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Studies of intercultural communication in applied linguistics initially focused on miscommunication, mainly between native and non-native speakers of English. The advent of the twenty-first century has witnessed, however, a revolution in the contexts and contents of intercultural communication; technological advances such as chat rooms, emails, personal weblogs, Facebook, Twitter, mobile text messaging on the one hand, and the accelerated pace of people's international mobility on the other have given a new meaning to the term 'intercultural communication'. Given the remarkable growth in the prevalence of intercultural communication among people from many cultural backgrounds, and across many contexts and channels, conceptual divides such as 'native/non-native' are now almost irrelevant. This has caused the power attached to English and native speaker-like English to lose much of its automatic domination. Such developments have provided new opportunities, as well as challenges, for the study of intercultural communication and its increasingly complex nature. This book showcases recent studies in the field in a multitude of contexts to enable a collective effort towards advancements in the area.

The contributions in this volume stem from different lines of research and represent both a continuation and an advancement of the European DYLAN project. The book addresses the meanings and implications of multilingualism and plurilingual repertoires as well as the ways in which cultural diversity is managed in companies and institutions in Switzerland. Characterised by official quadrilingualism, but also by new dimensions of multilingualism resulting from massive immigration, important workforce mobility and increasing globalisation, Switzerland offers an ideal laboratory for studying phenomena linked to multilingualism and cultural diversity. On the one hand, a special focus is put on the best practices of diversity management and language regimes with particular attention paid to the interplay between official languages and English, and to ways of leveraging diversity awareness, fostering cultural inclusiveness and enhancing intercultural learning in vocational education and training.On the other hand, the chapters examine at close range the way actors' plurilingual repertoires are developed and how their use is adapted to particular objectives and specific conditions. Being observed in several types of multilingual professional settings, the plurilingual strategies, including English as lingua franca, are particularly examined in terms of power relations and processes of inclusion or exclusion.

\"Meaning Making in Text extends the notion of text as a vehicle for ever-changing and complex forms of communication. Based on recent developments in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), it proposes a range of analytical tools for accessing a variety of discourses in different contexts. The book presents studies of linguistic and multimodal phenomena concerning English and minority European languages that, until now, have received very limited attention, and offers proposals for analysing text in terms of their application to pedagogy. The contributors demonstrate the increasingly rich potential of SFL to provide a refreshingly powerful account of human nature and the ways it can be applied that go well beyond those to do with language itself\"-- Provided by publisher.

Due to continuing immigration and increasing racial and ethnic inclusiveness, higher education institutions in the United States are likely to grow ever more diverse in the 21st century. This shift holds both promise and peril: Increased inter-ethnic contact could lead to a more fruitful learning environment that encourages collaboration. On the other hand, social identity and on-campus diversity remain hotly contested issues that often raise intergroup tensions and inhibit discussion. How can we help diverse students learn from each other and gain the competencies they will need in an increasingly multicultural America?Dialogue Across Differencesynthesizes three years' worth of research from an innovative field experiment focused on improving intergroup understanding, relationships and collaboration. The result is a fascinating study of the potential of intergroup dialogue to improve relations across race and gender. First developed in the late 1980s, intergroup dialogues bring together an equal number of students from two different groups - such as people of color and white people, or women and men - to share their perspectives and learn from each other. To test the possible impact of such courses and to develop a standard of best practice, the authors ofDialogue Across Differenceincorporated various theories of social psychology, higher education, communication studies and social work to design and implement a uniform curriculum in nine universities across the country. Unlike most studies on intergroup dialogue, this project employed random assignment to enroll more than 1,450 students in experimental and control groups, including in 26 dialogue courses and control groups on race and gender each. Students admitted to the dialogue courses learned about racial and gender inequalities through readings, role-play activities and personal reflections. The authors tracked students' progress using a mixed-method approach, including longitudinal surveys, content analyses of student papers, interviews of students, and videotapes of sessions. The results are heartening: Over the course of a term, students who participated in intergroup dialogues developed more insight into how members of other groups perceive the world. They also became more thoughtful about the structural underpinnings of inequality, increased their motivation to bridge differences and intergroup empathy, and placed a greater value on diversity and collaborative action. The authors also note that the effects of such courses were evident on nearly all measures. While students did report an initial increase in negative emotions - a possible indication of the difficulty of openly addressing race and gender - that effect was no longer present a year after the course. Overall, the results are remarkably consistent and point to an optimistic conclusion: intergroup dialogue is more than mere talk. It fosters productive communication about and across differences in the service of greater collaboration for equity and justice. Ambitious and timely,Dialogue Across Differencepresents a persuasive practical, theoretical and empirical account of the benefits of intergroup dialogue. The data and research presented in this volume offer a useful model for improving relations among different groups not just in the college setting but in the United States as well.

Multilingual encounters have been commonplace in many types of institutions, and have become an essential part of supranational institutions such as the EU since their inception. This volume explores and discusses different ways of researching the discursive dimension of these encounters, and critically examines their relevance to policy, politics, and society as a whole.

This wide-ranging survey of issues in intercultural language teaching and learning covers everything from core concepts to program evaluation, and advocates a fluid, responsive approach to teaching language that reflects its central role in fostering intercultural understanding. * Includes coverage of theoretical issues defining language, culture, and communication, as well as practice-driven issues such as classroom interactions, technologies, programs, and language assessment * Examines systematically the components of language teaching: language itself, meaning, culture, learning, communicating, and assessments, and puts them in social and cultural context * Features numerous examples throughout, drawn from various languages, international contexts, and frameworks * Incorporates a decade of in-depth research and detailed documentation from the authors' collaborative work with practicing teachers * Provides a much-needed addition to the sparse literature on intercultural aspects of language education  

\"Quebec has never signed on to Canada's constitution. After both major attempts to win Quebec's approval - the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords - failed, Quebec came within a fraction of a percentage point of voting for independence. Everyone Says No examines how the failure of these accords was depicted in French and English media and the ways in which journalists' reporting failed to translate the differences between Quebec and the rest of Canada. Focusing on the English- and French-language networks of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Kyle Conway draws on the CBC/Radio Canada rich print and video archive as well as journalists' accounts of their reporting to revisit the story of the accords and the furor they stirred in both French and English Canada. He shows that CBC/Radio Canada attempts to translate language and culture and encourage understanding among Canadians actually confirmed viewers' pre-existing assumptions rather than challenging them. The first book to examine translation in Canadian news, Everyone Says No also provides insight into Canada's constitutional history and the challenges faced by contemporary public service broadcasters in increasingly multilingual and multicultural communities.\"--Publisher's website.

The use of English as a global lingua franca has given rise to new challenges and approaches in our understanding of language and communication. One area where ELF (English as a lingua franca) studies, both from an empirical and theoretical orientation, have the potential for significant developments is in our understanding of the relationships between language, culture and identity. ELF challenges traditional assumptions concerning the purposed 'inexorable' link between a language and a culture. Due to the multitude of users and contexts of ELF communication the supposed language, culture and identity correlation, often conceived at the national level, appears simplistic and naïve. However, it is equally naïve to assume that ELF is a culturally and identity neutral form of communication. All communication involves participants, purposes, contexts and histories, none of which are 'neutral'. Thus, we need new approaches to understanding the relationship between language, culture and identity which are able to account for the multifarious and dynamic nature of ELF communication.