newsnight anchor, Emily Maitlis, and Elizabeth Harrington, a representative of the American Republican party, on 31 March 2020, following a news report by David Grossman of then President Trump’s handling of the novel coronavirus epidemic in 20202: EM: David Grossman there. Well, joining us now to discuss the ethics, former CNN host Soledad O’Brian and Elizabeth Harrington from the Republican National Committee. I’m going to talk to Elizabeth first if I can. Um, American people deserve to hear from their Commander-in-Chief, in the middle of a crisis, of course, ah but I wonder what your gut reaction is when you hear ah for example Andrew Cuomo saying it’s like being on eBay with 50 other states. Donald Trump gives to those states that he thinks have treated him right and not to those that haven’t, that have Democratic governors. You you must wince when you hear that, don’t you? EH: Well Andrew Cuomo has also said many positive things about the president and the vice president and the real assistance that has

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EM: EH: EM: EH: EM: EH: EM: EH: EM: EH: EM:

EH: EM: EH: EM: EH:

really been across party lines. It doesn’t really matter what party you are in. President Trump has said I’ll work with anybody if they’ll help the American people. Listen to what Gavin Newsom the governor of California has said, that the president has done everything that they’ve asked, and you’ve seen a real mobilization of getting government resources coming together. Look at the president opening up the cabinet room on Sunday night with experts who are in … know the supply chain and they say why do we have these masks in Ohio but can’t get them sterilized out … can you get the FBA FDA to get that approval – Elizabeth – – the next day we have in Ohio 160,000 masks – ah – that are able to be recycled out Eliz – That’s the kind of leadership that President Trump has consistently been delivering and Democrats sadly sometimes want to pay play politics Yeah, Elizabeth – Let’s go to try to get delivering results – as I’m sure you know he has spewed disinformation, inaccuracies, untruths right the way through this Like what? He said in January there were no worries about a pandemic, he had it totally under control, he then said it was a miracle and it would disappear, he said it was being talked up by Democrats wanting to unseat him, it was a hoax, he told reporters off – No – for asking questions – False – about Americans being worried. Were you happy with all that or do you want to sit here and defend that kind of language used at a time of crisis? He never called it a hoax […]

As Montgomery observes, the accountability interview is characterised by an adversarial quality that is not seen in other interview genres: here the news anchor begins her questions with ‘you must wince… don’t you’ and continues with ‘do you want to sit here and defend that kind of language used at a time of crisis’. She also vividly expresses the assumption that the interviewee knows that the president is lying (‘as I am sure you know he has spewed disinformation…’). Montgomery follows Clayman and Heritage (2002) in noting that the adversarial gambit by interviewers is often couched in a thirdperson attribution, either named or unnamed. Here, for example, the

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interviewer begins by asking the interviewee for her ‘gut reaction’ on hearing complaints by New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, thus invoking both the validity claims of truth and sincerity. The interviewee is not only invited to verify or challenge the truth of Cuomo’s claims but she is also questioned about how she feels about them. But, as Montgomery (2007) notes: Increasingly the accountability interview verges on argument as views are expressed no longer as embedded within interviewer questions and no longer formally separated through devices such as third-party attributable statement from those of the interviewer. Instead, the structure of questions and answers is replaced by assertion and counter-assertion. (Montgomery, 2007: 214)

This progression from eliciting a response to another’s comments to eliciting a response to one’s own propositions is actually evident even within the opening exchanges of this interview, as the interviewer’s attribution of claims moves from the third party (Cuomo) to the interviewer herself, and the exchange becomes a sequence of assertions and denials. Holding a representative of government or an institution to account has become a kind of verbal duel or gladiatorial combat for the entertainment of viewers, as much as an interrogation that will genuinely inform their understanding of the issues at stake. Questions for reflection

• Identify some television programmes in English available to you and your learners that contain examples of ‘chat’ or ‘banter’, and examples of accountability, experiential, expert and affiliated interviews. • Explain how you might design tasks to teach your more advanced learners to be critically aware of the conventions of each type of exchange, and the language that typifies them. Mediated Interviews in the Intercultural Classroom

In a discussion of the ethics of broadcast news, Montgomery (2007) calls for a general understanding of the conventions of the genre, and how it is changing. As many examples of broadcast interviews are now available online (as are, at the time of writing, the examples discussed here), it is possible for learners to access them, and to compare broadcasting conventions across different cultures as well as periods. The genre is important, as Montgomery observes, because, even in the age of the internet and social media, broadcast news remains one of the most trusted sources of information about the world. Through mediated discourse it is possible to explore cultural values: they are interactions that function as a source of knowledge, attitudes and beliefs, but they require

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skilled interpretation. There are, of course, many ways to teach and critique the conventions of mediated discourse. As well as checking the comprehension, we can focus on the evidence that viewers bring to bear when they assess their validity claims: do we regard the contributions to the exchange as being true, sincere, appropriate and well-formed and on what grounds are those decisions made? We can also raise learners’ awareness of the language and discourse conventions of celebrity and current affairs interviews by developing role plays which practise such interactional features as banter, accountability, witnessing, giving expert opinion and speculating (cf. Corbett, 2006a). Conclusion

It would clearly take many volumes to do justice to a proper discussion of the pedagogical uses of literary, media and cultural studies, and the variety of ways in which the many ‘texts’ represented by literature, the media and specific cultural practices can be used in intercultural language education. This chapter has narrowed the discussion down to two main themes, both to do with the discourse conventions shared by the diversity of texts available. First, an adaptation of Stuart Hall’s ‘encoding–decoding’ model of discourse production and consumption, though idealised, can help clarify the aims and intended outcomes of intercultural tasks, and organise the activities devised to achieve them. For example, class projects and smaller-scale classroom activities, such as reading and listening comprehension and surveys, can focus on encoders (the authors, auteurs, originators), the texts themselves (literary works, media products or social practices) or the decoders (the readers, viewers, participants/consumers) using appropriate methodologies, such as biographical research, stylistic or semiotic analysis, or ethnography. Secondly, a recognition of the mediated nature of texts, such as chat show conversations or current affairs interviews, can lead to an investigation of the particular conventions that shape such discourses, and prompt further enquiry into how broadcasters and audiences from different places and at different times produce them and make sense of them. The use of literary, media and cultural studies in language education can be challenging but it is certainly rewarding; in intercultural language education it is one of the richest means of developing critical cultural awareness. Notes (1) See IMDb: https://www​.imdb​.com​/title​/tt0264234/​?ref_​=fn​_tv​_tt​_11 (accessed 25 June 2020). (2) At the time of writing, the video could be seen in full on YouTube at https://www​ .youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=RWGmYSgVXyo (accessed 4 May 2020).

11 Assessing Intercultural Communicative Competence

The question ‘what is a good test’ is a question of ideology – because a ‘good test’ depends on clear identification of target competence, and target competence is a composite of goals and ideals. Spiro, 1991: 16

The penultimate chapter in this book turns to the issue of assessing intercultural communicative competence (ICC). Despite the proliferation of models of ICC over the past few decades (see Chapter 3), valid and reliable forms of assessment remain elusive, and there is still a lively debate about whether the assessment of ICC is achievable, or even desirable (cf. Liddicoat & Scarino, 2020). This chapter reviews the ideological reasons why assessing ICC and evaluating courses that teach it remain challenging, and offers practical advice to those teachers who wish to assess aspects of ICC. It also addresses the related issue of evaluating the impact of courses that are designed to teach ICC. The following topics are addressed: • • • • • •

The role of assessment in English language teaching (ELT). Challenges in assessing ICC. Test formats, objective and subjective. Formative and summative assessment. Determining learners’ progress. Evaluation: designing impact studies for ICC courses.

The Role of Assessment in ELT

Thus far, this book has been largely concerned with deepening the reader’s understanding of the ways in which language constructs, maintains and represents diverse social identities and group relationships, and demonstrating how an understanding of these processes can inform intercultural language education, particularly for those who are teaching English to speakers of other languages. The present chapter considers issues raised by assessment in an intercultural approach to ELT. 235

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The chapter is intended to be a discussion of assessment issues for teachers with little or no experience of language testing. Accordingly, the general role of assessment in ELT is reviewed, briefly, before the chapter focuses on assessing ICC and surveys some ways in which this might be accomplished. The chapter concludes with a consideration of how to evaluate the positive or negative impact of an intercultural language course. Much, of course, has been published to guide teachers on how to understand and construct language tests and other assessment instruments (e.g. Alderson & North, 1991; Fulcher, 2015; Hughes, 2003; Kunnan, 2013, 2018). The purpose of a given instrument of assessment may be to measure the strengths and weaknesses of a learner’s knowledge before a course begins (a diagnostic test), the skills and knowledge that a learner has acquired during a language course (an achievement test) or it can attempt to indicate a candidate’s general level of language competence, independent of any course taken (a proficiency test). Learners’ performance can be measured against fellow candidates (norm referenced) or against a predetermined set of standards or intended learning outcomes (criterion referenced). In the literature on testing and assessment, a test is generally considered valid if it assesses what it is meant to assess, and not something else (Hughes, 2003: 26–35). It would be difficult, for example, to design a valid written test of oral fluency, and if such a test were given at the end of a course in spoken skills, it would likely be considered invalid. In ELT there are three widely recognised types of validity (cf. Brindley, 2001: 137–138): • construct validity, or the extent to which the content of the assessment reflects the current theory of language; • content validity, or the extent to which the assessment adequately samples the range of the candidate’s abilities; • criterion-related validity, or the extent to which the results of the assessment correlate with other measures of the candidate’s ability. Other types of validity are sometimes discussed in the literature on assessment, including ‘face validity’, that is, a measure of the extent to which an instrument of assessment is acceptable to teachers and learners. For example, while reading a written text aloud proved to be a relatively reliable index of a candidate’s overall language competence, over time this form of assessment began to be stigmatised as ‘not communicative’ and so it fell out of fashion (cf. Coniam, 1990). Reading aloud as an instrument to assess communicative competence ceased to have face validity, no matter what statistical measures might support its use.

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The assessment of language competence has spawned a commercial industry of internationally recognised standardised tests that, as well as being valid, are statistically shown to be reliable, that is, they discriminate effectively and consistently between candidates at different levels of proficiency, and if the same candidate were to perform the same assessment more than once, in a short space of time, he or she would consistently achieve the same result. Assessments are also considered to be reliable if the results are relatively unaffected by factors unrelated to the skills being tested, for example, the candidate’s state of mind, alertness or tiredness, the location and the specific conditions under which the test is taken. While various measures can be taken to ensure the validity and reliability of language assessments, tests remain, as Spiro (1991: 16) observes, fundamentally ideological in nature. Foucault (1975) goes further, and all who have endured tests and assessments will no doubt experience a frisson of recognition and sympathy on reading his words: The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a normalizing judgement. It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that make it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish. (Foucault, 1975: 184)

All forms of language assessment are ‘a composite of goals and ideals’ and their uses are various. They may function as gatekeeping devices by which authorities, institutions or other elites grant or deny candidates access to further study or employment, or as a means of providing institutions or employers with evidence that their investment in training is providing the anticipated return of individuals who are equipped with whatever skills and knowledge are currently held in esteem. One ideological shift in language assessment can be seen in the movement away from tests that focused purely on the manipulation of language elements, often tested objectively through instruments such as multiple-choice tests. With the rise of communicative approaches to language learning, tests moved towards more holistic, subjective instruments that sought to assess the candidates’ ability to perform certain tasks in the world outside the classroom. The move towards intercultural communicative competence, however it is conceptualised, implies a further ideological shift in the goals and ideals underpinning language education. Byram (2021: 148–150) briefly reviews different transnational documents that aim, in different ways, to define intercultural and related competences, including the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) (Council of Europe, 2001), the later Companion volume (North et  al., 2018), discussed in Chapter  3, as well as the PISA 2018 Global Competence Framework (OECD, 2018). While some descriptors

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of intercultural competence do focus on communicative resources, including the ability of learners to ‘express their views and participate in society’ (OECD, 2018: 7), there are, as Byram (2021: 149–150) observes, debatable normative assumptions about what is considered ‘good’ participation in society in the 2018 PISA framework. For example: • I sign environmental or social petitions online. • I boycott products or companies for political, ethical or environmental reasons. • I regularly read websites on international social issues (e.g. poverty, human rights). It is evident that the nature and scope of intercultural competence remain a matter for debate. Here, we follow Byram (2021: 150) in observing that intercultural competence, however it is operationalised, must be anchored to one or more contexts; it is not an absolute, context-free quality or aggregate of qualities. Furthermore, the slight but important shift from intercultural competence to intercultural communicative competence changes the focus from what competent intercultural citizens should do, to whether speakers have the communicative resources to act in particular ways, should they choose to do so. The challenge of finding a valid and reliable assessment of ICC lies in resolving the rather different claims of the ‘intercultural’ and the ‘communicative’ in the formulation of learners’ competence. In the following sections of this chapter, after a brief discussion of whether or not ICC should be assessed at all, aspects of the assessment of ICC are examined, from the perspective of the savoirs described in Chapter 3. The reason for the focus on what might now be considered, by some, a limited or reductive model of ICC is simple: the savoirs, for all their limitations, some of which are acknowledged below, remain a powerful and systematic basis for thinking about the communicative demands of intercultural engagement. As such, they remain central to the original and revised CEFR framework, with which many English language teachers will be familiar. Questions for reflection

• Describe the kinds of language assessments that you are familiar with, as a teacher and, perhaps previously, as a learner. Classify them as achievement, proficiency, diagnostic, norm-referenced and/ or criterion-referenced assessments. • Describe the ideological bases of one of the language assessments with which you are familiar; that is, describe the beliefs that it enshrines about the nature of language, learning and communication.

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Can and Should ICC be Assessed?

The problems of reconciling the communicative and intercultural dimensions of assessing learners’ competence have long been recognised. While it is relatively unproblematical to assess linguistic or communicative competence, it is problematical to select the kinds of knowledge that will be ‘universally’ required for intercultural exploration, or to quantify, measure and test attitudes such as openness, curiosity and respect for otherness (cf. Sercu, 2004, 2010). Numerous voices have been raised that are, at the very least, sceptical of the entire project of assessing ICC. For example, Borghetti (2017) synthesises and extends a number of critical perspectives, both ethical and practical, that cast doubt upon the wisdom of testing candidates’ ICC. Her principal objections to assessing ICC can be summarised as follows: • Models of ICC are diverse and few explicitly define ‘culture’. In such circumstances, when the basis for assessment is unclear, it is unethical to assess capacities about which there remains no consensus. • There is a disconnect between competence and performance. While assessment instruments claim to test the former, they can only assess instances of performance, and infer that these instances correlate to knowledge and skill. While such a correlation might be made confidently in the case of language usage (e.g. the consistently accurate use of a grammatical feature reliably indicates knowledge of that part of the grammatical system), there is less confidence that the performance of, say, ‘respect for otherness’ in a test situation will correlate with a given personal quality. • Since intercultural communication is co-constructed by hearers and speakers, it is difficult to isolate the performance of one participant in the communicative event and accord responsibility to that participant alone. • There is an ethical issue about benchmarking certain standards of behaviour and arguing that they are appropriate and desirable in all situations. For example, the value of displaying the positive attribute of ‘respect for otherness’ might be questioned if the candidate’s interlocutor is threatening or actively hostile. Despite her reservations about assessment, Borghetti affirms the value of intercultural approaches to language education, suggesting that interculturality, like honesty and generosity, is a value that does not need to be assessed to be validated. Kramsch (1993: 257) also argued eloquently that the real value of intercultural language learning is to reach what, following Bhabha (1994), she described as a hybrid ‘third space’ (see Chapter 2) that, in being shaped by the spaces of the home culture and otherness, transcends them both. Kramsch observed that the location of the ‘third

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space’ will differ for individual learner, and its importance might not be realised until long after a course of study has been completed: Nobody, least of all the teacher, can tell [learners] where that very personal place is; for each learner it will be differently located, and will make sense at different times. For some, it will be the irrevocable memory of the ambiguities of the word ‘challenge’. For others, it will be a small poem by Pushkin that will, twenty years later, help them make sense out of a senseless personal situation. For others still, it will be a small untranslatable Japanese proverb that they will all of a sudden remember, thus enabling them for a moment to see the world from the point of view of their Japanese business partner and save a floundering business transaction. (Kramsch, 1993: 257)

Kramsch, Borghetti and others are, of course, right to reject the reduction of the value of intercultural language learning to those elements that can be atomised, quantified and tested before, during and immediately after a course; Nevertheless, as Borghetti acknowledges, assessment does have a legitimate institutional and individual use: state educational systems demand assessment to evaluate the effectiveness of schools in providing for their learners, and individuals use assessments to measure their personal progress in a course of study. Teachers also use assessments to chart learners’ needs, their development and to diagnose their problems. Furthermore, as Borghetti also concedes, the presence of an element like intercultural learning in assessments encourages institutions, teachers and learners to take it seriously – this is the ‘washback’ effect of testing (cf. Bailey, 1996). Even so, the challenges in developing valid and reliable means of assessing ICC are considerable. As Liddicoat and Scarino (2020) observe, of intercultural learning: Eliciting evidence of learning requires attention to three inter-related facets: (1) performance in interpreting and making meaning, (2) analysis of concepts, ideas, processes, perspectives, and the various aspects of language and culture that come into play, and (3) reflection on own/other positions, perspectives, choices, reactions, responses, and learning. Given the complexity involved, no single assessment task can capture these facets. This means that assessment needs to capture a range of means relating to both the performance and analytic, reflective-reflexive metalayers, as well as both individual instances of learning and developmental learning trajectories. Different kinds of configurations of evidence are thus needed. (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2020: 401)

Despite the difficulties, there are analogues for assessing ICC. Spiro (1991) offered a valuable account of the kinds of knowledge and skill required to measure and assess another apparently nebulous concept, namely ‘literary competence’. She demonstrated that literature tests demand

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a high degree of cultural knowledge (usually about canonical writers, literary history and literary theory) as well as a set of skills that enable candidates to produce acceptable responses to texts, including the articulation of an aesthetic response that involves the appropriate use of paraphrase, quotation, summary and citation of other sources. Although for much of the 20th century, literary competence was a set of skills and types of knowledge that was largely implicit (a fact that did not prevent it from being hotly contested), from the 1990s there was, in the UK at least, an institutional drive towards benchmarking minimal standards of provision and performance in the subject area (QAA 2019). University graduates who have degrees in English, for example, are expected to have a range of knowledge (e.g. of certain authors and literary movements), a specific set of skills (e.g. close reading; see Chapter 10) and a broader set of transferable skills (e.g. the ability to plan and organise work, and submit to deadlines). These benchmarking guidelines are not used in the assessment of individuals so much as in the evaluation of providing institutions. Neither are they overly prescriptive in, say, the exact form of knowledge to be acquired (there is the stated expectation that some knowledge of literature before the 18th century is to be learned, but Shakespeare, for example, is never mentioned by name). In the terms of the National Council of State Supervisors for Languages and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (NCSSFL-ACTFL) ‘can-do’ statements (Chapter  3), they provide performance benchmarks, rather than indicators or examples, but they are an attempt to make the ideology underpinning the literature curriculum overt. Of course, the ideology can always be challenged but at least it is stated explicitly. Like literary competence, ICC can be seen as a relatively fluid and changing set of knowledges and skills that represent particular social values (including accuracy, creativity and respect for otherness). While the values themselves, as Borghetti (2017) suggests, might lie beyond direct assessment, the formulation of relevant knowledge and skills can be used to inspire a diversity of assessment formats that are nevertheless reliable and valid, in that teachers and learners acknowledge their appropriateness, they test what they are supposed to test, their results are consistent and so on. For assessment of ICC to be valid, its character needs to be made explicit. Given that, as we have seen in Chapter  3, a number of models of ICC exist (and more are likely to be formulated in the future), it has to be accepted that no single model of ICC will be universally applicable, and so the teacher or institution has to consider which version of ICC is relevant to the educational context. Borghetti’s (2017) concerns can then be at least provisionally addressed by taking the following steps: • Adopting a contextually relevant model of ICC that seeks explicitly to define the knowledge and skills that learners are expected to acquire during the course.

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• Developing criteria for assessing ‘instances of performance’ in terms of the communicative resources the individual is able to draw upon to function in a range of situations. • Using a variety of assessment formats (individual and group) to accumulate enough evidence to give a reliable indication of an individual’s proficiency. • Assessing ‘instances of performance’ according to explicit criteria that do not necessarily assume that the learner accepts or aligns with a given social value. In short, learners might be expected to demonstrate that they have sufficient linguistic resources to display curiosity, even though they themselves might not be curious. The examples that are used in the following sections illustrate the above points in more detail. To illustrate the assessment of ICC, we will focus on one widely used model – the main savoirs on which CEFR scales of achievement are based (cf. Chapter 3) and consider test formats and types that are appropriate to assessing the competences proposed. The CEFR descriptors quoted are based on the CEFR (Council of Europe, 2001) and the updated Companion (North et al., 2018). The strengths and limitations of using the CEFR – or any other – scales to assess ICC are also discussed below. Questions for reflection

• Argue for or against the value of language testing. • Explain, from your own perspective, how language tests should treat the relationship of language and culture – as separate objects for assessment or as intertwined phenomena? • Consider the test format that you are familiar with – e.g. multiple-choice questions, matching activities, comprehension tests, essays or oral examinations? What kind of formats do you prefer (as a candidate and/or assessor) – and why? Assessing Knowledge (savoir)

While much language teaching has a skills focus, and although intercultural learning is relational (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2020), it is widely acknowledged that the knowledge of certain facts can be helpful in understanding others and in negotiating an unfamiliar culture. This is accepted in the CEFR (Council of Europe, 2001) in its explanation of the value of knowledge in intercultural learning: As far as language use and learning are concerned, the knowledge which comes into play is not directly related exclusively to language and culture. Academic knowledge in a scientific or technical educational field, and academic or empirical knowledge in a professional field clearly have

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an important part to play in the reception and understanding of texts in a foreign language relating to those fields. Empirical knowledge relating to day-to-day living (organisation of the day, mealtimes, means of transport, communication and information), in the public or private domains is, however, just as essential for the management of language activities in a foreign language. Knowledge of the shared values and beliefs held by social groups in other countries and regions, such as religious beliefs, taboos, assumed common history, etc., are essential to intercultural communication. These multiple areas of knowledge vary from individual to individual. They may be culture-specific, but nevertheless also relate to more universal parameters and constants. (Council of Europe, 2001: 11)

The key sentence here is ‘These multiple areas of knowledge vary from individual to individual’. Later, the CEFR document gives a broad outline of the kinds of knowledge that might be useful in exploring the culture of a European country, listing areas of knowledge under seven headings, namely, everyday living; living conditions; interpersonal relations; values, beliefs and attitudes in relation to a range of topics including history and the arts; body language; social conventions; and ritual behaviour (Council of Europe, 2001: 103). Byram (2008: 231) also offers a list of ‘relational’ knowledge relevant to the perception of one’s country by people from another, and vice versa, for example ‘the national memory of one’s own country and how its events are related to and seen from the perspective of one’s interlocutor’s country’. Since there is a potential for tremendous variation in the content of an individual’s knowledge and his or her cultural memory (whether of nation or other type of community), it remains problematical to identify discrete items of knowledge to be taught and assessed in an intercultural course. The advice given to the curriculum designer and teacher in the CEFR is to consider: • what knowledge of the world the language learner will be assumed/ required to possess; • what new knowledge of the world, particularly in respect of the country in which the language is spoken, the learner will need/be equipped to acquire in the course of language learning. This advice still makes the problematical assumption that learners of English should be required to know certain facts about the culture in question in advance of interacting with its members. Standardised tests of ‘the facts’ are thus easy prey to the charge that they assess the ability to recall a motley assembly of trivia, particularly when the test is delivered in an objective format, that is, in the form of multiplechoice questions, true-false questions or predictable short-answer questions. Valette (1986: 181) observes that objective tests of this kind of knowledge in the Regents examination in New York State were

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discontinued after misgivings were expressed about their effects on candidates’ learning, in that they encouraged learners to memorise facts rather than organise their cultural knowledge in such a way that it related to their second language interactions. Perhaps tellingly, the updated Companion to the CEFR (North et al., 2018) has little to say about the assessment of declarative knowledge as such. Nevertheless, such discrete items continue to form the basis of 21st-century citizenship tests in the UK and elsewhere, where candidates might be required to answer multiple-choice questions such as the following1: Where was William Shakespeare born?

A. Manchester B. Oldham C. Stratford-upon-Avon D. Lincolnshire

To prepare candidates to take this particular test, the Citizenship Materials for ESOL Learners resource book (NIACE, 2005) covers topics such as the UK parliamentary, health and legal systems, human rights and community involvement, as well as symbolic markers of British identity, such as flags, kings and queens. The standardised testing of such items of declarative knowledge in citizenship tests has a symbolic inclusionary as well as a practical exclusionary function: a citizenship test as a gatekeeper to monitor immigration. As Lu and Corbett (2012a: 336) argue, although materials that focus on declarative knowledge can be misused simply to promote rote learning, they can also be used critically in a broader educational context to interrogate ‘bounded’ concepts of belonging to a particular community (e.g. learners of English might discuss whether it is in fact necessary to know who Shakespeare was, why he is considered important and where he was born), as well as ‘global’ concepts of common humanity (e.g. learners can explore the legislative rights of diverse groups in a given society). Objective assessment of declarative knowledge can also be used as a preliminary test, to elicit the degree of background knowledge that learners have before a course begins. The completion of such a test would also have the pedagogical purpose of orienting the learners towards texts on the topic to be addressed. Even so, there remain obvious dangers in too heavy a reliance on objective tests of standardised knowledge. As noted, they can only test ‘shallow learning’ such as the memorisation of discrete facts, and not the ‘deep learning’ associated with the ability to organise, synthesise and relate information (cf. Entwistle et  al., 1992: 4–9). The teacher may judge that declarative knowledge of certain facts is useful or interesting – or even required – in intercultural learning, but it should not be the final goal of a course

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on culture. Too often, it can encourage stereotyping, as a final example from Valette (1986) illustrates: DESCRIBING ETIQUETTE What is the traditional American pattern when a man and a woman are walking down a city street? Correct response: The man always walks on the curb side. (Valette, 1986: 185) This test item may be true insofar as it describes a ‘traditional’ view of some Americans’ understanding of etiquette; however, presented out of context as a test item, it encourages the false inference that all ‘traditional’ Americans continue to behave in this way. Deeper learning would take this test item as the beginning of a process of contextualisation to explore how widely the precept is actually believed and observed in contemporary American life. The test item can function, not as an end in itself, but as a springboard to an investigation of perceived generational changes in American behaviour, and the impact of feminism on the concept of chivalry. Learners can investigate whether it is indeed considered polite (and by whom) for men to keep to the kerbside, to hold doors open for women, to offer women seats on public transport and so on. Objective tests of declarative knowledge are perhaps best used as a precursor to the deeper learning associated with the other savoirs. Questions for reflection

• Identify the kinds of factual information that you might test your learners’ knowledge of, as part of an intercultural course in English. • Explain what this kind of assessment would be most useful for, e.g. as a diagnostic, achievement or proficiency test. • Discuss with your colleagues what kind of factual information a ‘culturally literate’ citizen of your current country of residence should really know. • From that discussion, assess how easy or difficult it is to reach a consensus about the basis of ‘cultural literacy’. Assessing skills of interpreting and relating (savoir comprendre)

The skills-based aspects of ICC lend themselves most easily to communicative language assessment, which itself is a realisation of a skills-based ethos towards language. The skills of interpreting and relating are relevant to scales of achievement in the CEFR Companion, such as ‘Building on a Pluricultural Repertoire’ (North et  al., 2018: 157–162), a set of descriptors designed to grade the competences of learners who move between languages and negotiate meaning with the different linguistic resources at their disposal. The set of descriptors is given in Table 11.1.

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Table 11.1  CEFR descriptors for ‘Building on a Pluricultural Repertoire’ C2 Can initiate and control his/her actions and forms of expression according to context, showing awareness of cultural differences and making subtle adjustments in order to prevent and/or repair misunderstandings and cultural incidents. C1 Can identify differences in socio-linguistic/-pragmatic conventions, critically reflect on them, and adjust his/her communication accordingly. Can sensitively explain the background to, interpret and discuss aspects of cultural values and practices drawing on intercultural encounters, reading, film, etc. Can explain his/her interpretation of the cultural assumptions, preconceptions, stereotypes, and prejudices of his/her own community and of other communities that he/ she is familiar with. Can deal with ambiguity in cross-cultural communication and express his/her reactions constructively and culturally appropriately in order to bring clarity. B2 **Can describe and evaluate the viewpoints and practices of his/her own and other social groups, showing awareness of the implicit values on which judgments and prejudices are frequently based. **Can interpret and explain a document or event from another culture and relate it to documents or events from his/her own culture(s)/ and/or from cultures he/she is familiar with. Can discuss the objectivity and balance of information and opinions expressed in the media about his/her own and other communities. Can identify and reflect on similarities and differences in culturally-determined behaviour patterns (e.g. gestures and speech volume) and discuss their significance in order to negotiate mutual understanding. Can, in an intercultural encounter, recognise that what one normally takes for granted in a particular situation is not necessarily shared by others, and can react and express him/ herself appropriately. Can generally interpret cultural cues appropriately in the culture concerned. Can reflect on and explain particular ways of communicating in his/her own and other cultures, and the risks of misunderstanding they generate. B1 Can generally act according to conventions regarding posture, eye contact, and distance from others. Can generally respond appropriately to the most commonly used cultural cues. Can explain features of his/her own culture to members of another culture or explain features of the other culture to members of his/her own culture. Can explain in simple terms how his/her own values and behaviours influence his/her views of other people’s values and behaviours. Can discuss in simple terms the way in which things that may look ‘strange’ to him/her in another sociocultural context may well be ‘normal’ for the other people concerned. Can discuss in simple terms the way his/her own culturally-determined actions may be perceived differently by people from other cultures. A2 Can recognise and apply basic cultural conventions associated with everyday social exchanges (for example different greetings rituals). Can act appropriately in everyday greetings, farewells, and expressions of thanks and apology, although he/she has difficulty coping with any departure from the routine. Can recognise that his/her behaviour in an everyday transaction may convey a message different to the one he/she intends, and can try to explain this simply. Can recognise when difficulties occur in interaction with members of other cultures, even though he/she may well not be sure how to behave in the situation. A1 Can recognise differing ways of numbering, measuring distance, telling the time, etc. even though he/she may have difficulty applying this in even simple everyday transactions of a concrete type. Source: North et al. (2018: 159).

The degree to which candidates might be able to perform aspects of their pluricultural repertoire is suggested in this scale; however, the descriptors do not prescribe the instruments of assessment. Some of the language behaviours described are productive and others are receptive, and several apply directly or indirectly to topics discussed earlier in this

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book. For example, aspects of the relational skill of conversational interaction (Chapter 5) are addressed at different levels in this scale: kinesics such as eye contact are introduced at B1, and ways of interacting in conversational stories (e.g. taking the floor, giving feedback, overlapping and interrupting) might be included in ‘particular ways of communicating’ and ‘cultural cues’ as well as ‘gestures and volume of speech’ at B2 level. Greater experience and more prolonged reflection on these topics might enable the candidate to ‘identify differences in socio-linguistic/-pragmatic conventions, critically reflect on them and adjust his/her communication appropriately’ at C1. There is a general progression from exposure to and performance of the behaviour to reflection on any cross-cultural differences in its realisation. The test format for the assessment of skills of relating and interpreting would normally be subjective, in that, at least at the higher levels, the assessment is likely to demand a complex response by the candidate to the assessor’s rubric. Tests are subjective insofar as they call upon the judgement of the marker, and some differences of opinion are therefore possible, although the test specification should give assessors clear guidance about the criteria to be used in grading. There is, in fact, no absolute distinction between objective and subjective tests – some elicitation techniques have characteristics of both types. As Spiro (1991: 65–66) demonstrates, even matching tests can be devised that elicit some evidence of deeper learning; for example, a candidate can be instructed to match the beginnings of a selection of texts with their endings and justify the matches made. Such a test is partly objective in that the matches would be objectively right or wrong, but the justification component would involve recognition of cultural cues and consistency of style. The marker might in principle give credit to a ‘wrong’ match if the justification were plausible. Here, one possible test format would be the familiar one of a role play in which candidates were required to use everyday conversation on a topic to construct, maintain and then – at more advanced levels – reflect on group identity, and how the interlocutors related to each other. The type of conversational role plays described in Chapter 5 can be adapted for assessment purposes. Those taking the test can be required to perform the conversational interaction and then reflect on their and others’ contribution to it. The CEFR descriptors can help guide the assessment of performance. The descriptors in Table 11.1 also refer to the skills of interpreting documents from different cultures. At the level B2, leaning towards C1, we find the following ‘can-do’ statements: • Can interpret and explain a document or event from another culture and relate it to documents or events from his/her own culture(s) and/ or from cultures he/she is familiar with.

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• Can discuss the objectivity and balance of information and opinions expressed in the media about his/her own and other communities. Again, a mixture of objective and subjective assessment involving reading and listening, as well as writing and/or speaking might be used to assess these competences. Comprehension and the basic interpretation of documents from another culture, including audio-visual media texts, might be tested in part through multiple-choice, true-false or short-answer questions; however, the assessment of deeper understanding at a higher level would again require a more subjective component. Tests can be devised around the ‘close reading’ of texts from different cultures, for example, a reflective response to news broadcasts from different cultures that include accountability, witness, expert or affiliated interviews (see Chapter 10) would be one way of assessing this savoir. Other ways of assessing these competences include the analysis and discussion of literary texts, advertisements, non-fictional texts on a variety of topics, as well as behavioural practices. Notwithstanding the fact that ‘text’ can be broadened to include forms of cultural behaviour, there is a long tradition of devising assessments that require candidates to explain and interpret texts critically, and compare them across those languages and cultures with which they are acquainted (e.g. Facciol & Kjartansson, 2003; see also the section on ‘Assessing Critical Cultural Awareness’). The intercultural ELT teacher can draw on the established tradition of assessing reading skills when devising assessments that test the learner’s ability to relate and interpret texts. Questions for reflection

Look again at the descriptors given above for ‘Building on a Pluricultural Repertoire’. • Explain how you would adapt the descriptors to your own educational context. • Identify the kind of test formats you would use to assess learners at each level. Skills of discovery and interaction (savoir apprendre/faire)

The skills of discovery and interaction covered in Chapters 6–8 are developed through ethnographic observation, interviewing and online exchange. The means of assessing these skills are various, from role plays graded in real time, to simulations, to written portfolios based on projects that the candidates have carried out. The CEFR Companion offers some support in the grading of interviews in general (Table 11.2) and in the candidate’s interpretation of data elicited (e.g. Table  11.3), but the descriptors may well again need to be adapted and supplemented to meet

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Table 11.2  Adapted CEFR descriptors for ‘Interviewing and Being Interviewed’ C2

Can keep up his/her side of the dialogue extremely well, structuring the talk and interacting authoritatively with effortless fluency as interviewer or interviewee, at no disadvantage to other speakers.

C1

Can participate fully in an interview, as either interviewer or interviewee, expanding and developing the point being discussed fluently without any support, and handling interjections well.

B2

Can carry out an effective, fluent interview, departing spontaneously from prepared questions, following up and probing interesting replies. Can take initiatives in an interview, expand and develop ideas with little help or prodding from an interviewer.

B1

Can provide concrete information required in an interview/consultation but does so with limited precision. Can carry out a prepared interview, checking and confirming information, though he/ she may occasionally have to ask for repetition if the other person’s response is rapid or extended. Can take some initiatives in an interview/consultation (e.g. to bring up a new subject) but is very dependent on interviewer in the interaction. Can use a prepared questionnaire to carry out a structured interview, with some spontaneous follow up questions.

A2 Can make him/herself understood in an interview and communicate ideas and information on familiar topics, provided he/she can ask for clarification occasionally, and is given some help to express what he/she wants to. Can answer simple questions and respond to simple statements in an interview. A1 Can reply in an interview to simple direct questions spoken very slowly and clearly in direct non-idiomatic speech about personal details. Source: cf. North et al. (2018: 91). Note: Descriptors marked with asterisk (**) represent a high level for B2. They may also be suitable for the C levels.

the needs of the particular educational context. Table 11.2, for example, is devised for diverse types of interview, including interviews with health professionals, references to which have been omitted from the scales shown here. There is no indication that there might be differences between direct or indirect interviews, nor any sense of the generic subtleties that might account for the pragmatic differences in a broadcast news anchor’s interview of a politician, an ‘ordinary’ witness to an event, an acknowledged expert on a subject or a fellow journalist (see Chapter 10). Even so, the scales of achievement show potential phases in the development of a learner-ethnographer, from, say, asking simple questions (A2), or relying on prepared questionnaire prompts (B1), to having the flexibility to structure spoken discourse spontaneously and fluently (C2). The ability to contribute to an interview, direct or indirect, face to face or online, however, is only part of the skill set required to interact and discover cultural information. As we saw in Chapter 7, in particular, interpreting the responses of an interviewee involves a highly sophisticated set of competences that go beyond the comprehension of literally expressed information. Again, the CEFR Companion provides partial support for the assessment of this set of skills, but they tend to be scattered across different scales of achievement, the most relevant being reproduced in Table 11.3. This set of descriptors applies to both speech

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Table 11.3  CEFR descriptors for ‘Identifying Cues and Inferring (Spoken and Written)’ C2

No descriptors available; see C1.

C1

Is skilled at using contextual, grammatical and lexical cues to infer attitude, mood and intentions and anticipate what will come next.

B2

Can use a variety of strategies to achieve comprehension, including listening for main points; checking comprehension by using contextual clues.

B1

Can exploit different types of connectors (numerical, temporal, logical) and the role of key paragraphs in the overall organisation, in order to better understand the argumentation in a text. Can extrapolate the meaning of a section of a text by taking into account the text as a whole. Can identify unfamiliar words from the context on topics related to his/her field and interests. Can extrapolate the meaning of occasional unknown words from the context and deduce sentence meaning provided the topic discussed is familiar. Can make basic inferences or predictions about text content from headings, titles or headlines. Can listen to a short narrative and predict what will happen next. Can follow a line of argument or the sequence of events in a story, by focusing on common logical connectors (e.g. however, because) and temporal connectors (e.g. after that, beforehand). Can deduce the probable meaning of unknown words in a written text by identifying their constituent part (e.g. identifying word roots, lexical elements, suffixes and prefixes).

A2

Can use an idea of the overall meaning of short texts and utterances on everyday topics of a concrete type to derive the probable meaning of unknown words from the context. Can exploit his/her recognition of known words to deduce the meaning of unfamiliar words in short expressions used in routine everyday contexts. Can exploit format, appearance and typographic features in order to identify the type of text: news story, promotional text, article, textbook, chat or forum etc. Can exploit numbers, dates, names, proper nouns etc​.​to identify the topic of a text. Can deduce the meaning and function of unknown formulaic expressions from their position in a written text (e.g. at the beginning or end of a letter).

A1

Can deduce the meaning of an unknown word for a concrete action or object, provided the surrounding text is very simple, and on a familiar everyday subject.

Pre- Can deduce the meaning of a word from an accompanying picture or icon. A1 Source: cf. North et al. (2018: 67).

and writing, and so might be applied to the interpretation of responses in a synchronous, spoken interview, or an asynchronous exchange online, when an informant responds to a set of pre-written questions. The scale offers some help in differentiating levels but tends to be more focused on the use of inferencing skills to ‘extrapolate the meaning of occasional unknown words’ (B1), rather than considering, in detail, how to infer, say, meanings about given values from the stories told by an interviewee (cf. Chapter 5). This inferential skill presumably comes under the rubric of ‘Is skilled at using contextual… cues to infer attitude, mood and intentions…’ (C1). The CEFR descriptors should, therefore, be treated suggestively rather than as robust, reliable and valid indicators of candidates’ level of ICC in all situations. The ‘skills of discovery and interaction’ required

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of a learner who is participating in an online intercultural exchange will be in some ways the same and in other ways different from those of a sojourning exchange student, and the same could be said of a business person who is attached to a multicultural team. All will need highly developed observational skills, the ability to ask shrewd questions or elicit information indirectly and the capacity to interpret the data with which they are presented. The instruments available to each type of learner will differ according to the context. Since assessment instruments need to be sensitive to the likely demands on particular groups of learners, they must be adapted accordingly. Role plays and oral examining formats, whether in individual, pair or group settings, tend to be constrained by limited time frames. Similarly, a single reflective essay on an interview or observation cannot probe a candidate’s ability to, say, organise a project, implement data gathering, analyse the data and present it in speech and/or writing. The skills of discovery and interaction might therefore be most fully tested through group or individual projects that are staged and continually assessed over a longer period of time. Projects and portfolios are useful in assessing a number of competences more thoroughly than individual oral tests or reflective essays. For example, they can demonstrate the candidate’s abilities in the following areas: • • • • •

planning a small-scale research project; allocation of tasks (teamwork); data gathering (e.g. literature review, observation, interviews); analysis of data; writing up and/or oral presentation of findings.

Each stage of the research process can be separately evaluated and graded by the assessor. The content of the research can also be graded for those aspects of ICC that the instructor or the curriculum designer considers most relevant or appropriate to the context, e.g. the ability to find and summarise factual information about a particular cultural context, the ability to elicit and interpret information about cultural values from interviews or observation, etc. Portfolios can also contain a component of critical reflection (perhaps in the familiar form of a learner journal) where the candidate can respond to any clash between his or her values and those encountered during the research. Naturally, the candidate should be aware in advance what aspects of ICC are being tested at any given stage in the process. Portfolio-based assessment of a research project of some kind is the most expansive form of testing the skills of discovery and interaction. More focused assessment of particular skills can be used as a preparation or rehearsal for such a ‘capstone’ project, given time and curricular space.

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Questions for reflection

• Discuss how useful you find the descriptors in ‘Interviewing and Being Interviewed’ for assessing learners’ ability to engage in ethnographic interviews (cf. Chapter 7). • Discuss how useful you find the descriptors in ‘Identifying Cues and Inferring’ for assessing a candidate’s ability to analyse ethnographic interviews. • Consider how you might adapt the descriptors in each of the above cases. • Look at the range of CEFR descriptors in North et al. (2018). Identify all those that might be relevant to the assessment of a learner’s ability to organise and/or participate in an ethnographic project. Assessing attitudes (savoir être)

Perhaps the most ethically challenging component of ICC to assess is that of ‘attitudes’. This set of competences is included in the original CEFR document under ‘existential competences’, in a section that to a certain extent acknowledges the issues around assessment as personality engineering. Given the controversial nature of the issue, the CEFR definition is worth quoting at length: Existential competence (savoir-être […]) may be considered as the sum of the individual characteristics, personality traits and attitudes which concern, for example, self-image and one’s view of others and willingness to engage with other people in social interaction. This type of competence is not seen simply as resulting from immutable personality characteristics. It includes factors which are the product of various kinds of acculturation and may be modified. These personality traits, attitudes and temperaments are parameters which have to be taken into account in language learning and teaching. Accordingly, even though they may be difficult to define, they should be included in a framework of reference. They are considered to be part of an individual’s general competences and therefore an aspect of his or her abilities. In so far as they are capable of being acquired or modified in use and through learning (for example, of one or more languages), attitude formation may be an objective. As has frequently been noted, existential competences are culture-related and therefore sensitive areas for intercultural perceptions and relations: the way one member of a specific culture expresses friendliness and interest may be perceived by someone from another culture as aggressive or offensive. (Council of Europe, 2001: 11–12)

There are some assumptions here that invite further deliberation. Most obviously, personality traits are considered mutable, and therefore open to the kind of modification that will result in more effective language

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learning. A friendlier, more open, more curious person is assumed to be a better learner than someone who is hostile, less open or less curious – although the CEFR acknowledges that the expression of qualities such as friendliness and hostility is culturally relative. Given that certain character traits, such as curiosity and openness, might facilitate intercultural communication, they are included in a model of ICC and therefore should be amenable to assessment. The question about whether the definition and assessment of preferred personality traits should be within the remit of an instructor or an institution is not fully addressed. Therefore, the ethical issues around the assessment of personal qualities such as those associated with ‘existential competence’ continue to be raised, e.g. by Borghetti (2017): Every construct sets standards, and guiding individuals towards standards which prescribe them to be something and not to be something else can be problematic. Not in the least because this implies that individuals are not encouraged to foster their own distinct characters, but are led in the direction of one pre-established, preferred personality. (Borghetti, 2017: 8)

It is perhaps telling that sets of descriptors and scales of achievement for traits such as ‘curiosity’ and ‘openness’ are not explicitly formulated in the 2001 CEFR nor in the 2018 Companion, where ‘existential competence’ is relatively downplayed, though it is acknowledged that certain types of person are likely to be better intercultural ‘mediators’ (North et al., 2018): A person who engages in mediation activity needs to have a well-developed emotional intelligence, or an openness to develop it, in order to have sufficient empathy for the viewpoints and emotional states of other participants in the communicative situation. (North et al., 2018: 106)

There are, as Fantini (2012: 400, 401) observes, numerous tests that do claim to assess qualities such as ‘personal disposition toward transformational experiences’ (e.g. the Beliefs, Events and Values Inventory, BEVI), or ‘global mindedness’ (e.g. the Global Mindedness Scale, GMS). These tests tend to be based on an adaptation of the cultural dimensions (see Chapter 2) and are used to profile individuals for a range of purposes, e.g. recruitment into multicultural teams, education in multicultural contexts or even partnership in cross-cultural personal relationships. One such test, BEVI (2019), advertises itself as being: designed to assess a number of relevant processes and constructs including (but not limited to): basic openness; receptivity to different cultures, religions, and social practices; the tendency (or not) to stereotype in

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particular ways; self and emotional awareness; and preferred but implicit strategies for making sense of why ‘other’ people and cultures ‘do what they do’. (BEVI, 2019: 2)

This kind of psychological profiling has been used to assess qualities like empathy in health-care staff, leadership and the extent to which study abroad has had a transformative impact on those who undertake it. In her doctoral thesis in psychology, Spaeth (2012: vi) draws on the BEVI to argue that ‘the degree to which an individual is undifferentiated from his or her parents, experiences a foreclosed identity, and reports a troubled childhood is associated with a wide range of capacities and beliefs about self, others, and the world at large such as emotional expressiveness as well as environmental, cultural, and global concerns’. Clearly, there are still sensitive issues around the assessment of qualities such as ‘emotional expressiveness’ across cultures that value different means of expressing emotions. However, as the CEFR suggests, one might argue that it is legitimate to attend to issues such as receptivity, openness, curiosity and even emotional expressiveness in a course on intercultural language learning. One way of addressing the ethical dilemma is not to prescribe how traits such as curiosity, receptivity, openness or expressiveness must or should be made manifest; rather, learners might be encouraged to reflect on how they expect such traits to be realised in themselves and others. A reasonable question for instructors to consider is whether they have supported learners in the acquisition of the communicative resources that would enable them to be open, curious, receptive and so on, in a way in which they feel comfortable. Instructors might also consider the extent to which they have enabled learners to explore alternative ways of being. The exploration of ‘alternative ways of being’ is structured in the Council of Europe’s analytical tool for analysing an ‘Autobiography of Intercultural Encounters’ (reprinted in Byram, 2008: 240–245; see also Méndez García, 2017). The assessment of ‘existential competence’ might therefore involve reflections on what learners understand by those personality traits that are assumed to be relevant to intercultural communication, drawing both on personal experience of face-to-face or virtual encounters with other ways of being, as well as the analysis of, say, works of literature or drama. The grading of such essays might then draw upon scales of achievement used for other written work (e.g. North et al., 2018: 173–174). Questions for reflection

• In your view, is it ethical or legitimate to assess personal qualities in a test of ICC? • What qualities would you include or exclude from such assessment? • What kind of test formats might be used to assess these qualities?

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Assessing critical cultural awareness (savoir s’engager)

In the 2001 version of the CEFR, although there are few explicit references to criticality, one of them is, significantly, in the descriptors for overall reading comprehension (Council of Europe, 2001: 69). At the C2 level, we find the following ‘can-dos’: • Can understand and interpret critically virtually all forms of the written language including abstract, structurally complex or highly colloquial literary and non-literary writings. • Can understand a wide range of long and complex texts, appreciating subtle distinctions of style and implicit as well as explicit meaning. Perhaps ironically, the phrase ‘and interpret critically’ is removed from the revised achievement scales in the later Companion to the CEFR (North et al., 2018). However, the term ‘critical’ is used more frequently throughout the revised document, particularly in two new achievement scales that are suggested for the reading of ‘creative’ texts, one focusing on the expression of ‘a Personal Response to Creative Texts (Including Literature)’ and the other focusing on the ‘Analysis and Criticism of Creative Texts (Including Literature)’. Both sets of descriptors are primarily concerned with different aspects of ‘decoding’ the creative text and articulating an emotional response or critical evaluation of it. A sample from each set of descriptors illustrates their primary concerns. For each scale, the highest (C1/C2) and the lowest (A1/A2) level for which a descriptor is available are shown in Tables  11.4 and 11.5​(cf. North et  al., 2018: 116–117). Here, the primary concern is how the learner responds to the content of the text, that is, to the characters, events and ‘themes’ that are represented in and by a text. To show a C1 level of proficiency, the learners will need to be able to summarise the narrative, describe the characters, speculate about their psychological motivations and state of mind and express a possible set of themes that the work as a whole embodies. The learners will also need a set of emotional and expressive resources to communicate whether or not they found the work in question satisfying, funny, sad, melancholy, bitter-sweet and so on. Table 11.4  Expressing a Personal Response to Creative Texts (Including Literature) C1

Can describe in detail his/her personal interpretation of a work, outlining his/her reactions to certain features and explaining their significance. Can outline his/her interpretation of a character in a work: their psychological/emotional state, the motives for their actions and the consequences of these actions. Can give his/her personal interpretation of the development of a plot, the characters and the themes in a story, novel, film or play

A1 Can use simple words and phrases to say how a work made him/her feel. Source: Adapted from North et al. (2018: 116–117).

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Table 11.5  Analysis and Criticism of Creative Texts (Including Literature) C2 Can give a critical appraisal of work of different periods and genres (novels, poems, and plays), appreciating subtle distinctions of style and implicit as well as explicit meaning. Can recognise the finer subtleties of nuanced language, rhetorical effect, and stylistic language use (e.g. metaphors, abnormal syntax, ambiguity), interpreting and ‘unpacking’ meanings and connotations. Can critically evaluate the way in which structure, language and rhetorical devices are exploited in a work for a particular purpose and give a reasoned argument on their appropriateness and effectiveness. Can give a critical appreciation of the deliberate breach of linguistic conventions in a piece of writing. A2 Can identify and briefly describe, in basic formulaic language, the key themes and characters in short, simple narratives involving familiar situations that are written in high frequency everyday language. Source: Adapted from North et al. (2018: 116–117).

The second set of descriptors (Table  11.5) also focuses largely on decoding but draws on ‘close reading’ and ‘stylistic’ strategies, which possibly accounts for why the level of proficiency at the upper and lower end is higher than in the former scale. In this case, the encoding process is less concerned with content and more with form, ‘the finer subtleties of nuanced language’ and ‘rhetorical devices’ such as ‘the deliberate breach of linguistic conventions’. The proficient learner has to recognise these formal features, describe them and speculate about their meaning in the given text. There is little in the CEFR about authorial encoding or how people other than the individual learner himself or herself might respond to the text. Yet, the suggestion that the proficient learner can give a ‘critical appraisal of work of different periods and genres (novels, poems and plays)’ indicates an expectation that the learner will at least have accumulated some knowledge about literary conventions. The assumption that certain figures of speech might be present in the text ‘for a particular purpose’ suggests that the learner might consider resorting to a study of the author and authorial intention, perhaps to find biographical evidence for salient factors involved in the process of encoding the text, but the focus on encoding is neither clear nor systematic. At a less proficient level (A2), the learner is again expected to hunt for ‘themes’. In the 2018 Companion to the CEFR, there is also a new set of descriptors for ‘Watching TV, Film and Video’ but, curiously, learners are not expected to develop the analytic and critical skills that they bring to literary texts, although it might be argued that media products are implicitly also included under ‘creative texts’. The descriptors for the upper and lower levels of engagement with media texts are shown in Table 11.6 (cf. North et al., 2018: 66). Here, the focus is primarily on comprehension (‘follow’, ‘understand’, ‘recognise… and identify’) even when the texts alluded to include current affairs and discussion programmes in which ideological positions will be presented and negotiated, and advertisements that will attempt to

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Table 11.6  Watching TV, Film and Video C1

Can follow films employing a considerable degree of slang and idiomatic usage. Can understand in detail the arguments presented in demanding television broadcasts such as current affairs programmes, interviews, discussion programmes and chat shows. Can understand nuances and implied meaning in most films, plays and TV programmes, provided these are delivered in the standard language.

A1 Can recognise familiar words and phrases and identify the topics in headline news summaries and many of the products in advertisements, by exploiting visual information and general knowledge. Source: Adapted from North et al. (2018: 116–117).

persuade the viewer to behave or think in a particular way. The issue of ‘the critical’ is one that is therefore still relatively underdeveloped in the CEFR even in relation to literary and media texts that might promote critical cultural awareness. Chapter 10 proposed that learner’s engagement with literary, media and cultural texts might be a means of raising critical cultural awareness, and, if this were the case, the analysis of such texts might also form the basis for assessment. A critical interpretive approach to the assessment of literary, media and cultural texts in an intercultural approach, then, should take the following issues into consideration: • The learner’s interpretation can focus on the producer, the text itself or the audience, using different means of collecting and analysing appropriate data, e.g. biographical and historical research on the author and his or her context, an account of the textual content and/ or a formal stylistic or semiotic analysis of the text, or an individual or group response, possibly via ethnographic study. The rationale and means of analysis should be explicit and its partial nature acknowledged. • The interpretation should pay attention to the explicit or implicit values, perspectives and ideologies represented by the author, encoded in the text and reconstructed by the reader(s). • Possible outcomes of the analysis would be to mediate between different cultural perspectives, ideally negotiating a mutually accepted understanding of the text that would promote a more equable or democratic world view. Because the teaching and assessment of critical cultural awareness addresses ideological issues directly, many language teachers, particularly those of the generation schooled to avoid topics such as politics and religion in the classroom, might feel uncomfortable doing so. As Byram (2008: 233) observes, ‘Although the teacher may not wish to interfere in the views of their learners, for ethical reasons, they [sic] can encourage them to make the basis of their judgements explicit, and expect them to be consistent in their judgements of their own society as well as others’.

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The assessment of critical cultural awareness, in sum, can focus on how learners make the basis of their judgements explicit and consistent. Questions for reflection

Look at the CEFR descriptors (sampled in Tables  11.4–11.6) that assess learners’ ability to analyse literary and media texts. • Explain how you might adapt these descriptors to give a clearer sense of critical reading. • Explain how you might adapt these descriptors to give a more comprehensive coverage of the elements of encoding and decoding involved in understanding a literary or media text. The Strengths and Limitations of Scales of Achievement

While scales of achievement such as the CEFR descriptors or the NCSSFL-ACTFL ‘can-do’ statements are now perhaps the most widely used means of assessing intercultural language learning, it should be clear from the above discussion that they have their strengths and limitations. On the plus side, research into the application of the CEFR scales of achievement provides some support for their face validity and reliability. Fulcher (2015: 78–79) reports on studies that untrained raters were remarkably consistent in employing the CEFR scales of fluency to assign appropriate categories to learners whose proficiency level had been preestablished. Fulcher (2015) concludes that: The studies conducted using linguistically based fluency descriptors show that they are easily and consistently interpreted by raters who can match them to observable phenomena. (Fulcher, 2015: 79)

On the minus side, the limitations of achievement scales are succinctly summarised by Liddicoat and Scarino (2020): In principle, such attempts at developing scales are intended to capture the hypothesised, evolving development of intercultural understanding. However, given the complexity of the appraisal involved in judging intercultural understanding, these scales cannot do justice to judging performance because of the inevitable generalisation that occurs in their development – generalisation across learners and learning, across contexts, and across languages and cultures. In contrast, it is precisely the specificity of the context and the variability in perspectives, worldviews and ways of knowing, and acting/reacting in communication across languages and cultures that are the focus of making judgments of intercultural understanding. Furthermore, in making judgments of intercultural understanding, attention is not only given to knowledge and skills but

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also on ‘embodied experience, meaning, language, culture, participation, positioning and identities enacted’ (Moss 2008: 238), which again cannot be captured in scales. In the use of such scales, there is a tendency to see the criteria and standards embedded in the descriptions in an atomised manner when intercultural understanding needs to be judged in a holistic manner. (Liddicoat & Scarino, 2020: 403)

If they are to be used, then, the kinds of scales of achievement offered by the CEFR, the NCSSFL-ACTFL and other bodies (cf. Chapter  3) need to be used with caution. The instructor or institution will need to adapt them to their own context, to meet the needs of their own learners, and the sets of descriptors need to be used in combination to give a more holistic profile of the learner’s competences. As ever, the adaptation of such instruments, and their employment in assessment, will be constitutive of the beliefs and values that the instructor or institution has about language, culture and the nature and purpose of communication. Questions for reflection

To reflect on these concerns, we review below the level descriptors of one area of ICC that has become particularly prominent, namely the ability to mediate. The CEFR Companion (North et  al., 2018) considerably extends the roles allotted to the concept of mediation, drawing on a number of disparate disciplines, including translation and discourse studies, conflict resolution and Vygotskyan psychology. As a result, mediation appears in numerous aspects of the updated CEFR, from ‘mediating a text’ through ‘mediating concepts’ to ‘mediating interaction and communication’ (Corbett, 2021). The scales reproduced here are part of a fuller set of descriptors that aim to discriminate between levels of competence in ‘Facilitating Communication in Delicate Situations and Disagreements’. The full set of scales includes further situations and roles, namely personal, public and educational (North et al., 2018: 220–221). Here, the intercultural communicative interactions are anchored specifically to the occupational context. • Bearing in mind Fulcher’s (2015: 79) comment that research shows that the CEFR fluency scales show consistency amongst untrained raters, discuss how easy you find it to discriminate amongst the different levels in Table 11.7, e.g. between C2 and C1 levels. • Argue for or against the claim that the descriptors suggested for level C2 represent a progression from the competences described at C1. • Describe how you would design classroom tasks that recreate the contexts described in ‘Situations (and Roles)’? Are the situations clear? • Discuss whether or not you agree with Liddicoat and Scarino’s (2020) assertion that such scales of achievement atomise aggregated qualities that would be better judged holistically.

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Table 11.7  Mediating communication: Facilitating Communication in Delicate Situations and Disagreements Level descriptors

Situations (and Roles): Occupational

C2

Can deal tactfully with a disruptive participant, framing any remarks diplomatically in relation to the situation and cultural perceptions. Can confidently take a firm but diplomatic stance over an issue of principle, while showing respect for the viewpoint of others.

In collaborative work that takes a difficult turn in negotiations, in discussions about cuts and restructuring

C1

Can demonstrate sensitivity to different viewpoints, using repetition and paraphrase to demonstrate detailed understanding of each party’s requirements for an agreement. Can formulate a diplomatic request to each side in a disagreement to determine what is central to their position, and what they may be willing to give up under certain circumstances. Can use persuasive language to suggest that parties in disagreement shift towards a new position.

In the resolution of organisational and functional conflicts

B2+ Can elicit possible solutions from parties in disagreement in order to help them to reach consensus, formulating openended, neutral questions to minimise embarrassment or offense. Can help the parties in a disagreement better understand each other by restating and reframing their positions more clearly and by prioritising needs and goals. Can formulate a clear and accurate summary of what has been agreed and what is expected from each of the parties.

In the resolution of organisational and functional conflicts When dealing with everyday negative interactions between employees At collective bargaining or labour arbitration

B2

At minor disputes at the workplace When dealing with everyday negative interactions between employees During preparatory meetings to examine and revise an agenda or an action plan

Can, by asking questions, identify areas of common ground and invite each side to highlight possible solutions, helping others with complaints about bills or services at shops, transport, banks at minor disputes at the workplace. Can outline the main points in a disagreement with reasonable precision and explain the positions of the parties involved. in arguments affecting third parties at restaurants, cinemas or other public places when dealing with everyday negative interactions between employees. Can summarise the statements made by the two sides, highlighting areas of agreement and obstacles to agreement.

B1+ Can ask parties in a disagreement to explain their point of When dealing with view, and can respond briefly to their explanations, provided everyday negative the topic is familiar to him/her and the parties speak clearly. interactions between employees B1

Can demonstrate their understanding of the key issues in a – disagreement on a topic familiar to him/her and make simple requests for confirmation and/or clarification.

A2

Can recognise when speakers disagree or when difficulties occur in interaction and adapt memorised simple phrases to seek compromise and agreement.

A1

Can recognise when speakers disagree or when someone has – a problem and can use memorised simple words and phrases (e.g. ‘I understand’ ‘Are you okay?’ to indicate sympathy.

Source: Adapted from North et al. (2018: 220–221).

–

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There is no doubt that English language teachers with different degrees of experience and confidence will use scales such as the ones illustrated in this chapter in different ways. For the less experienced, the scales may well function as a relatively prescriptive guide to progressively more complex forms of intercultural communication, viewed atomistically. There is arguably a progression from learners recognising a dispute and being able to use simple phrases to express concern and empathy (A1/2) and mastering the communicative resources to state the nature of the dispute, and make requests when clarification or confirmation is necessary (B1). More experienced teachers might take a more holistic view of the contents of the scales, rearranging, adapting, supplementing and editing them according to the perceived needs of their students. Their value, ultimately, is not only that they are a potential instrument of assessment, but also that they offer support in the construction of what aspects of basic to complex intercultural communication might be. That support can only ever be partial. Formative and Summative Assessment

There is a danger in over-assessing learners during a course, and in this context a useful distinction can be made between formative and summative assessment. The former gives learners guidance on their performance and progress during a course, while the latter assesses the state of their skills and knowledge at the end of a course. Students’ ICC will change at different rates over the duration of a course, and, indeed, over a longer period of time, and so it would be misguided of an instructor to imagine steady, linear progress in this respect. Byram (1997b: 75–76, 80–81, 105), aptly, likens the process of intercultural learning to working on a jigsaw puzzle, whereby some parts of the whole are completed swiftly, others slowly, some only become clear in relation to others and the completion of later parts prompts a re-evaluation of sections completed earlier. Earlier stages of learning might provide points of reference (‘edges and corners’) for a richer, more detailed picture that emerges over time. Since intercultural learning is a non-linear, gradual process of selfdiscovery and re-evaluation, it might be assumed that continuous assessment is the best means to determine how learners are progressing and what they have achieved at the end. There are, however, pros and cons about high-stakes continuous assessment. On the one hand, if learners know that work to be completed during the course counts towards their final grade, they may be inclined to take it more seriously. However, if all continuously assessed work is high stakes, then there may be a higher level of candidate anxiety, and consequently, less willingness to experiment and take risks. There is therefore a balance to be struck in how much continuous assessment to demand, and how much of that should be counted towards a final course grade.

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The choice among test formats and their implementation depends on many factors such as the length of the course, the definition of ICC that informs its aims and intended learning outcomes, the number of learners and their language level, and (not least) the time that the instructor is willing and able to devote to assessing and grading. This chapter has suggested an organisation of assessment based on the two main themes that have run through this book: the semiotic exploration of the possible meanings of texts, whether advertisements, television broadcasts, films, literary works or cultural practices, and the ethnographic investigation of the cultural communities that produce and consume texts. The skills of critical interpretation (semiotic) and discovery (ethnographic) are key to intercultural language learning; the development of knowledge and the exploration of the attitudes of self and other can be integrated into the procedures devised to teach and assess interpretation and discovery. Good tests of ICC, then, should initially support learners in their acquisition of interpretive and ethnographic skills, through formative assessment, and then test the degree to which they have acquired them, through summative assessment. The choice of test formats, from multiple-choice quizzes, through portfolios charting a research project, to psychometric questionnaires, will be based on the type of skills and knowledge being formatively, and, in due course, summatively assessed. The various models of ICC that attempt to grade the extent to which competences have been achieved might, as we have seen, guide and support the instructor who wants to assess certain aspects of learners’ performance at different points in a course, but they should also be subjected to a critical perspective. They may or may not suit the purposes of a given educational context, and they may need to be adapted or replaced if the instruments used in assessment are to be ‘fit for purpose’ (cf. Jenkins, 2016). Course Evaluation and Impact Studies

A broader issue in assessment is not the testing of individual learners, but the evaluation of the courses and the educational initiatives in which learners have participated. Impact studies attempt to evaluate the outcome of intercultural education on a cohort of learners. Such studies are appearing with greater frequency in the research literature. Fantini (2018) offers a detailed account of the impact on participants of two sets of international educational exchanges, organised under the auspices of the Federation for International Living. Fantini’s account is based on a large-scale, longitudinal research project that draws upon a wealth of data, triangulated using both qualitative and quantitative analytical instruments. Noting that such exchanges should be of high quality and well-supported, Fantini (2018: 253) concludes, ‘Because the nature of intercultural encounters is so provocative, it promotes deep introspection and reflection within participants.

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In addition, one normally develops deep attachments to the place where the sojourn occurred’. This kind of educational experience is only one means of developing ICC, however, and Fantini’s definition of ICC in this case includes the ability to adapt oneself to one’s host environment. For other kinds of intercultural programme, other types of encounter will be more likely, and so other means of evaluating impact are necessary. O’Dowd (2017) reports on an ongoing initiative to evaluate the impact of online intercultural exchanges, via telecollaboration, on, among other factors, the ICC of instructors undergoing initial teacher education (ITE) in different countries. He notes: The process of evaluating telecollaborative exchange in ITE is complex and various issues need to be addressed when choosing a research methodology. For this reason, the research team will follow a mixed methods approach (Nunan & Bailey, 2009) using quantitative data collection to measure the development of students’ intercultural and digital-pedagogical competences and corpus analysis to measure gains in language competence. This data will be triangulated with qualitative data in order to answer questions related to why telecollaboration had the impact it did, how it was integrated in the participating institutions and how the telecollaborative model impacted differently across various socio-institutional contexts. (O’Dowd, 2017: 40)

The cohorts to be evaluated, and the purpose of the evaluation, are clearly different from that of Fantini, although some principles are relevant to both studies: the necessity to have a workable definition of ICC that is relevant to the participants; a large enough sample of subjects; the luxury of being able to follow them through a longitudinal study; and triangulation allowed by a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods of data analysis, involving instruments such as surveys, interviews and, in O’Dowd’s case, corpus analysis of exchanges produced between participants. The rise in impact studies of intercultural language education is welcome, but the ‘actual’ impact of such learning on students may still be elusive. One recalls Kramsch’s anecdote, quoted earlier in this chapter, about the businessperson, stuck in negotiation, who suddenly realises the value of an untranslatable Japanese proverb, encountered years earlier. Such epiphanies escape our attempts to capture them, and, in the end, the main reason why we adopt an approach to learning is seldom based on the statistical reliability of its attendant instruments of assessment but because we believe that the approach is valid and necessary. The advocacy of intercultural language education is ultimately an act of faith, in ourselves, our learners and our society. Note (1) Taken from https://lifeintheuktestweb​.co​.uk​/british​-citizenship​-test​-6/ (accessed 13 May 2020). The answer is C.

12 Further Prospects for Intercultural Language Education

The concluding chapter of this book draws together the main themes, situating the intercultural approach to English language teaching (ELT) presented here in the wider context of language and intercultural communication, and speculates about future developments. The main topics covered are: • A review of the key points covered in this volume. • An intercultural approach to ELT in context. • The future development of intercultural language education. An Intercultural Approach to ELT

This book has attempted to describe the intellectual context and practical means of implementing an intercultural approach to ELT. As the volume draws to its conclusion, it is worth reviewing the key points covered, and revisiting some of the outstanding issues. First of all, the approach described here emerges from the assumption that communication between individuals and groups is dependent on more than the language systems that they, at least partially, share. Interlocutors can draw upon wider resources for making and negotiating meanings, resources that are subsumed under the complex term ‘culture’. For some (e.g. Dervin, 2012), ‘culture’ has become such an overcontested, suspect term that it is of negligible use to the educator. The word has been tainted by its use in referring to outdated, essentialist notions of national and group values, as well as to the emergent configurations of identity, value, attitude and belief that are constructed whenever two individuals interact. Additionally, since there is an ambiguity about whether ‘culture’ pre-exists and shapes any interaction, or whether it comes into being through interaction, the term is worthless. However, if we understand culture as being like discourse, which both shapes and is continually shaped by succeeding interactions, we can argue that the term remains useful. Individuals are both products of their cultures (which are multiple, and can be categorised as national, sexual, 264

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age related, professional, class based, religious, etc.) and producers of their cultures through successive interactions. In and through their interactions, individuals not only explicitly or implicitly draw upon the cultural categories available to them, but they also challenge, adapt or revise those categories in their own discourses and practices (cf. the working definition of ‘culture’ in Chapter 2). In this book, then, ‘culture’ remains viable as an explanatory term for the ways in which individuals both shape and are shaped by their environment, and the ways in which they construct and maintain identities, values, beliefs and attitudes through their interactions. An analysis of these interactions shows if, when and how they draw on existing notions of culture, explicitly or implicitly, and how they reproduce, resist and reshape cultural categories through their discourse and behaviour. An intercultural approach to ELT attends to the role of culture in communication between speakers of different languages, from different backgrounds. The intercultural learner of English is one who has been trained to become aware of different systems of belief, value and attitude, to develop positive and resilient coping strategies when his or her own world view and sense of selfhood are challenged by otherness. The effective intercultural speaker becomes a mediator between the different cultural systems that he or she has been exposed to through the process of learning another language. While any language might be learned interculturally, English has assumed a particular status in the early decades of the 21st century. The growth of digital communication and the various processes of globalisation have accorded English a privileged position as the lingua franca of science, business and, in an increasing number of contexts, education. The adoption of English as a global lingua franca and, in many nonanglophone contexts, a medium of instruction, can be viewed critically, and the continuing rise of English has certainly resulted in certain individuals and groups being empowered, while others are disenfranchised. The intercultural teacher of ELT needs to be aware of the sociopolitical issues that have arisen alongside the growth of global English. For example, the following factors affect the way the language is taught: • Learners are more likely to use English to communicate with non-native speakers than native speakers. There is, therefore, no pressing reason to focus on anglophone cultural heritage when teaching the English language. • Learners are often exposed to English as part of their daily lives, e.g. in shop signage, through social media or via global television platforms such as Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Netflix. Increasingly, the English language and anglophone cultural products are ‘owned’ or ‘consumed’ in plurilingual contexts by members of the learners’ local communities.

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• Learners may be acquiring the language to function in business or educational contexts where English is the main medium of communication. However, plurilingual contexts of science, business or education are increasingly common, which means that English will be only one of the linguistic resources that the learner will be called to draw upon. • Some institutions in non-anglophone contexts are imposing an ‘English medium’ policy (e.g. schools, universities or educational courses). This kind of policy can act as a barrier between learners and a broader context unless language education can support both English and the local language(s). An intercultural approach to ELT responds to these factors by

• Equipping learners to discover and interpret the practices and products of different cultural groups through the medium of English. Anglophone cultural heritage is still a legitimate object of interest, but it is one amongst many. • Acknowledging the role that English plays in the learners’ local or home culture, or everyday life, and making that the basis of critical investigation. • Attending to the phenomena of ‘translanguaging’ and ‘plurilingualism’ and encouraging activities that extend communicative resources across a diversity of languages. • Ensuring as much as possible that access to English empowers rather than disempowers learners, and that its use adds to rather than subtracts from their sense of selfhood. The intercultural approach to ELT proposed in this volume is intended to be responsive to the issues identified above. Chapters 1 and 2 discussed various scholarly approaches to the concept of culture, some of which focus more on the way culture shapes behaviour and identities, and some of which focus more on the way culture is shaped by individual and group practices. The ‘cultural dimensions’ approach to exploring the cultural values realised by groups assumes that members of communities align themselves predictably according to predetermined categories such as deference to authority, tolerance of ambiguity, individualism/collectivism and masculinity/femininity. Postmodern approaches to cultural studies see identities as much more dynamic, arguing that individuals and groups in interaction might ignore, resist, revise and indeed transcend binary categories such as master/servant, masculine/feminine, and that cultures emerge through interaction, the meanings assigned to their practices being contingent on unique contexts. The present approach assumes that culture is dialogic: that individuals are at some level of consciousness socialised into knowledge, implicit

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or explicit, of cultural dimensions such as individualism/collectivism or masculinity/femininity, but that the categories that such dimensions represent can be reproduced, resisted or remade through further interaction in new circumstances. Part of the agenda of intercultural language education is to transform learners’ implicit cultural assumptions into explicit critical awareness, to make the assumptions available for discussion and possible transformation. Chapter  3 considered several models of intercultural communicative competence (ICC), the knowledge and skills that learners will arguably need to acquire to be effective intercultural agents. Chapter 4 looked at the design of classroom tasks to address the kinds of knowledge and skill the instructor hopes the learners will acquire. To this end, an intercultural approach to ELT explores the identity-shaping nature of conversational interactions (Chapter 5), suggests ways of discovering alternative ways of being (Chapters 6–8) and investigates how to interpret the cultural products made available for our consumption (Chapters 9 and 10). Chapter 11 discussed issues around the assessment of a sample of the competences proposed in Chapter  3, and, ideally, acquired through the tasks and activities suggested in Chapters 4–10. The present volume, then, aims to offer teachers, course planners and materials designers a coherent and reasonably comprehensive intercultural approach to ELT. Even so, it is part of a larger project to research and teach language and intercultural communication. The following, final section attempts to situate this book in that wider context. Language and Intercultural Communication

It will be clear to many readers who are knowledgeable about intercultural language education that much of the present volume has been influenced by the pedagogical research and practices of Michael Byram and his associates and erstwhile students. Byram has written, co-authored or co-edited a number of influential books on teaching and learning language and culture, particularly, but not solely through the Languages and Intercultural Communication in Education (LICE) series for Multilingual Matters. Key volumes in this series are Byram (1997b, 2008). Other contributors to the series have also focused on the definition and fostering of ICC, e.g. Byram et al. (1994, 2001) through to Wagner et al. (2019). Outside this series, other authors and editors have contributed to the discourse on intercultural language education and the debate on ICC, notably Bennett (2015), Deardoff (2009) and Jackson (2012, 2020a). In their concluding chapter to Jackson (2012), MacDonald and O’Regan (2012: 565) list over 20 scholarly journals that publish articles relevant to intercultural communication, including Language and Intercultural Communication and the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication. These two journals are affiliated to two scholarly associations that hold regular conferences, the International Association

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for Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC) and the National Communication Association (NCA), respectively. MacDonald (2020) observes that while these associations now hold conferences that enable dialogue between East and West, there are gaps in research and pedagogy: […] with some exceptions, scholars from the global South remain less widely represented in the field: particularly those located in the Indian subcontinent, the Arab nations, or states in Africa. Thus, while the pedagogical politics of languages and cultures have arguably changed over the past 20 years, the epistemological politics of knowledge and research into languages and cultures appears to remain relatively undented. (MacDonald, 2020: 566)

Although, at the ‘centre’ of research and innovation there has been an explosion of scholarly and pedagogical interest in intercultural communication and intercultural language education over the past decades, the idea that the present volume represents a settled or consensual orthodoxy can be quickly dispelled. Byram’s later work (Byram, 2008; Wagner & Byram, 2017) has followed Guilherme (2002) in developing a concern with teaching language for intercultural citizenship. Critical pedagogy’s advocacy of language education as transformative social action also informs the contributions to Dervin and Liddicoat (2013), Dervin and Gross (2016), Dasli and Díaz (2016) and Nakayama and Halualani (2011). An awareness that models of interculturality and treatments of intercultural communication still tend to arise from Europe and North America informs alternative studies that appropriate the concepts for Asia and the Global South or attempt to ‘decolonise’ language education, e.g. Asante et al. (2013) and Phipps (2019). No doubt there will continue to be spirited debate about the applicability of various models and frameworks of intercultural communication in different contexts, but one common thread that runs, implicitly, through these very varied discussions is that intercultural language pedagogy has a moral, social and ethical function, and that it is therefore more suited to the state educational sector than to the commercial language teaching sector. There may, indeed, be understandable suspicion about intercultural language education amongst commercial English language institutions and teachers on the following grounds, amongst others: • it is not the job of the English language school to inculcate moral values; • there is no time in a packed language curriculum to explore intercultural issues, nor are there the resources to allow educational exchanges of the type facilitated by the state sector.

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Such suspicions can be addressed in several ways. First, despite any assertions to the contrary, there is no such thing as a value-free language curriculum. White (1988) acknowledges that all types of ELT curricula have reflected different general value systems: Views on the nature and purpose of education include those which emphasize the transmission of an esteemed cultural heritage; which stress the growth and self-realization of the individual; and those which regard education as an instrument of social change. Respectively, these three orientations have been termed classical humanism, progressivism and reconstructionism. (White, 1988: 24)

White goes on to associate the main ELT methodologies of the last century with these orientations (cf. Clarke, 1981). Grammar-translation aimed to transmit an esteemed cultural heritage (classical humanism); audiolingualism and notional-functionalism both aimed to effect social change by producing individuals with a mastery of the target language system and the ability to interact effectively (reconstructionist); and taskbased or ‘process-based’ approaches to language learning aimed to foster individual growth by challenging the learner with problems that could only be solved by developing his or her linguistic competence (progressivism). For the commercial sector, the progressive curriculum provides a suitable ‘fit’ for the contractual relationship the language school has with its clients: the agreement, if unspoken, is that the learner (or the learner’s sponsors) will pay for a form of teaching that will facilitate growth in the learner’s personal linguistic development. To caricature the relationship somewhat, commercial schools provide a service; they do not aim to brainwash clients into liberal thinking or to challenge the ideological basis of their existence by exposing them to a life-altering encounter with otherness. An intercultural curriculum embraces and transforms aspects of all three of the curricular options as described by White and others: it may well engage with the cultural heritage of a community, but only in order to interrogate it critically as a repository of contestable values; it aims to effect social change by enabling more effective intercultural communication between members of different languages and cultures; and it aims to develop the identity of learners by encouraging them to explore otherness. Language teachers who are anxious that the implementation of an intercultural curriculum simply betokens the return of the classical humanist curriculum in a new guise might be reassured that the local culture is as legitimate an object of inquiry in an intercultural curriculum as ‘other’ cultures, and that all cultures are subjected to sympathetic but critical scrutiny. The intercultural language curriculum might indeed be described as ‘neo-humanist’ as it places respect for the individual and his

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or her or their multiple identities at the heart of the educational adventure. The successful intercultural learner moves amongst a web of cultural configurations, large and small, in a process of continual mediation and negotiation, developing the resilience to deal with the inevitability of change, in a manner that is ultimately enriching and empowering. While the local or home culture is neither denied nor demeaned, the intercultural learner will inevitably find his or her attitudes, beliefs and perspectives challenged by the contact with otherness. In the process, the interaction with others will lead to the kind of personal growth characterised by ‘progressive’ curricula. The social or ‘reconstructionist’ outcome, ideally, will be generations of learners who are trained, to different degrees, in intercultural mediation skills, or diplomacy, and who have acquired the capabilities to cope with and respond actively to the stresses and problems of living in the multicultural global village that the world has become. Seen in this somewhat utopian light, the intercultural curriculum has much to offer the ELT commercial sector as well as the state sector. There has, of course, long been a strong commercial interest in teaching intercultural communication skills to professionals in multicultural business settings, though such courses have tended to focus on dealing with critical incidents arising from encounters between, say, stereotyped ‘individualistic’ Americans who encounter equally stereotyped ‘collectivist’ Japanese or Chinese (cf. Chapter 2). Jack (2009) and the contributors to Guilherme et al. (2010) seek to interrogate and transcend approaches to professional training based on simplistic cultural stereotypes, by bringing the kinds of ethnographic and semiotic skills described in this book to bear on the multicultural workplace. In other ways, developments in ELT globally over the past 20 years have inevitably impacted on the ethos of the commercial sector as well as the private sector. With the rise and global diffusion of English as a lingua franca, and growing trends such as the transnational penetration of anglophone media corporations, the pedagogical goal of ‘native speaker proficiency’ has been displaced as the aspirational outcome of the learner’s linguistic growth. The updated Companion to the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) (North et  al., 2018) firmly establishes different degrees of ‘mediation’ as the principal outcome of language learning: the learner acquires ever more sophisticated ways to mediate texts, and mediate between other interlocutors (cf. Corbett, 2021. If it is widely accepted that the overall goal of language learning has become intercultural mediation, the commercial sector of ELT will follow the public sector in designing contexts where mediation skills can be rehearsed, practised, developed and assessed in standardised examinations. Such contexts are inevitably intercultural. In setting out a ‘global agenda for IC research and practice’, MacDonald and O’Regan (2012; see also MacDonald, 2020) set out a number of themes and issues relevant to intercultural language education that

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remain topics to be addressed by the scholarly and pedagogical community at large. These include: • ‘the idea of culture itself, and the ways in which this relates to the identities of human actors’; • the social, political, economic and cultural impact of globalisation, particularly the physical movement of large numbers of migrants from the Global South to the Global North; the impact of this diffusion of people on individual, group and community identities; the impact of global communications on family, group and social networks across ‘transnational space’; • the nature of the relationships between language and identity, and communication and culture, as they are realised in global and local contexts; • the extent to which any ‘principles’ of intercultural communication are universal; • hitherto neglected or inaccessible areas of intercultural communication, such as the experiences of less privileged groups (e.g. refugees), speakers of minority languages or those engaged with warfare and national security in mediating; • innovative research methods and paradigms, such as the use of ‘radical narrativity’ in letting subjects speak for themselves, or the use of rigorous auto-ethnography in compiling ‘thick’ descriptions of intercultural being; • the expansion of centres of intercultural research from sites such as the United States, Australasia and Europe to Africa, Asia and Latin America. These are durable issues and remain live topics in ongoing debates around intercultural language education. It should by now be clear that the present volume, which is primarily addressed to teachers of English as a second or other language, takes up a position with respect to some of them. The position taken here, for example, is that identities are fluid, that the individual’s beliefs, attitudes, values and world view are the mutable product of a unique complex of dynamic interactions with others, from small groups, to larger communities, mediated by communications that range from spoken conversation to the broadcast media. ICC is developed by attending to the processes by which these identities are formed, challenged and changed. The position taken in the present volume also aligns with MacDonald and O’Regan’s (2012: 558) assertion that ‘no modelling of intercultural competence is context free’. They go on to suggest that ‘The challenge remains whether any one model of competence can be developed that can be applied reliably to every intercultural context, or whether multiple models of competence should be developed in particular contexts with high levels

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of specificity’. The view taken here is that the latter option is much more likely to be realised, and that there are indications that this process is already happening. As Chapters 3 and 11 demonstrated, there are already competing models of ICC, developed for particular contexts, which, although of interest to instructors anywhere, can only partially be applied to others. The competences expected of an exchange student are different from those expected of a language learner who is involved in an online intercultural exchange, or, at least, they will be realised differently in the course of study. The 2001 CEFR and the 2018 Companion volume, like other such documents and policy statements, emerged from the long and difficult process of developing a common transnational identity and plurilingual ethos for the inhabitants of the European Union. When this model of ICC has been exported beyond Europe, its significance and function has changed (see the contributions to Byram & Parmenter, 2012), not least in the fact that, beyond Europe, the plurilingual CEFR has become a document primarily used to guide the teaching of English. The recent National Council of State Supervisors for Languages and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (NCSSFL-ACTFL) ‘cando’ statements relate both to the experience of immigrants to the United States and sojourners and exchange students who set out from America on relatively short trips elsewhere. The Global Competences Framework (Spencer-Oatey & Stadler, 2009) is designed for businesspeople, while other frameworks of cross-cultural competence have been designed for health-care professionals, for example the qualities identified in the Tool for Assessing Cultural Competence Training (TACCT) in North American medical education programmes (Lie et al., 2009). One feature of a medical professional’s intercultural competence, for example, in communicating with a patient is articulated as follows: • recognise physicians’ own potential for biases; • recognise physician–patient power imbalance; • describe potential ways to address bias. As Lu and Corbett (2012b: 30) observe, this component of a medical professional’s ICC might easily be related to the savoirs formulated by the CEFR: the health-care provider needs to relativise his or her own values, value the attitudes and beliefs of the patient, use direct or indirect means to elicit information from the patient and view that information with critical sympathy. The more abstract of the savoirs may be transformed into concrete realisations that function across different domains; for example, Corbett (2019) suggests that some of the intercultural competences expected of medical professionals can be adapted to the training of tour guides. It is to be expected then, that, to revisit Byram’s metaphor once again, the ‘edges and corners’ of the jigsaw puzzles that make up models of ICC will be reused, recycled and reshaped to give specific

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realisations for particular local contexts that demand their own emphases and adaptations. Finally, following a discussion on particular textbooks that have been produced to support intercultural language education, globally and locally, MacDonald and O’Regan (2012) affirm that: […] in our view, there is no substitute for language teachers and intercultural trainers developing a curriculum and set of materials designed for a particular cultural context – be it a region, a town or just one’s own class. (MacDonald & O’Regan, 2012: 562–563)

The development of curricula and teaching materials is, of course, consuming of time and energy, whether it is done by individual teachers or groups of instructors collaboratively. On the other hand, as the regionally linked case studies reported in Wagner et al. (2019) demonstrate, such a development can be a pleasure as well as a challenge. Encountering case studies of others’ practices with a view to adapting them to one’s own educational context is perhaps the most infectiously enthusing means of professional development. It has been the aim of this volume to set such case studies into a coherent framework that informs further practice and experimentation. Over the past decades, intercultural language education has moved from a position on the relative margins of language pedagogy to assume a position near the centre, at least in the stated aspirations of transnational and local language curricula. It has matured sufficiently to have developed a coherent set of educational principles and practices that have become ever more useful in a world of instantaneous digital communication, transnational migration and social upheaval. It has become commonly accepted that the process of language teaching and learning should be allied to a broader inquiry into our understanding of ourselves and others, and of the world at large. It is time, now, to close this book and let that exploration continue.

Appendix Checklist of questions to promote visual literacy (see Chapter 9)

The following checklist of questions is presented as support for teachers who are interested in developing visual literacy skills with learners. Of course, the checklist is not intended to provide a fully comprehensive account of visual conventions. However, the suggestions provide a starting point for considering how images convey meanings. A. Images of People

• What kind of person/people are shown (policeman, model, child, etc.)? • What kind of values do the people shown represent (kindness, physical beauty, individuality, generosity, honesty, efficiency, power, or miserliness, ugliness, corruption, etc.)? • Who or what are the characters looking at? ⚬⚬ Are they looking at each other or not looking at each other? What does this tell you about how they feel about each other? Are they looking at something else, an object or a place? How do they feel about it? ⚬⚬ Are they looking at you, the viewer? How are you expected to feel about them? Do you, in fact, feel this way? ⚬⚬ Are they looking at something else, out of the frame of the picture? What might it be? Can you tell? How do the characters feel about this unseen presence? • How close are the characters to you? ⚬⚬ Are the people in close-up, medium-shot or long-shot? How does their distance from you make them seem to you – intimate, friendly or distant? Why do you think they have been shown this way? • Are the characters facing you, or angled away from you? How does this affect the way you feel about them? Are they distanced from you or are they inviting you to join them? • Are you looking up at the characters, looking down at them, or are they at eye-level with you? How does this affect the way you feel 275

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about them? Do you feel respect for them, superior to them or are you equals? B. Fashion and Style

• How are the people in the image dressed? What does their style of clothing suggest about them – e.g. about their age, class, gender, nationality, ethnicity, profession? Are they up to date or out of fashion? What values do you associate with the people based on their clothing? • Is the person undressed? If so, where are they situated and, by extension, where are you, the viewer, supposed to be? Is the person looking at you or away from you? Are you supposed to look at and admire him or her, pity him or her, or envy him or her, desire him or her? Do you? C. Objects

• What kind of object is shown in the image? What is its function – illustration, advertisement, diagram? Can you see all of it or just part? Are you looking from above, below or head-on? • Are you supposed to want it, understand it, make your own, etc.? Does the image enable you to do this? What kind of person would need to be able to understand, own or explain such an object? In other words, what kind of viewer are you expected to be? • Does the object have a set of associations? What kind of people would own such an object, or wish to own it? Is it considered to be cheap or expensive, tacky or sophisticated? Why? Does it have these associations in your culture? In other cultures? • Does the object have symbolic value? Does it symbolise values like beauty, youth, passion, temptation, knowledge, power? How did it come to have these values? Does the object have this value in your culture now, or in the past? What about in other cultures? D. Settings

• Is there no visible setting? If not, why do you think you are being invited to focus only on the object or person in the image? • Is the setting identifiable? Is it an urban or a rural setting, a desert or the ocean, public or domestic, etc.? Does it look like the kind of place you would wish to be? • Does the setting have any kind of associations – romantic mountains, urban squalor, garden paradise, etc.? What kind of people might live, work or visit there? • Is the setting used to illustrate a country or the home of a particular group of people? Do you think it is an accurate representation of the

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homeland, or is it partial? If it is partial, why has this particular image been selected? E. Composition

• Look at Figure  9.1. (Chapter 9) It summarises some of the possible meanings which can be given by placing one part of the image in relation to the others. The main divisions are ⚬⚬ Centre/margins: Is there a strong presence in the centre of the picture? If so, what is its significance and how does it relate to the elements (if any) at the margins? ⚬⚬ Top/bottom: The upper part of an image is often used to represent something that is ideal, heavenly, a state to which we aspire. The lower part shows something that is real, practical, ‘scientific’. Is your image divided like this? ⚬⚬ Left/right: The left part of an image often gives a context in which the information on the right should be understood (e.g. an ‘expert’ on the left introduces a product shown on the right). Does your image have a left-right structure? If so, does the lefthand-side information give a context? F. Framing

• Are the elements in the picture shown as a unified whole, or are they separated in some way by ‘frames’ (i.e. lines formed by part of the setting, or by tools people are holding, or by shadows, etc.)? • If the elements are shown as a whole, what kind of category do they all belong to? Can you give the category a short title (e.g. happy people on a beach; fresh vegetables on a table)? • If the elements are separated by frames, why has this been done? Do they simply belong to separate categories? Are they antagonistic to each other, or is there a problem of communication between them? G. Important Information

• What do you see in the foreground and background of your image? The important information is usually in the foreground, closer to the viewer. Is this so for you? • Is some element in the picture foregrounded in another way, e.g. does some aspect of the size, lighting, focus or colour bring it to your attention? Why has it been singled out for your attention? H. Narrative Images

• In your image, is someone or something acting upon one of the other elements in the image? If so, is this a physical action (e.g. kissing, shooting, following) or a mental action (e.g. watching, desiring, disliking)?

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• How is the action portrayed – by gesture, gaze, expression on face or by means of a vector, that is, a line tracing a path from one element or character to another, drawn for example by a tool, or a ray of light, or a pattern on the image? • What kind of people/things act or perceive in your images? What kind of actions do they perform? What kind of people/things are the objects of the acts or perceptions? Across a variety of images, do patterns emerge about the kinds of thing certain cultural groups do (e.g. housework, driving certain cars, particular types of play?) • Are you, the viewer, ever the object of the gaze of an element in the picture? Do fingers, guns, gestures point at you? How are you expected to respond to these forms of address, threat or invitation? I. Descriptive Images

• If no vectors are evident, or actions are taking place in the image, then you are probably only expected to observe it. Consider the purpose of your observation. How are you expected to respond to what is described by the image, e.g. desire it? admire it? use it as a role model? be amused by it? imitate it? understand it?

be revolted by it? despise it? avoid it? ridicule it? be shocked by it? condemn it?

• What does your expected response reveal about the cultural norms assumed by the producers of the image? What kinds of images describe admirable qualities, and what kinds of images describe qualities to avoid and condemn? Do you always agree with the norms which are assumed? Are they constant over time? Do certain groups in society challenge those norms visually – by exaggerating them or subverting them? If so, how? J. From Reality to Abstraction

• Does the content of the image seem ‘realistic’ or ‘unrealistic’? How is the degree of ‘reality/unreality’ achieved? ⚬⚬ use of colour/monochrome film; ⚬⚬ sharpness of focus (soft focus to very sharp focus); ⚬⚬ saturation of colour (from very pale to very rich); ⚬⚬ degree of detail given; ⚬⚬ (im)possible perspectives. • Are some parts of the image more ‘realistic’ than others? If so, what is the effect of the contrast?

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• What is the general effect of the degree of realism achieved? Does it increase or decrease the credibility of the image – make it seem more or less life-like? Who might have constructed such an image, and to what purpose – to make you believe in it, to seduce you by its richness, to puzzle you, etc.? • Is the image an abstraction of reality? If so, how does it represent the world – as a chaos of colour, as a geometric series of patterns, as something mechanical, as something organic, etc.? How does the abstract image use the following resources: ⚬⚬ colour ⚬⚬ texture ⚬⚬ shape ⚬⚬ organisation of patterns? • Does the title help you interpret the image, or is the interpretation deliberately left open? How much does the viewer have to work with the image to create meaning? Do you enjoy working this hard, or do you feel cheated and frustrated by the lack of guidance? • If you can, compare a photographic portrait with portraits done by painters from different periods and artistic movements. What is valued in a photograph, a renaissance portrait, a restoration portrait, a Victorian portrait, an impressionist portrait, a cubist portrait, an abstract ‘portrait’? Do the same kinds of people get portrayed? What aspects of the portrait are important to the sitter, the artist and the viewer? • Is an abstract image used, say, in advertising or in popular culture, perhaps one that you recognise from a gallery or an art book? If so, what is the function of the image in its different contexts? K. Image and Text

• Look again at the diagram of the composition of an image (Chapter 9, Figure 9.1). How is the text positioned with respect to the image? Is it: ⚬⚬ to the left, providing a context? ⚬⚬ to the right, providing an explanation? ⚬⚬ at the top, expressing an ideal state? ⚬⚬ at the bottom, grounding the image in reality? ⚬⚬ at the centre, demanding our attention? ⚬⚬ at the margins, providing a gloss, or extra info? ⚬⚬ superimposed, and at one with the image? ⚬⚬ framed separately, providing complementary info? ⚬⚬ parallel to the image, suggesting similarity? ⚬⚬ at an angle to the image, suggesting otherness? ⚬⚬ supplied by speech or thought bubbles from a character? • How are words and phrases from a foreign language ‘imported’ as visual images into the linguistic landscape of a given culture?

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Investigate how French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Chinese, etc. expressions are used in public spaces in anglophone countries (e.g. in restaurants). Or consider how English is used in the linguistic landscape of non-anglophone countries, adding visual analysis to the ethnographic techniques suggested in Chapters 6–8.

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Index

assessment, 3, 24, 29, 35, 42, 48-49, 51, 63, 68-69, 77, 169, 234-249, 251255, 257-259, 261-263, 267, 270, 272 attitudes, 2-3, 5, 7, 11, 16, 28-29, 36, 43, 46, 48-49, 51, 59, 63, 72, 80, 89-91, 93-94, 96, 100-101, 107, 113-114, 117, 121, 125-126, 128, 134, 141-142, 145, 148, 150, 153, 157-161, 168-169, 171-172, 206, 208, 212, 214, 221, 233, 239, 243, 252, 262, 265, 270-272 Auden, W.H., 181-182 audiolingualism, 10-11, 269 Austin, J., 10 Australasia, 43, 271 Australia, 17, 100, 110, 204, 215 auteur, 207, 209, 219, 221, 223, 234 authenticity, 3, 10-11, 66, 75-76, 99, 106, 223 autobiography, 152-153, 254 autonomy, 76, 169 awareness, 20, 23-24, 34, 46, 48, 50, 53-54, 57, 60-61, 67, 74, 101, 119, 143, 163, 170, 172, 175, 182, 202203, 206, 209, 211-213, 215-216, 225, 234, 246, 248, 254-255, 257258, 267-268 Ayr, 134-135

acculturation, 72-73, 114, 116, 252 ACTFL (American Council for Teaching of Foreign Languages), 4-5, 41-42, 51-57, 59, 61-62, 64, 78, 116, 241, 258-259, 272 Africa, 43, 58, 69, 138, 210, 215, 268, 271 Agar, M., 15, 162 Aguilar, M.C., ix, 34 Aksikas, J., 33-34 Alderson, C., 236 Aleutian Islands, 103 Alexander, L., 45 Anderson, M., 118 Anderson, W., ix, 87, 152-153, 155, 162163, 166, 168, 170-171 anthropology, 1, 6, 8-9, 12, 14-15, 17, 24, 27-29, 31-33, 35-37, 39-40, 42, 103-105, 116, 149 Apache, 13 Appadurai, A., 225 Apple, 182-183 appraisal, 256, 258 appropriateness, 168, 231, 241, 256 Arab, 268 Argentina, 163-165 Armenia, 187 Arnold, M., 32, 69 Art, 143-144 art, 7, 37, 70, 143-144, 146, 176, 179, 197, 199, 205, 227, 279 arts, 11, 35, 58, 71, 146, 180-181, 203, 230, 243 Asante, M., 268 Asia, 29-30, 35,43, 58, 157, 268, 271

backchannelling, 82, 100, 131, 145, 229 Bailey, K., 240, 263 Barnak, P., 122 Barro, A., 147, 149 Barthes, R., 33, 174, 177, 192

298

Index 

Barton, D., 104 Bassnett, S. 211 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 110, 220, 231 behaviourism, 10, 15 Belgium, 180 beliefs, 2, 7, 11, 25, 28, 30, 36-37, 39, 46, 51, 54, 61, 91, 100-101, 104, 113, 117, 141-142, 145, 149, 153, 157, 204, 206, 208, 218, 233, 238, 243, 254, 259, 264-265, 253, 270-272 Bellini, G., 187-188 Belz, J., 152-153, 155, 173 benchmarking, 52, 54-56, 239, 241 Bennett, J., 52, 267 Bergman, I., 183 Bernstein, B., 132-133, 145 Berry, J., 72 BEVI (Beliefs, Events & Values Inventory), 253-254 Bex, T., 19 Bhabha, H. 43, 239 Bhatia, V., 19 Biber, D., 18 Bible, 71, 199 biculturalism, 72 Bignell, F., 175, 219, 221 bilingualism, 70, 72, 76 biography, 209, 215, 234, 256-257 Black, 35 Blenheim Palace, 53-55 Blommaert, J., 104, 107, 127, 131, 135, 166 Bloom, H., 204 Bloomfield, L., 9-10, 12 Blum-Kulka, S., 94 BNC (British National Corpus), 87 BNCC (Base Nacional Comum Curricular), 56-59, 61, 63, 78 Boas, F., 12, 14 Bond, M., 29 Boose, L., 33 Borghetti, C., 239-241, 253 Bosher, S., 122 Brazil, 13, 17, 23, 41, 50, 56-58, 61, 119120, 143, 155, 160, 163, 189, 191, 200-201, 204, 212, 228 Brebner, M., 9 Breen, M., 11

299

Briggs, C., 126, 128-129, 151 Brigham Young University, 87 Brindley, G., 236 Britain, 17, 32-34, 36, 53-54, 59, 71, 87, 100, 106, 121, 143, 161, 163-165, 192, 194, 204-205, 210-211, 214215, 220, 223-224, 229, 244 British Council, ix, 143 British Cultural Studies, 143, 205, 211 Brooks, C., 207 Brueghel, P., 179-181 Brumfit, C., 34, 156, 210 Brussels, 180 Buddhism, 182-183, 186, 190 Burns, R., 120-121 Burt, R., 33 Burwitz-Melzer, E., 215 Butler, C., 17 Byram, M., ix, 4-6, 34-35, 38, 44, 46, 48, 50, 52, 62, 68, 72, 101-102, 105, 116, 212, 215, 237-238, 243, 254, 257, 261, 267-268, 272 Canada, 17, 215 Canagarajah, S., 23, 112-113 Candlin, C., 19 Čaňková, M., 211 canon, 32-35, 70, 204, 207, 210, 213, 241 capitalism, 22, 119, 193, 205, 212 Carel, P., 152 Caribbean, 210 Carter, R., 6, 34, 210 Casablanca, 183 CCC (Centre for Contemporary Culture), 32-33 CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference), 4-5, 41-42, 44-46, 49, 51-53, 55-57, 59-63, 67, 77-79, 99, 112, 116, 150, 155, 158, 172, 216, 237-238, 242-250, 252-259, 270, 272 Ceramella, N., 211 Cevasco, M., 204 Chan, B., 158 China, 163, 220 Chinese, 13, 16, 30, 36, 47, 59, 163, 270, 280 Chomsky, N., 9-11

300 Index

Christianity, 17, 178, 182-183, 187-188 Chung, K., 182 Churchill, W., 53 citizenship, 34, 50-51, 69, 71, 212-213, 244, 263, 268 Clark, K., 220 Clarke, J., 269 class middle, 132-135, 141, 204, 210 social, 24, 30, 97, 110, 134, 145, 147, 205 working, 22, 32, 35, 104, 106-107, 132-136, 143, 145, 192, 204-205, 221-222 Clayman, S., 232 CNN (Cable News Network), 231 COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), 96, 99, 101, 220 cognitive, 3, 10-11, 14-15, 17, 38, 179 Cohen, P., 106, 192 collectivism, 28, 30, 36, 38, 133-134, 137, 146, 260, 266-267, 270 Collie, J., 34 colonialism, 25, 58, 210, 220 colour, 15, 22, 183, 196-197, 219, 222, 225, 277-279 communicative, 1-3, 5, 10-11, 17-24, 28, 35, 37, 39, 41-47, 49, 51-53, 55, 57, 60-61, 63, 65-68, 72-76, 78-80, 82-83, 99-101, 103, 111112, 116-117, 125, 129-130, 134, 137, 142, 148, 151, 155, 158, 160, 167-169, 172, 174, 199, 206-208, 210, 212-213, 235-239, 241-243, 245, 249, 253-255, 257, 259, 261, 266-267 communist, 119 community, 6-7, 12, 15-17, 19, 25, 30, 34-36, 38-39, 42, 47, 51, 57-58, 63, 69-71, 75, 92-93, 95, 101, 104105, 108-109, 112-113, 116-118, 126, 133-134, 136, 139, 141, 145, 150, 158, 160, 162, 167, 171, 192, 226, 243-244, 246, 269, 271 competence, 5-6, 17, 35, 39, 41-47, 49, 51-53, 55-57, 59, 61-63, 65, 67-68, 72-73, 76-80, 82-83, 103, 111-112, 116-117, 131, 133, 147-

148, 150-151, 155, 158, 160, 168169, 172-174, 212-213, 217, 235243, 247-249, 251-255, 257, 259, 261-263, 267, 269, 271-272 comprehension, 10, 59, 126, 202, 216217, 234, 242, 24-250, 255-256 computer-mediated communication, 152154, 163, 173, 151-152 concept training, 118-120, 124, 157, 172 Condon, J., 28 Coniam, D., 236 Conrad, S., 18 conscientização, 50 consciousness, 25, 99, 106, 120, 197, 266 Conservative, 214 conversation, 18, 21, 29, 47-48, 51, 66, 74, 79-87, 89-101, 105, 113, 126128, 130, 135-137, 139, 149, 162163, 166, 206, 226-227, 234, 247, 267, 271 Cook, G., 80 Cook-Gumperz, J., 105 Corbett, J., 4, 7, 19, 47, 49-50, 69, 87, 116-117, 122, 152-153, 155-156, 158-160, 162-163, 166, 168, 170171, 211, 234, 244, 259, 270, 272 coronavirus, 49, 231 corpora, 9, 83, 86-87, 96, 99, 214-215, 263 cosmopolitanism, 160, 199 Cotton, D., 127 Council of Europe, 4, 41, 44-46, 65, 242243, 252, 254-255, 272 Covas, M., 189-191, 198 Crawford, R., 203 Crete, 181 critical cultural awareness, 20, 23, 33, 46, 50, 54, 74, 175, 202-203, 206, 209-213, 225, 255, 257-258, 267 critical discourse analysis, 20-22, 24, 50 critical pedagogy, 6, 20, 23-25, 27, 50, 211-213, 268 critical thinking, 20, 62, 211-213 criticality, 23, 255 criticism, 95, 216, 255-256 cubism, 197, 279 Culler, J., 33 culture, 1-3, 5-9, 11-12, 14-21, 23-32, 34-43, 45-51, 53-60, 62-80, 83,

Index 

94, 97-101, 103-106, 112, 114122, 126, 129, 142-149, 151-153, 155, 157-158, 167, 169, 171-176, 178, 183-184, 192-196, 199-200, 201-202, 204-206, 210, 212-214, 216-218, 220, 224-225, 233, 239240, 242-243, 245-248, 252-254, 258-259, 264-267, 269-271, 276, 279 Cultural Studies, 1, 4, 5, 15, 27, 31-35, 69-70, 102-103, 106, 110, 143, 203-206, 211, 222, 225, 234 Cuomo, A., 231, 233 curiosity, 45-46, 49, 51, 53, 63, 74, 110, 148, 150, 160, 169, 227, 239, 242, 253-254 curriculum, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 16, 23, 34, 38-39, 41-42, 45, 47, 55-57, 62, 68-70, 74, 76-78, 100, 102, 111116, 124, 148-149, 169, 174, 203, 213, 215, 225-226, 241, 243, 251, 268-270, 273 customs, 71, 103, 117, 124, 168 Daedalus, 181 Dallas, 184 Damen, L., 4, 102-104, 116-117, 119, 122, 147-148 dance, 7, 32, 34, 58, 120, 123, 207-207, 209, 222-225, 228-230 Dart, H., ix, 50, 152 Dasli, M., 5, 20, 212, 268 Davies, A., 44 Davies, M., 86 Deaf, 36 Deardoff, D., 41, 52, 267 decolonisation, 268 deductive, 38 Dervin, F., 63, 153, 168, 264, 268 dialect, 59-60, 135 Díaz, A., 5, 20, 212, 268 Dietz, G., 25-26 dimensions critical discourse analysis, 21, 24 cultural, 28-31, 133 intercultural, 56-58, 62, discourse, 8, 18-22, 29-31, 33, 48, 50, 60, 80-81, 90, 92, 94, 96, 99, 105, 115, 133-134, 145, 163, 166-168,

301

172, 191, 201, 203, 206-209, 214216, 218-223, 226-228, 233-234, 249, 259, 264-265, 267 Disney, 265 Disraeli, B., 214-215 Dodd, C. 152 Dondis, D., 175, 195 Dong, J., 104, 107, 127, 131, 135 Dooly, M., 151-152 Drakakis, J. 33 drama, 93, 183, 216, 218, 221, 226, 254 drills, 2, 11-12 Driver, P., 211 Durant, A., 211 Duranti, A., 12, 15 Dutch, 45, 168 Eco, U., 174 Edginton, B., 34, 211 Edmodo, 152, 155 EFL (English as a Foreign Language), 24, 99, 121 Eggins, S., 17, 19, 21, 80-81, 83, 85, 88-89, 92, 100 Egypt, 112 Ek, J. van, 45 ELF (English as a lingua franca), 4, 23, 43, 56-57, 103, 167, 265, 270 Eliot, T.S., 32 emojis, 162-163 emotion, 18, 36, 81-89, 162-166, 168, 183, 221, 227, 225, 253-255 empathy, 74, 82, 86-88, 107, 163, 253254, 261 enculturation, 65, 69, 71-73, 113 enlightenment, 30, 183, 220 Entwistle, N., 244 Erickson, F., 105, 137-138 ESL (English as a Second Language), 71-72, 129 ESOL (English to Speakers of Other Languages), 244 ESP (English for Specific Purposes), 18-19 ethics, 6, 100, 106, 109, 225, 231, 233, 238-239, 253-254, 257, 268 Ethiopian, 160 ethnicity, 8, 24-25, 33-34, 36, 69-70, 97-98, 104, 106, 108, 114-115,

302 Index

121, 123, 129, 176, 204, 210, 214, 225, 279 ethnocentric, 49, 210 ethnography, 1-3, 5,7-9, 11, 13, 15-17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 28-29, 33, 42, 48, 54, 59, 65, 96, 98-100, 102-117, 119-131, 137-138, 140-141, 146160, 162, 165-167, 169, 171-175, 199, 201, 207, 209, 211, 220, 223226, 230, 234, 248, 252, 257, 262, 270-271, 280 ethnology, 103-104 ethnomethodology, 103, 105, 111 ethnoscapes, 225 etiquette, 59, 93, 120-122, 124, 245 Eurocentricism, 69 Europe, 4, 9, 13-14, 17, 35, 41, 43-46, 55, 62, 65, 67, 72, 79, 112, 143, 155, 157, 165, 204, 214, 216, 224, 237, 242-243, 252, 254-255, 268, 270-272 Everett, D., 13 exchanges, 11, 21, 28, 50, 58, 66, 74-5, 78, 80, 91, 99, 102, 117, 125-129, 131, 137-139, 141, 150-151, 153157, 162, 165, 168-170, 172-173, 175, 212-213, 221-222, 226-231, 233-234, 246, 248, 250-251, 262263, 268, 272 exempla, 21, 81, 88-91, 94, 99 experiential, 2, 149, 231, 233 Facciol, R., 248 Facebook, 152, 155 Fairclough, N., 21-22 Fantini, A., 4, 13, 52, 117, 253, 262-263 fashion, 32, 35, 108, 139, 141, 146, 176, 185, 192, 194, 195, 197, 206, 209210, 221-226, 236, 276 Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, 155 Federation for International Living, 262 fiction, 93, 138, 155, 206, 216, 218, 227, 248 fieldwork, 9, 104, 149-150 film, 3, 31, 33-34, 92, 111, 148, 152-153, 155, 183, 205-206, 208-210, 217, 219-222, 227-230, 246, 255-257, 262, 278

finanscapes, 225 Firth, J., 17 Fish, S., 207 Fiske, J., 177 Fitch, M., 222 Fitzgerald, H., 29, 100 Flat Stanley, 173 Fleming, M., 101-102, 215 fluency, 94, 96, 236, 249, 258-259 football, 36, 121, 167-168, 178, 207 Forceville, C., 178 Foucault, M., 22, 204, 237 framing, 67, 198, 260, 277 Frankfurt School, 212 Freire, P., 23, 50, 212 French, 16, 45, 152, 171, 220 functionalism, 9, 16-17, 19-21, 24, 27, 31, 35, 40, 54-55, 65, 81, 104, 260, 269 Gaelic, 194 Gajdusek, L., 215 Garfinkel, H., 105 Garvin, R., 159 gate-keeping, 115, 128, 129, 237, 244 gaze, 181, 184-186, 188-190, 192, 237, 278 gender, 8, 15, 24, 29-30, 33-34, 36, 48, 69, 92, 97-98, 100, 108, 110, 123, 132, 137, 147, 149, 165, 195, 204205, 210, 214, 222, 224, 276 Gendou Missile, xi, 193-194 generative, 9, 15, 36 genre, 17, 19-22, 24, 33, 51, 67, 74, 79, 81-84, 89-90, 92, 94, 98, 100-101, 125-128, 133-134, 139, 153,-154, 205-206, 216, 227-228, 230-232, 233, 249, 256 German, 45, 134, 224 Ghadessy, M., 18 Ghori, A., 182 Giles, H., 72 Gill, S., 211 Giroux, H., 212 Glasgow, 143-146, 165 Global South, 268, 271 globalisation, 57-58, 166, 265, 271 GMS (Global Mindedness Scale), 253 goals, 5-6, 8-9, 11, 19, 23, 25, 28, 39, 42, 49, 51-52, 54, 60-61, 63, 65-66,

Index 

68, 70, 72-79, 82-83, 91, 93, 104, 112-114, 116-117, 122, 128, 154, 157, 206, 215-216, 227, 235, 237, 244, 260, 270 goal-setting, 63 God, 163 Goetz, J., 108-109 Goldstein, B., 176, 211 Golubeva, I., 72 Goodman, S., 175, 177 Google, 152, 155, 176 gossip, 70, 90, 92-94, 98-99, 113, 127, 227 graffiti, 193-194 grammar, 8-12, 14, 18, 32, 60, 62, 65, 94, 174-175, 177-179, 195, 239, 250, 269 Gramsci, A., 22, 33, 204 Gray, A., 106 Greek, 69, 179, 182 Grice, H.P., 95 Gross, Z., 268 Grossman, D., 231 Guilherme, M., ix, 4, 20, 23, 25-26, 50, 212, 268, 270 Gumperz, J., 105 Guth, S., 152 Habermas, J., 231 Hall, E., 27 Hall, G., 34 Hall, J., 94, 97-98 Hall, S. 32, 69, 208, 234 Halliday, M., 17-18 Halualani, R., 268 Hamilton, M., 104 Hampden-Turner, C., 29 Han, Z., 10 Harden, T., 36-37 Harrington, E., 231 Hartley, J., 177 Harumi, S., 96 Hasan, R., 18-19 Heath, S.B., 104, 106, 110 Hebdige, D., 32, 106-108, 192-194, 223 hegemony, 22-23, 33, 205

303

Helm, F., 152 Heritage, J., 232 Herodotus, 220 Hirsch, E., 33, 69, 71 Hofstede, G., 29, 133 Hoggart, R., 32, 69 Holliday, A., 5, 15, 30, 102, 112-114 Hollywood, 33, 92, 183, 196, 228 Hong Kong, 17, 200, 215 honorifics, 16 Hopi, 12 hospitality, 48, 116-117 Howard, M., 103-104 Howatt, A., 9-10 Huapi, 103 Hughes, A., 236 Hughes, T., 92 Hui, M., 16 humanism, 5, 269 humanities, 203 Hwang, H., 163 hybridity, 25-26, 42-43, 239 Hyland, K., 19 Hymes, D., 65 Hyon, S., 19 IALIC (International Association for Languages and Intercultural Communication), 268 Icarus, 179-182, 184 icon, 11, 47, 69, 118, 163, 167, 174, 182183, 187, 195, 199, 250 identity, 11, 14, 21, 24, 30-31, 34-38, 43-46, 55-58, 61-63, 69-70, 72-74, 79-82, 86, 90-91, 99-101, 106-107, 110, 113-114, 116, 121, 126-128, 133, 138-141, 147, 149, 151, 153, 156, 159-160, 166-168, 170-172, 196, 204, 211, 227, 235, 244, 247, 254, 259, 264-267, 269-272 ideology, 25, 29-30, 34, 50, 119, 176, 193, 205-206, 208, 213, 219, 223, 225, 235, 237-238, 241, 256-257, 269 ideoscapes, 225 idiom, 60, 249, 257 ILT (Industrial Language Teaching), 114117

304 Index

image, 52, 74-75, 130, 143, 145, 174179, 181-184, 186-203, 208, 217218, 230, 252, 275-279 IMDb, (International Movie Database) 221, 234 immersion, 103, 105 immigrant, 72, 116, 160 immigration, 42, 71-72, 75, 116, 244, 272 imperialism, 6, 67, 177, 210, 220 implicature, 94-95 Impressionism, 197, 279 indexicality, 128, 130, 135, 146, 153, 162-163, 166-167, 173 India, 103, 215, 210, 268 indigenous, 25 indirectness, 60, 89, 94-95, 98, 141-142, 174, 249, 272 individualism, 28-30, 133, 266-267, 270 Indonesia, 182-183 Intercultural Communicative Competence, 39, 41-42, 44, 46, 50-51, 53, 55-57, 59, 62-65, 68, 72-74, 76-78, 235-236, 238-242, 245, 250-254, 259, 261-263, 267, 271272 inference, 29, 48, 60, 94-95, 105, 125, 108, 128, 141, 207, 239, 245, 250, 252 input, 66, 74-76, 78, 82-83, 96, 114, 175-176 intercultural, 2, 4-8, 12, 15-17, 20-21, 23-32, 35-45, 47-50, 52-54, 56-58, 63, 65, 68, 70-80, 82-83, 94, 99-103, 105-106, 109-117, 119120, 123, 125, 129, 147-155, 157158, 160, 162, 168-174, 176, 196, 199, 202-203, 206, 210-215, 217, 219, 221-222, 225-226, 233-240, 242-246, 248, 251-254, 257-259, 261-273 interculturalidad, 25 interdisciplinarity, 33, 106, 204 interlanguage, 10 interpreting, 6, 41, 46, 48-49, 54, 74, 95, 106-107, 117, 150, 158, 174-175, 190, 202-203, 206, 221, 225, 240, 245, 247, 249, 256,

intertextuality, 166 interview, 16, 20, 22, 28, 76, 104, 106107, 109-110, 114-115, 119, 121122, 125-132, 134, 137-148, 150, 152-153, 158-159, 162, 165-166, 168, 171, 174, 199, 208, 221, 226234, 248-252, 257, 263 intonation, 60, 132 Ireland, 36, 215 irony, 95, 98, 181 Islam, 116, 199 Islamic University of Gaza, 155 Italian, 22, 123, 187 italics, 86, 200 ITE (Initial Teacher Education), 263 Jack, G., 270 Jackson, J., 5, 50, 147, 267 Jacobite, 194 Jamarani, M., 152 Japan, 28, 30, 123, 163, 193-194, 199, 217-218 Jauregi, K., 171 Jaws, 92 Jefferson, G., 165 Jefferson, T., 53-54 Jenkins, J., 23, 43, 262 jigsaw, 75, 261, 272 Johnson, K., 66, Johnson, M., 179 Jong, W., 77 Judaism, 171 Judd, E., 97-99 Kachru, B., 43 Kediri, 182-183 Kells, Book of, 199 Kelly, G., 217 Keywords, 35 Kim, S., 110, Kim, Y., 72 kinesics, 247 King, S., 221 Kjartansson, R., 248 Klinghardt, H., 9 Klippel, F., 96 Kluckhohn, F., 104 Knights, L.C., 32

Index 

knowledge, 3, 5, 10, 15, 17, 19, 31, 33, 36-37, 41-43, 46-48, 50, 52-53, 58-60, 67-72, 75, 80, 83, 94, 99, 104-105, 111, 116-117, 120, 150, 158, 163, 165, 169, 171-172, 182183, 192, 198, 206, 208-212, 215216, 221, 233, 236-237, 239-245, 256-258, 261-262, 266-268, 276 Korea, 163 Kramsch, C., 4, 42-43, 101, 116, 215, 219, 239-240, 263 Kress, G., 175, 177-181, 189-191, 196, 198 Kunnan, A., 236 Kwakiutl, 14 Kwanzaa, 69 La Plata, 164 Labov, W., 81 Lackey, D., 219 Lakoff, G., 179 languaculture, 62, 173 Latin, 123, 211, 271 Lazar, G., 34, 210 Leavis, F.R., 32, 204 Lebanon, 186 Lebenswelt, 37 LeCompte, 108-109 Lee, E., 211 Leech, G., 65 Leeuwen, T. van, 175, 177-181, 189-191, 196, 198 Lewis, T., 152 lexical, 16, 162-163, 228, 250 lexicon, 199 Liddicoat, A., 170, 235, 240, 242, 258259, 268 Lima, B., 50, 152 Lincolnshire, 244 lingua franca, 4, 23, 43, 56-57, 103, 167, 265, 270 linguaculture, 62 linguistics, 1, 8-17, 19-20, 24-25, 27, 31, 35, 39-40, 102 Linke, G., 152 listenership, 81-83, 85, 87, 91, 99-100 listening, 3, 5, 11, 47, 60, 70, 74, 76, 96, 126, 131-132, 137, 153, 175, 206, 234, 248, 250

305

literacy, 23, 32, 69-71, 104-105, 174-175, 177-179, 181, 183, 185, 187, 189, 191, 193, 195, 197, 199, 201, 245, 275 literature, 7, 26-27, 31-35, 58, 70-71, 102, 116, 122, 147, 152, 158, 175176, 203-205, 207, 210, 213, 215, 217-218, 222, 226, 234, 236, 240241, 251, 254-256 262 Lithuanian, 168 Littlejohn, A., 11 loafing and lurking, 16, 137, 158 local, 13, 18, 48, 51, 55-57, 60-63, 67, 70, 78, 99, 114-115, 118, 121, 138, 143, 146, 148, 155, 158-160, 165-167, 171, 176, 199-201, 225226, 265-266, 269-271, 273 London, 149, 209, 224 Loveday, L., 37-38, 67 Lull, J., 221 Lynuetyeang, 200 Macaulay, R., 134-135, 137 MacDonald, M., 38, 40, 215-216, 218, 267-268, 270-271, 273 Macintosh, 183 MacNaughton, I., 92 Madonna, 178, 187-188 Maitlis, E., 231 Malaysia, 215 Maley, A., 66, 78, 213 Malinowski, B., 17 Maluf, P., 189-191, 198 Manchester, 244 Mandarin, 16 Mapuche, 103 Marlboro, 185 Martin, J., ix, 17, 19, 27 Martyniuk, W., 44 Marx, K., 22, 204 masculinity, 121, 266-267 materialism, 184 Matos, A., 211 Matsumoto, D., 163 Matthiessen, C., 17 Maule, D., 121 McCarthy, M., 81 McCrone, D., 196 McGuigan, J., 106

306 Index

McPeck, J., 211 McRae, J., 34, 210 McRobbie, A., 32, 106-107, 223-224, 226 MDA (Multidimensional Analysis), 18 media, 1, 6, 8, 15, 21-22, 26-27, 31-36, 39-40, 42, 47, 70, 72, 74-75, 99, 103, 105-106, 109-111, 116, 148, 152, 155, 158, 174-175, 196, 198, 202-213, 215, 217-223, 225-227, 229, 231, 233-234, 246, 248, 256258, 265, 270-271 mediascapes, 225 mediation, 4-6, 14, 39, 41-43, 49-50, 65, 68, 72-73, 75, 77, 113-114, 116-117, 123, 150-154, 163, 173, 184, 203, 206, 212-213, 221-222, 226-228, 230, 233-234, 253, 257, 259-260, 265, 270-271 medical, 47, 157, 272 Melchor-Couto, S., 171 Melde, W., 20 memory, 88, 159, 240, 243 Memphis, 159 Méndez García, M., 50, 254 mentalese, 14 Metamorphoses, 181 metaphor, 52, 179, 207, 256, 272 methodology, 6, 8-10, 18, 20-21, 33-34, 37, 39, 61, 63, 80, 103-104, 106, 108-112, 116, 118, 130, 203-204, 222-223, 225-226, 234, 263, 269 Mexican, 70, 126, 160 Michell, R., 92 microculture, 167 microethnography, 103, 105-106, 111, 115, 132, 149 migration, 11, 23, 25, 61, 70, 225, 271, 273 Mitchell, C., 145 monitored, 115, 155 monitoring, 52, 63, 155 monochrome, 183, 197, 278 monocultural, 63 monolingual, 76 Montgomery, M., ix, 32-34, 133, 207, 211, 230-233 Monticello, 53-55 Monty Python, 92 moodle, 152, 155

moral, 68, 89, 100, 108, 190-191, 268 morality, 93, 182 morally, 68 Morgado de Matos A., 211 Morgan, C., 46 Morgan, J., 91 Morley, D., 33, 110 morphology, 9, 14 Morrow, K., 66 Moscow, 67, 118 Moss, P., 259 motivation, 3, 117, 152-153, 209, 255 Moulding, S., 66, 78 Muggleton, D, 106 Müller-Hartmann, A., 154, 156 multiculturality, 25, 43, 59, 61, 71, 122, 171, 224, 251, 253, 270 multidimensional, 18 multilingualism, 6, 14, 25, 55, 71, 158, 267 multimedia, 47 multimodal, 51, 219 multinational, 29, 42, 56, 59, 193 multiple choice, 243 Murdock, G., 222, 224 Murray, D., 34, 70-71 Musée des Beaux-Arts, 181 music, 3, 34-35, 38, 58, 70, 110-111, 148, 177, 182, 193, 217-218, 223224 Myers, G., 19 myth, 49, 69, 75, 179, 181-182 Nakayama, T., 268 namaste, 49 naming, 16 narrative, 14, 21, 30-31, 33, 81-83, 85, 89-94, 98-99, 133, 135-137, 145146, 153, 181-182, 184, 186, 191192, 216, 250, 255-256, 271, 277 Nasioi, 103 nation, 4, 25, 29, 30, 34, 36, 38, 41-42, 47, 56-57, 62, 64, 69, 71, 78, 87, 97, 121, 123, 133, 149, 168, 170171, 176, 195-196, 210, 214-215, 231, 241, 243, 264, 268, 271-272, 276 native, 3-4, 6-13, 23, 43-44, 49, 67, 70, 75, 170, 265, 270

Index 

naturalism, 196 NCA (National Communication Association), 268 NCSSFL, (National Council of State Supervisors for Languages) 4-5, 41-42, 51-57, 59, 61-62, 64, 241, 258-259, 272 negotiated syllabus, 77 Netflix, 265 netiquette, 155, 157 New Guinea, 103 news, 22, 34, 70, 75, 96, 128, 176, 209, 211-212, 214-215, 226-227, 230233, 248-250, 257 Newsnight, 231 Newsom, G., 232 newspaper, 18, 22, 31, 75-76, 107, 176, 196, 198, 205 NIACE (National Institute for Adult and Continuing Education), 244 Nigeria, 215 Nightingale, V., 102, 110 norms, 30, 36-37, 59, 63, 92, 117, 124, 127, 129, 136, 145, 157, 161, 166, 192-194, 216, 225, 238, 278 North America, 3-4, 9, 12-13, 16, 28, 112, 184-187, 204, 272 North, B., 4, 44, 216, 236-237, 242, 244246, 249-250, 252-257, 259-260, 268, 270-272 notion, 65, 205 notions, 10, 45-46, 65-68, 205, 264-265, 269 Notting Hill, 92 Nunan, D., 6, 11, 66, 73-74, 104, 107108, 263 O’Brian, S., 231 O’Dowd, R., 50, 151-154, 169, 263 O’Keeffe, A., 99 O’Regan, 23, 38, 267, 270-271, 273 Oceania, 58 Odysseus, 69 OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), 237-238 Ogay, T., 63 onomatopoeia, 162-163 ontology, 38

307

oral, 175, 236, 242, 251 orthography, 135 Osler, A., 50 other, 26, 43, 51, 70, 107, 121, 123, 153, 157 othering, 30 otherness, 45-46, 48-50, 73, 113, 168, 239, 241, 265, 269-270, 279 Ouellette, L., 205 Ovid, 181 pandemic, 232 Paran, A., 34 Parker, S., 31 Parmenter, L., 4, 44, 272 participant observation, 104, 114-115, 149 Passy, P., 9 pedagogy, 2, 4, 8, 20, 23-25, 27, 50, 73, 111, 162, 169, 211-213, 234, 244, 263, 267-268, 270-273 Penn Warren, R.,, 207 Pennycook, A., 6, 20, 23 performative, 38, 81 Philippines, 103 Phillipson, R., 6, 23, 210 philosophy, 2, 23, 70 Phipps, A., 20, 23, 102, 152, 160, 170, 268 phonology, 8, 62 photography, 176, 196-197 Pinker, S., 11-14 Pirahã, 13-14 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), 237-238 pluricultural, 245-246, 248 plurilingualism, 25, 59, 76, 265-266, 272 Pocari Sweat, 199 poetry, 14, 33, 62, 120-121, 181-182, 205-206, 217-218, 240, 256 pointillism, 197 Polish, 280 Poole, B., 21 portfolios, 248, 251, 262 postmodernity, 266 pragmatics, 29, 57, 62, 147, 246-247, 249 praxis, 23 process-based learning, 269 processing, 21, 96, 161, 222

308 Index

professionalism, 178 proficiency, 3-4, 6, 52-55, 60, 71, 80, 153-154, 165, 170, 201, 2017-218, 236-238, 242, 245, 255-256, 258, 270 progressivism, 269 proletarianism, 192 propaganda, 198, 205, 227 prosodics, 97 psychological, 8-10, 14-15, 45, 72, 195, 254-255, 259, 262 Puerto Rica, 138 Pulverness, A., 3, 11, 213-214 punk, 107, 138, 140, 146, 192-194, 222 Pushkin, A., 240 QAA (Quality Assurance Agency), 241 Quaker, 67 qualitative, 262-263 quantitative, 18, 262-263 questionnaire, 28-29, 66, 70, 110, 148, 152-153, 249, 262 Qu’ran, 199 race, 24, 33, 69, 114, 123, 204, 210, 224 Radway, J., 102 rapport, 61, 151, 155-156, 161-162, 165 rastafarianism, 222 rave, 223-224 realism, 197, 279 reception, 4, 209, 243 receptive, 246, 253-254 reconstructionism, 269-270 recount, 81-85, 86-87, 89-91, 94, 99 reflexivity, 2, 6-7, 27, 97, 100, 142, 165, 167, 169, 211, 240, 248, 251 refugees, 225, 271 register, 17-18, 19-20, 22, 166 Reid-Thomas, H., 34 relational knowledge, 243 relativisation, 172, 272 reliability, 30, 108, 235-238, 240-242, 250, 258, 263 religion, 11, 22, 36, 48, 71, 98, 117-118, 155, 158, 179, 183, 243, 253, 257, 265 repertoire, 41, 57-58, 60, 74, 79, 86, 88, 95, 245-246 representational art, 197

Republic of Ireland, 215 Republican, 231 resilience, 26, 41, 61, 63, 74, 171, 193, 265, 270 resistance, 23-24, 44, 70, 91, 110, 115, 136, 139, 170, 199, 204, 208, 220, 226, 265-267 rhetoric, 145, 177, 203-204, 256 rhyme, 207, 217 rhythm, 219 Richards, I., 207 Richards, J., 3 Richards, K. 167 Richardson, T., 225 Rinvolucri, M., 91 Rio de Janeiro, 155, 171 Risager, K., 62-63 ritual, 35, 38, 106, 243, 246 Roberts, C., 15, 92, 102, 105, 114-115, 120, 122, 126, 129-131, 147, 149 Rocky, 221 Rose, G., 175, 196, 221 rubric, 169, 247, 250 Russia, 14, 67, 119, 168 Sacks, H., 90, 96 Sapir, E., 12-14 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 12 Saudi Arabia, 123 Saussure, F. de, 9 Saville Troike, M., 104-105 savoirs, 46-51, 53-55, 57, 59, 62, 67, 70-71, 79-80, 117, 158, 172, 175, 213, 238, 242, 245, 248, 252, 255, 272 SBT (Sistema Brasileiro de Televisão), 228229 Scale jumping, 166 Scales of achievement (CEFR), 4, 49, 56, 242, 245-247, 249-250, 253-256, 258-259, 261 scapes, 225 Scarino, A., 235, 240, 242, 258-259 schemata, 36, 216 Schindler’s List, 33 Schmitt, H., 158 Schön, D., 2 Scollon, R. & S.W., 29-31, 105

Index 

Scotland, 36, 74, 120-121, 134-135, 176177,184-185, 194-196, 203 Scrivener, J., 175, sculpture, 182-183 Searle, J., 10 second storying, 92 secularisation, 183 self, 7, 36, 51, 53, 57-59, 61, 63, 72, 98, 124, 132, 134-135, 137, 139, 142, 153, 162, 168-169, 172, 182, 222223, 230, 252, 254, 262, 269 self discovery, 261 selfhood, 265-266 semantic, 62 semiology, 33 semiotics, 11, 21, 48-49, 107, 160, 174175, 178, 199, 201, 209, 219, 221, 223-224, 226, 234, 257, 262, 270 Sercu, L., 117-118, 239 sexuality, 30, 161, 224 Shakespeare, W., 4, 33, 241, 244 Sharifian, F., 152 Sherman, J., 211 Shohamy, E., 6, 158 sign, 11, 107, 109, 159, 174, 194, 196199, 219, 221 signage, 159-160, 265 situational, 17-18 skills, 3, 5-6, 11, 15, 21, 31, 39, 41-43, 46, 48-51, 54-55, 58-59, 63, 65, 67-68, 72, 74, 76-77, 79-80, 82, 90, 94-95, 97, 99-100, 102, 107, 111, 116-117, 124-127, 129, 131, 133, 135, 137, 141, 143, 145, 147, 149-150, 165, 169, 172-175, 177, 186, 202-203, 206-207, 209, 212, 215, 224, 234, 236-237, 239-242, 245, 247-251, 256, 258, 261-262, 267, 270, 275 skinhead, 192-193 Skuttnab-Kangas, T., 23 Slade, D., 17, 21, 80-81, 83, 85, 88-89, 92, 94, 96, 100 slang, 167, 257 Slater, S., 34 Smith, J., 11-12 Smith, P., 29 Smith, R., 9

309

SOAP corpus, 87 soap operas, 36, 70, 87, 93, 183, 205-207 Soares, J., 228-230 soccer, 20, 222 socialisation, 29-31, 38, 48, 55, 115 socialist, 119 sociocultural, 17, 21, 72, 195, 246 socioeconomic, 106 sociolinguistics, 1, 8-9, 17, 29, 31, 35, 40, 45, 65, 67, 81, 96, 103, 126, 132134, 158, 166 sociology, 21, 33, 106, 204 sociopolitical, 34, 265 Sofo, F., 2 sojourning, 42, 50, 143, 153, 251, 263, 272 South America, 25 Soviet, 118 Spaeth, J., 254 Spain, 45, 70, 126, 159-160, 217-218 speaking, 3, 5, 11, 30, 32, 39, 44, 58, 79, 81, 85, 108, 121, 126, 137, 148, 153, 160, 175-176, 206, 228, 248 spectatorship, 222 speech, 9-10, 12, 14, 17-19, 42, 45, 47-48, 51, 72, 79-81, 94, 96-99, 120, 125-126, 132-135, 139, 141142, 145-146, 154, 175, 209, 227, 246-247, 249, 251, 256, 279 spelling, 62, 135, 173 Spencer-Oatey, H., 5, 57, 77, 272 Spielberg, S., 92 Spiro, J., 235, 237, 240, 247 spoken discourse, 9, 11, 18, 20-21, 24, 48, 67, 75, 79, 83, 87, 90, 96, 99, 102, 105, 127, 130-131, 173, 198, 202, 206, 236, 243, 249-250, 271 sport, 22, 47, 71, 97, 118, 120-121, 124, 158, 205, 207, 222, 226 Spradley, J., 130 Stadler, S., 5, 57, 77, 272 stance, 6, 100, 116, 128, 141, 162, 168, 190, 221-222, 260 Standard English, 43, 135, 257 standardised tests, 237, 243, 244 253, 259, 270 Starkey, H., 50 Stempleski, S., 117, 122

310 Index

stereotype, 29-31, 57, 114, 120-121, 123, 140, 153, 192-193, 196, 225, 245246, 253, 270 Stern, H., 3, 39, 47, 67, 72 Stevenson, R.L., 217 Stirling University, 215 stories, 7, 21-22, 48, 74, 79-94, 96-100, 127, 135, 142, 152-153, 162, 171, 175, 181-182, 193, 205, 215-216, 247, 250, 255 strategies, 16, 47, 60, 72, 77, 98-99, 107, 110, 113, 121, 132, 139, 141, 145146, 148, 150, 174, 191, 203-204, 206-207, 216, 219, 221, 250, 254, 256, 265 Street, B., 104 structuralist, 10, 15, 23, 62 style, 28, 34, 38, 60, 67, 77, 96, 106-107, 112, 129, 132-133, 135, 138-142, 145-146, 192-194, 197, 199, 210, 216-217, 219, 223, 226, 247, 255256, 276 stylistics, 60, 210, 216, 219, 234, 256-257 subculture, 74, 106-110, 132, 138-141, 145-146, 192-193, 222-224, 226 subjectivity, 106-108, 111 subtitles, 111, 149, 228 Suetonius, 220 summative, 63, 235, 261-262 survey, 5, 49, 234, 236, 263 Svartvik, J., 65 Swales, J., 19 swastika, 107 Swayze, P., 228-230 Sweet, H., 9 Sybil, 214-215 syllabus, 3, 39, 45, 65, 77, 101, 156, 213 symbol, 11, 13-14, 37, 67-69, 71, 107108, 121, 182-184, 188, 193, 195, 223-224, 244, 276 sympathy, 86, 92, 214, 237, 260, 272 synonymy, 25, 87-88, 102-103 syntax, 256 synthetic personality, 228, 230 Syria, 186-197 system, 29 systemic, 17, 19-20, 137

tabloid, 196 taboo, 48, 243 TACCT (Tool for Assessing Cultural Competence Training), 272 Taiwan, 165 Talbot, M., 100 talk, 21, 31, 36, 79-80, 89, 94-98, 100, 111, 113, 121-122, 132, 135, 168, 177, 209, 225, 227, 231-232, 249 tango, 222 Tannen, D., 94, 100 Tanzania, 215 Tarone, E., 10 TASK, 74 task, 3, 5-6, 10-12, 24-25, 34, 42, 65-66, 73-78, 82-85, 92, 97, 100, 102105, 112-113, 117-121, 123, 126, 132, 150, 152-153, 155-157, 169, 175-176, 210-211, 214-215, 233234, 237, 240, 251, 259, 267, 269 Taylor, D., 199 Tcherepashenets, N., 152 technoscapes, 225 teenagers, 35, 47, 49, 155, 176, 225 telecollaboration, 50, 117, 125, 151-163, 165-171, 173, 263 teleconference, 155 television, 20, 31-34, 92-93, 109-111, 128, 148-149, 155, 177, 183, 190, 205-207, 209, 211, 219-222, 226227, 230, 233, 257, 262, 265 Tennessee, 159 tenor, 18-20 tense, 81-83, 91, 93, 175 test, 2, 69, 71, 129, 173, 235-237, 239245, 247-248, 251, 253-254, 262263 Texas, 184 Thames Valley University, 149 Threshold level, 45 tolerance, 28, 47, 50, 96, 266 Tolson, A., 227-229 Tomalin, B., 117, 122 tone, 59, 128, 153, 165, 183, 196, 219 tourism, 3, 55, 59, 61, 75, 143-144, 146, 153, 159-160, 196, 220, 225 traditions, 71, 171 transaction, 240, 246

Index 

transaction, 11, 65-67, 79-80, 84, 95, 98-99, 127-128, 130, 240, 246 transcription, 108, 131-132, 134-135, 146, 173 transculturalism, 25-26 transfer of information, 11, 37, 66, 79, 130, 137, 141 transferable skills, 3, 241 transformative, 33, 254, 268 translanguaging, 14, 76, 266 translation, 9, 12-13, 15, 43, 57, 153, 189-190, 200, 259, 269 translocal, 166 transnational, 41, 56, 62-63, 237, 270273 triangulation, 262-263 Trim, J., 44-45 Trompenaars, F., 29 Trump, D., 231-232 Tudini, V., 170 Turkey, 143 Turner, G., 29, 33, 106, 108, 204 typography, 187, 250 Tyson, L., 205 UNICollaboration, 173 United States of America, 33-34, 52, 61-62, 70-71, 104, 116, 119-120, 199, 271-272 University of West London, 149 Ur, P., 80, 94 Uryu, M., 42-43 usage, 16, 148, 159, 239, 257 Ushioda, E., 167-168 utilitarianism, 29, 67 utopia, 270 utterance, 10-11, 14, 17, 95, 98, 105, 128, 131, 140, 145, 198, 250 Valdes, J., 72-73 Valette, L., 243, 245 validity claims 231, 233-234 validity of assessment, 235-241, 250, 258 values, 3, 11, 16, 25, 28-32, 34-37, 39, 42, 45, 50-51, 53-55, 57, 59, 61-62, 67, 69-70, 75, 80, 89-90, 98-101, 104, 106, 114, 116-117, 122, 125-128, 139, 141-142, 145-

311

146, 153, 157, 176-177, 184, 193, 204-206, 210-214, 216, 221, 223, 227, 231, 233, 241, 243, 246, 250251, 253, 257, 259, 264-266, 268269, 271-272 Vancouver, 14 Vantage level varada mudra, 182 variety, 15, 41, 43, 52, 57-58, 61, 76-77, 83, 103, 128, 176, 234, 242-243, 248, 250 Vasquez, O., 70 vectors, 181-182, 184, 186, 192 Ventola, E., 19 video, 33, 93, 110, 130, 142, 152, 205, 209, 211, 234, 256-257 viewer, 33-34, 36, 109-111, 178, 181-182, 184-194, 197-199, 205, 207-209, 220-221, 227, 231, 233-234, 257 virtual, 43, 102-103, 150-158, 160, 167, 173-174, 221, 254 visual, 11, 21, 35, 58, 60, 67, 74-75, 107108, 113, 139, 174-187, 190-193, 195-203, 217, 219, 221, 226, 248, 257, 278 vocabulary, 18, 35, 60, 88-89, 94, 99, 174-175, 178, 192, 217, 223 Vygotsky, L., 14, 259 Wagner, M., 5, 46, 112, 267-268, 273 Waletzky, J., 81 Walkerdine, V., 221 Walter, M., 9 Walters, K., 69 Wang, Y., 163 Warschauer, M., 151-152 Warwick University, 57, 60 Waystage level, 45 Welsh, 36 West Indian, 67 West, 29, 165, 225, 268 Whannel, P., 69 Whorf, B.L., 12-14 Widdicombe, S., 106, 138-141, 145-146, 223-224 Widdowson, H., 10, 75, 210 Wiggershaus, R., 205

312 Index

Wilkins, D., 10, 65 Williams, R., 32, 35, 69, 205 Williams, W.C., 181-182 Willis, D., 6 Willis, J., 6 Willis, P., 106-107, 110 Witte, D., 36-37 Woofitt, R., 106, 138-141, 145-146, 223224

xenophobia, 192 Yandell, J., 34, 71 York, 92, 233, 243 Yousef, F., 28 Zarate, G., 4, 46 Zhang, H., 158 Zimmerman, D., 167