Intercultural communication

• Will Baker ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Southampton

     University of Southampton

     GB.ENG.M4.24UJ, Reino Unido

     
• Localización: ELT journal: An international journal for teachers of English to speakers of other languages, ISSN 0951-0893, Vol. 78, Nº 2, 2024, págs. 212-215
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Intercultural communication (IC) can be defined as communication where cultural and linguistic differences are perceived as relevant to the interaction by the participants or researchers involved (Zhu 2019; Baker 2022). In IC, participants make use of and negotiate between different cultural resources and languages in interaction, including intersecting cultural identities, communities, references, and meanings (eg nationality, ethnicity, class, profession, gender, sexuality), at a range of scales from the local, to the national, and the global. Due to its focus on linguistic and cultural practices, language learning is inevitably an intercultural process, whether or not it is explicitly recognized in teaching. The intercultural dimensions of language learning become particularly important when the focus is on developing learners’ communicative competence since that communication is typically intercultural. Indeed, the idea of culture as part of language teaching has a long history. In the nineteenth century, languages were learnt primarily through works of literature to gain a better understanding of the culture of the target language community (Risager 2007). In the twentieth century, there was an emphasis on learning languages as a means of communicating across national cultural borders, often for economic or political advantage (Jenkins 2015). The rapid increase in globalization at the end of the previous century and during the first decades of this century has seen a focus on learning languages for global connections and intercultural communication. This has been particularly true of English and ELT due to the role that the expansion of English language use has played in the processes of globalization (Moran Panero 2018).