Intercultural awareness: modelling an understanding of cultures in intercultural communication through English as a lingua franca

Baker, Will

doi:10.1080/14708477.2011.577779

Cited by 191 publications

(166 citation statements)

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“…Indeed, the global use of English as a lingua franca in a huge variety of scenarios brings to the fore the limitations of associating a partic ular language, English, with any one culture or even group of cultures, i.e., the Anglophone world. A complex, dynamic, and emergent account of culture also fits well with the limited empirical research on ELF and culture so far (Meierkord 2002;Pölzl and Seidlhofer 2006;Baker 2009, Baker 2011Ehrenreich 2009). …”

Section: Culture As Complex and Emergentmentioning

confidence: 82%

“…While culture has been defined in many different, at times even contradictory ways, and a fuller characterisation of culture will be provided below, for the present it can be approached as a shared, but con stantly changing and negotiated, set of beliefs, values, ideologies, discourses, and practices. As well as culture providing a fruitful concept in exploring ELF from a research perspective, earlier studies have demonstrated that culture is also seen as relevant to participants in ELF communication in their own explana tions of their experiences (Meierkord 2002;Pölzl and Seidlhofer 2006;Baker 2009, Baker 2011.…”

Section: Culture In Intercultural Communication Through Elfmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Culture and complexity through English as a lingua franca: rethinking competences and pedagogy in ELT

Baker

2015

Journal of English as a Lingua Franca

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Culture and complexity through English as a lingua franca: rethinking competences and pedagogy in ELTAbstract: English as a lingua franca (ELF) research highlights the complexity and fluidity of culture in intercultural communication through English. ELF users draw on, construct, and move between global, national, and local orientations towards cultural characterisations. Thus, the relationship between language and culture is best approached as situated and emergent. However, this has chal lenged previous representations of culture, particularly those centred predomi nantly on nation states, which are prevalent in English language teaching (ELT) practices and the associated conceptions of communicative and intercultural communicative competence. Two key questions which are then brought to the fore are: how are we to best understand such multifarious characterisations of culture in intercultural communication through ELF and what implications, if any, does this have for ELT and the teaching of culture in language teaching? In relation to the first question, this paper will discuss how complexity theory offers a framework for understanding culture as a constantly changing but nonetheless meaningful category in ELF research, whilst avoiding essentialism and reduc tionism. This underpins the response to the second question, whereby any formu lations of intercultural competence offered as an aim in language pedagogy must also eschew these simplistic and essentialist cultural characterisations. Further more, the manner of simplification prevalent in approaches to culture in the ELT language classroom will be critically questioned. It will be argued that such sim plification easily leads into essentialist representations of language and culture in ELT and an over representation of "Anglophone cultures." The paper will con clude with a number of suggestions and examples for how such complex under standings of culture and language through ELF can be meaningfully incorporated into pedagogic practice.

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Section: Culture As Complex and Emergentmentioning

confidence: 82%

Section: Culture In Intercultural Communication Through Elfmentioning

confidence: 99%

Culture and complexity through English as a lingua franca: rethinking competences and pedagogy in ELT

Baker

2015

Journal of English as a Lingua Franca

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“…More recently the notion of 'intercultural awareness' (ICA) has been put forward (Baker 2011(Baker , 2012a as an approach which builds on CA but takes a more dynamic intercultural perspective. While CA explores the manner in which national conceptions of culture frame intercultural communication, ICA focuses on the INTER or TRANS cultural dimension where there is no clear language-culture-nation correlation, particularly in global uses of English.…”

Section: Cultural and Intercultural Awarenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Critical cultural awareness is crucial to ICC in providing the foundation for evaluating one's own and other's 'perspectives, practices and products' (Byram 1997: 63). Critical cultural awareness and other formulations of cultural awareness are often presented as a key feature of intercultural competence or as a less technical, more holistic synonym of it (Risager 2004).More recently the notion of 'intercultural awareness' (ICA) has been put forward (Baker 2011(Baker , 2012a as an approach which builds on CA but takes a more dynamic intercultural perspective. While CA explores the manner in which national conceptions of culture frame intercultural communication, ICA focuses on the INTER or TRANS cultural dimension where there is no clear language-culture-nation correlation, particularly in global uses of English.…”

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confidence: 99%

Research into Practice: Cultural and intercultural awareness

Baker¹

2015

Lang. Teach.

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This article examines the role of cultural awareness (CA) and intercultural awareness (ICA) in classroom theory and practice. CA and ICA can be roughly characterised as an awareness of the role of culture in communication with CA focused on national cultures and ICA on more dynamic and flexible relationships between languages and cultures. There will be a consideration of findings from CA and ICA research that have not been well applied, those that have been well applied and those that have been over applied to classrooms. In particular, it will be argued that CA and ICA are more prevalent in pedagogic theory, and to a lesser extent policy, than they are in practice. While the cultural dimension to language learning is now fairly mainstream, where elements of CA and ICA are applied or translated into the classroom they typically take the form of comparisons between national cultures, often in essentialist forms. There is still little evidence of classroom practice that relates to the fluid ways cultures and languages are related in intercultural communication, especially for English as a lingua franca or other languages used on a global scale.Will Baker is a lecturer in modern languages and deputy director of the Centre for Global Englishes at the University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, Hampshire, UK, where he teaches and supervises research in applied linguistics, global Englishes and intercultural communication. He has also taught English in the UK and Thailand. His research interests include intercultural communication, intercultural awareness, English as a lingua franca, ELT and e-learning and he has published and presented internationally in all these areas. 2 IntroductionCulture has long been part of second language (L2) teaching and learning whether through a focus on the literature written in the chosen target language or an interest in the country, people and traditions associated with the language. However, with the socio-cultural turn in applied linguistics, the last few decades have seen an accompanying rise in interest in the cultural dimension to language teaching and learning exemplified in such seminal writings as Kramsch (1993;1998) and particularly Byram's (1997) intercultural communicative competence framework. Nonetheless, the influence these and other theoretical and empirical studies have had on teaching practice at the 'chalk-face' is still debatable. In this article I will examine the extent to which research findings have been applied, where this has been done well, where it has not, and where the findings have been over-applied. Such an evaluation will necessarily be subjective, and I will draw on my own experiences of teaching master's level courses in the UK to language teachers from around the world, as well as my experiences of and continued interest in English language teaching (ELT) in Thailand. At the same time though, I will relate these experiences to what we currently understand through research about the role of cultural and intercultural awareness in L2 use and learn...

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“…Baker (2011) summarizes these processes by asserting that learning a foreign language will influence learners' views of the world and thus have an impact upon learners' conceptions of self, a view echoing Lantolf's (2000) earlier work. There has been a move away from simplistic ideas of languages structuring perceptions at a deep cognitive level and we see Kramsch (2011: 364) describing processes of 'making and organising meaning through signs, symbols and conceptual metaphors that not only refer to the outside world but shape the minds of their users and receivers as well'.…”

Section: Developing Intercultural Competencementioning

confidence: 94%

Getting to know you: The development of intercultural competence as an essential element in learning Mandarin

Jin¹

2014

London Review of Education

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Intercultural awareness: modelling an understanding of cultures in intercultural communication through English as a lingua franca

Cited by 191 publications

References 35 publications

Culture and complexity through English as a lingua franca: rethinking competences and pedagogy in ELT

Culture and complexity through English as a lingua franca: rethinking competences and pedagogy in ELT

Research into Practice: Cultural and intercultural awareness

Getting to know you: The development of intercultural competence as an essential element in learning Mandarin

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