This seminar provides students with a deep understanding of how intercultural communication has been conceptualized and analyzed in the interrelated fields of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics. The course takes a constructionist approach and focuses on how the constructs of ‘culture’ and ‘cultural difference’ are enacted by speakers of more than one language in conversational interactions, and pays equal attention to the ways that culture is treated as a resource for social purposes by multilingual speakers. The course will emphasize the perspective that culture and cultural difference are social constructs that cannot be presumed, but rather are the result of active processes in interaction among conversational participants, processes which sometimes point to the relevance of cultural models, interpretive schemas, discourses, and ideologies. In this regard, the course will examine both ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ levels. The course will also provide students with a strong foundation in methodological concerns, including interactional sociolinguistics, sociocultural linguistics, and ethnographic discourse analysis, the most commonly used methodological frameworks for analyzing intercultural differences in face-to-face interaction. Participants will read research on the social construction of culture and interculturality from the interrelated fields of applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis that examine 1) miscommunication in cross-cultural interactions; 2) the discursive construction of culture and cultural difference; and, 3) the use of culture as a social resource in interaction. We will examine seminal work in the field, starting with cross-cultural communication studies, followed by an examination of the developments in the field that have led to the reconceptualization of this area of inquiry. Following a seminar format, students will participate in Laulima discussions, lead discussions of readings in class and present data for analysis in workshop format during the semester. A final term paper of 20-25 pages (with deadlines for proposal and first draft) will be required for the course.
Required text: pdfs will be available on Laulima.