Where Does Culture Fit in? A Discourse Analysis of Intercultural Couples’ Talk (2024)

The Intercultural Dynamics in Which the Discourses Take Place

Context and Catholicity in the Science and Religion Debate

Bolden, G. B. (2014). Negotiating understanding in “intercultural moments” in immigrant family interactions. Communication Monographs, 81(2), 208-238.

Communication Monographs, 2014

This article aims to advance an interactionally sensitive, emic view of intercultural communication by exploring the organization of “intercultural moments” in conver- sation—moments during which cultural and linguistic differences between people become exposed. Field video recordings of ordinary face-to-face interactions in Russian–American immigrant families are analyzed using the methodology of conversation analysis. The article focuses on sequences in which participants deal with actual or anticipated understanding problems and examines how participants’ assumptions about their asymmetric cultural and linguistic expertise are revealed in their actions. Some interactional payoffs in adopting the role of a cultural expert vis-à- vis a novice are described to show how an ostensible non-understanding is both a participants’ problem to be solved and a resource for social action.

The reconstruction of intercultural discourse: Methodological considerations

Journal of Pragmatics, 2001

Intercultural intimate relationships

The International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication, 2017

As transnational social networks expand, people increasingly form intimate relationships with partners from a different sociocultural background. While intercultural intimate relationships are not a new phenomenon, they have attracted research only recently due to their global proliferation. Scholars are particularly interested in how such mixed relationships communicate and how their interculturality impacts on partners' (and their offspring's) identities. Some studies have been criticized for overemphasizing cultural differences and identification problems of intercultural partners. This depiction of intercultural coupledom as problematic in early research echoed initial societal perceptions of it. Contrastingly, recent works explore how intercultural partners can effectively communicate and negotiate their complex sociocultural repertoires. The hybrid cultural forms and meanings that intercultural couples create are shown as empowering rather than debilitating. This new approach is also reflected in society and the media, which increasingly represent intercultural families in a positive light, gradually normatizing or even endorsing them.

Intercultural Discourse and Communication: The Essential Readings Scott F. Kiesling, Christina Bratt Paulston (Eds.), Blackwell Publishing, 2004, xvi + 330 pp., ISBN 0-631-23543-4

Fuel and Energy Abstracts, 2006

“Where are you from?”: Interculturality and interactional practices

‘Where are you from?’ I often find it difficult to answer the above question in small talk. Born in the era of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and grown up in one of the coldest cities close to the Russian border in China, I received most of my education in Beijing. About 15 years ago at the time of preparing for the abstract, I arrived at Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, a city known for its mining history, football team and local ‘Gordie’ accent, to carry out a PhD project on language development of Chinese-speaking children. It turned out to be one of the most significant chapters in my life. I stayed on in the UK after the PhD and established myself in academia. I am now a professor of Applied Linguistics and Communication, and recently appointed as Head of Department, in the oldest university department of applied linguistics in London. In this chapter, using the methodology of auto-ethnography, I shall reflect on how I manage and negotiate many different aspects of identity in workplace interactions with reference to my work on Interculturality. As an emerging research paradigm, Interculturality (e.g. Zhu Hua, 2014, Dervin & Risager, 2014) represents a line of investigation that departs from traditions of seeing cultural memberships or cultural differences, largely, if not always, as something ‘given’, ‘static’, or as something one either has or does not have. Instead it argues that cultural memberships (Chinese, Turkish, British, etc) are not always relevant to intercultural interactions and people can do a number of things with cultural memberships through indexical or symbolic interactional resources. These main arguments are particularly useful in my reflection of how I make use of some interactional practices to manage a plurality of my cultural, linguistic, professional and social identities (a transnational de facto, originally coming from China and having lived in the UK for 15 years, working in a British higher education, having travelled and lectured in many different parts of the world, mother of two boys born and grown up in the UK). I shall focus on three kinds of interactional practices. The first one is names of reference. I shall talk about how I have chosen to remain to be known as ZHU Hua, my Chinese name in Romanisation, for my academic life; how my marriage and having children led to new social identities of mine (I am known as Mrs Hua LI in my bank and in the children’s school) and how these name references constantly serve as a reminder of differences in traditions, conventions, and expectations from a female academic between the West and East. The second is address terms. I shall talk about how I, coming from a Chinese culture, have learned to address senior colleagues by their first name without feeling ‘out of order’ and developed and engaged in ways of interactions appropriate to cultures and contexts. The last is nationality and ethnicity talk (e.g. when are you going home?). I shall talk about how I have learned to negotiate identity ascribed or constructed by others through nationality and ethnicity talk, i.e. discourse evokes or orients to one’s ethnicity or nationality either explicitly or implicitly. In my conclusion, I shall discuss the impact of living and working in another culture on my interactional practices and my understanding of the relationship between language, culture and identity and vice versa.

Intercultural Differences and Discourse

International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature

This practical work is an attempt to show learners of English that fluency in a foreign language is not the only means of smooth communication. It states that culture is a group-specific (constant)and language has at least two main varieties (spoken and written) (variables). A discourse in this work, moreover, is a spoken or written communicative situation involving two or more parties in a specific spatial and temporal enclosure. Against that background, it highlights the need to use the in-discourse gap-fillers. Accordingly, the work shows that grammatical correctness is not enough to conduct appropriate communication. So are the culture-specific implicit lacks of clarity, intolerance, and non-observance of cultural differences.

Reviewed Work:Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approuch

"Deconstructing culture: towards an interactional triad », Journal of Intercultural Communication, 29, 2012

How may culture be defined? Numerous works and important contributions have been answering this crucial question for the past thirty years; yet the problem remains unsolved. When taking a close look at ‘intercultural communication’, we may see that some utterances might not be that cultural at all. If we have a clear definition of ‘intercultural communication’, then what is ‘intra-cultural communication’ (Winch 1997, Ma 2004)? Is there really a sharp difference between these two concepts and is miscommunication necessarily ‘cultural’ when implying individuals or groups from alleged different cultural backgrounds? We will study various examples and try to separate the cultural from the non-cultural by taking a close look at intercultural and intra-cultural miscommunication, insofar as their definitions seem to ultimately cover the same conceptual maps. After this first step, we will deconstruct the concept of culture, as it has been defined by scholars in various research fields over the last decades; we will thus see that culture might not be a set of shared values or behaviours (Knapp & Knapp-Pothoff 1990; Scollon & Wong Scollon 2001): culture may only be a very personal variable of a complex, strangely organized and experimental toolbox (Kay 1999) which would constitute a product of our education, psychology, social encounters and language and would only remain activated through particular contexts. This exploration will eventually be followed by a proposal for a redefinition of ‘culture’ as a concept, based on interactional pragmatics, contextics (Castella 2005) and a triadic declension of this very concept with three notions: bathyculture, dramaculture and osmoculture.

Culture in Conversation