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1 Introduction

This book is about intercultural communication in Asia – people communicating across cultural boundaries, the characteristics and values of the cultures which can affect the success or otherwise of communication, and the broader implications of these issues for education.

Intercultural communication in Asia is increasing rapidly, as indeed it is world-wide. This is partly the result of the increased physical mobility of people, which itself is the consequence of a number of social, political and economic changes. Asia itself is more accessible to tourism, not only from outside Asia, but also between Asian countries. Statistica reports that world-wide in 2015 there were nearly 1.2 billion tourism arrivals worth $7.27 trillion (https://www.statista.com/topics/962/global-tourism/). Geo-political borders are now more open than they were even a decade ago, and the opening up of Myanmar leaves North Korea as the only country in Asia with relatively hermetic borders.

Economically Asia is now much more prosperous. Physical mobility is increasing rapidly: tourism into and out of Asia; education of Asians overseas; the rise of Asian middle classes with a thirst for foreign culture, English language, and travel, as well as education; globalisation and commerce; European tourists in rural China and Vietnam and Laos; Japanese and Chinese and Korean tourists abroad, in Asia and beyond; Asian students in European or English-dominant countries. In short, people are on the move, now more than ever before, and contacts between speakers of different languages and cultures are rising comparably. In this international, intercultural world English is, by a wide margin, not only the lingua franca of Asia (House 2018; Lian & Sussex 2018) but also what we might call the “cultura franca” – a broadly common set of practices and values ranging from ad hoc, almost pidgin, practices negotiated in real time and in situ for interpersonal communication, all the way to elaborate codes of values and interaction. If the twenty-first century is the Asian century, then Asia, with 60% of the world’s population (http://worldpopulationreview.com/continents/asia-population/), is providing major, and rapidly growing, contexts of intercultural interactions (Chitty 2010).

In this twenty-first century world we have not only physical but also digital mobility, facilitating cultural contact and with it communication. Digital technology has supplemented, and in some cases supplanted, physical contact with virtual. Japan and Korea are among the most digitally connected nations in the world, and China has accelerated dramatically over the last 5 years to become numerically the world leader in digital connexions (for data see the World Bank: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.P2).

Communicating interculturally requires that people from different languages and cultures interact. And that brings us at once to an issue of terms and definitions. There is some consensus, but only inconsistent observance, in the use of these terms. “Intercultural communication” is more associated with people from different languages and cultures communicating. In contrast, “cross-cultural communication” is more usually understood contrastively, and deals with the factors of the cultures which are relevant to actual or potential communication. However, both “intercultural communication” and “cross-cultural communication” are commonly used for communicating across cultural boundaries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercultural_communication).

For intercultural communication to happen, people from different languages and cultures have to be able to come into contact: they need to come physically face to face, or be culturally in contact through their writings or cultural products. More recently they have been digitally in communication, with contact facilitated by technology, especially the Internet. This requires either that people travel, or that their messages and/or cultural products do.

For many centuries, intercultural communication in Asia – as indeed in Europe, Africa and the Americas – was restricted by limitations on personal mobility and communications. In the world after the various agrarian revolutions most people – other than nomads – did not travel very far from their birthplace during their entire lives. So local languages and cultures, together with folklore, grew and flourished and consolidated. There was less input from people outside this relatively enclosed local context. National boundaries were less well-defined and more porous, so that in principle, people could travel. But in practice it was difficult, often dangerous, inconvenient and expensive to travel, and they tended not to (Snow 2018). And thus intercultural communication was not as widespread as it is today. There were some exceptions. There are the Norman French, the Middle English and the Church-based Latinate cultures in English after the Norman conquest in 1066, and indeed the Latinate Church culture parallel to indigenous cultures through the world of the Catholic Church. Armies travelled, for instance in the Crusades from the eleventh century. So did ships, with exploration and navigation as part of the great European expansion from the fifteenth century, with settlement following in most countries outside Europe. Urbanisation brought rural people to towns and cities as a form of economic migration, creating intercultural contexts through the contacts of languages and dialects.

Intercultural communication was formerly much less of a regular occurrence than it is today. If people do not travel, cultures cannot easily come face to face, except through their messages; and the pace and outreach of messages and people movement was slow, even after the introduction of printing, and in spite of later – pre-digital – advances in transport and communications. Intercultural communication has become endemic and a natural and necessary concomitant of the new world order. And all this is continuing to change with relentless speed and thoroughness.

2 The Domain of Intercultural Communication

As an area of intellectual enquiry with the task of understanding, analysing and addressing all these factors, intercultural communication is of necessity inherently interdisciplinary (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercultural_communication). So in intercultural communication we find education; anthropology and ethnography; linguistics and applied linguistics, as well as pragmatics; sociology; psychology and social psychology; communication studies; critical theory; humanities; media studies; information theory; politics and policy, including language planning and policy; and applications to communication in any thematic or scientific area.

In this network of disciplines, language and education are central. Assessed performance in the homeland language and English is now standard in education systems across Asia, and second language competence, especially in English, is a core feature of education, commerce, culture and tourism. The older homeland language pedagogies, founded on centuries of tradition in grammar and normative, native-user models, have been progressively incorporating more communicative approaches and frameworks, prompted especially by English and the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (www.commoneuropeanframework.org). We see here an additional juxtaposition of values, in terms of shifting educational models. Homeland languages in Asia, like second languages elsewhere, have joined this trend, especially Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, with their dominant position in international commerce and culture, both in courses offered by bodies like the Confucius Institute (Chinese), and in the education systems of other Asian countries. English has an additional role as an international lingua franca, together with the emerging localised norms like Chinglish (Chinese-English) in China, and Japlish (Japanese-English) in Japan, which are now achieving greater acceptability and prominence as English develops growing roles alongside the homeland language. In this broadly based, and hugely expensive, activity, communication has joined normative performance as a key goal, again prompted by curriculum and pedagogy. It is now possible to propose that we are moving, not into a post-communicative framework for language education, but into one enhanced by a major focus on intercultural communication. Some of this movement is focused on language skills and performance, especially intercultural communicative competence (Alptekin 2002; Barker 2015; Byram et al. 2001a, b; Deardorff 2010), including its teaching and assessment (Byram 1997). Intercultural competence is also a feature of language-in-education planning and pedagogy (Byram 2010). The goal is a principled approach to intercultural awareness for the purposes of communication (Snow 2018). And here competence is seen within the wider remit of intercultural communication.

Intercultural communication shows many of the characteristics of an emerging domain of intellectual enquiry. It has international organisations like the International Association for Intercultural Communication Studies (IAICS: http://web.uri.edu/iaics/), with its own journal Intercultural Communication Studies. As we shall see in the following section, across its interdisciplinary space, intercultural communication is both catholic, in the older sense of universal and inclusive, as well as eclectic, choosing and activating material and ideas from across a wide spectrum. In theory and methodology it is centripetal, importing what it needs from other disciplines in terms of theory and methodology for the research goals at hand. There is no style of inquiry which is distinctively that of “intercultural communication”, other than its thematic focus and interdisciplinarity. Most of its research to date has been descriptive, analytical and comparative, empirical and inductive, and qualitative: there is some evidence of formal observation and quantitative methods from the social sciences. There is some work in the framework of critical theory (Cheong et al. 2012; Halualani 2008; Nakayama and Halualani 2011; Ono 2010; Willink et al. 2014). But on the whole, the core of intercultural communication is a-theoretical. This can be expected to self-correct as researchers progressively define and deepen the areas of enquiry.

The discipline area – it is not yet possible to talk of a “discipline” – of intercultural communication is certainly growing dynamically, and in some cases dramatically. Education in intercultural communication is responding decisively in both curriculum and materials. Courses are being introduced across the educational spectrum, at secondary and especially tertiary levels. Language courses, which before tended to include intercultural communication in a more occasional and unstructured way, are now starting to incorporate it as part of standard curricula. There are over a dozen good introductory textbooks, supported by books of readings, and increasing numbers of monographs and monograph series, like:

  • Multilingual Matters: Languages for International Communication & Education

  • Peter Lang: Critical Intercultural Communication Studies

  • Routledge: Routledge Studies in Language & Intercultural Communication

The annual IAICS conference is specifically devoted to intercultural communication, but many other conferences in the areas listed above include themes and sections focused on intercultural communication. Journals specifically devoted to intercultural communication were mostly established in the first decade of this century, and include:

  • Intercultural Communication Studies

  • Journal of Intercultural Communication Research

  • Journal of International and Intercultural Communication

  • Language and Intercultural Communication

Among other journals in the communication field which are increasingly devoting space and attention to intercultural communication are:

  • International Journal of Intercultural Relations

  • International Journal of Language and Culture

  • Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development

  • Intercultural Pragmatics

And, of particular interest to this book, there are English language journals with a specifically Asian focus on communication and intercultural communication:

  • Asian Journal of Communication

  • Asian Communication Research

  • Chinese Journal of Communication

  • Keio Communication Review

(and see So 2010). Most of these journals are part of the stables of international publishers like Elsevier, Multilingual Matters, Routledge, and Taylor & Francis.

In terms of the focal themes of intercultural communication research, Arasaratnam (2015) selected three key journals:

  • Journal of Intercultural Communication Research

  • International Journal of Intercultural Relations

  • Journal of International and Intercultural Communication

and identified eight key themes in their coverage: identity; acculturation and global migration; communication dynamics; intercultural competence; theories, models and scales; perception, stereotypes and discrimination; cross-cultural differences; and intercultural education and study abroad. We have confirmed her results by an independent scan of another journal, Language and Intercultural Communication.

One theme which has become increasingly evident is the rapid increase in intercultural communication research relating to China and Chinese, which, on an informal count of the papers published since 2010, now ranks second only to America and American English (with the exception of studies comparing the US and Japan). But the sheer numbers and increasing electronic influence of China are attracting research interest, principally but by no means solely from scholars based in Asia, both Chinese and otherwise. This journal activity is supported by a growing number of introductions to intercultural communication (e.g. Martin and Nakayama 2012, Neuliep 2014), and books of readings (e.g. Samovar et al. 2014). There are also a few, but only a few, books which deal specifically with Asia (Kirkpatrick and Sussex 2012).

3 English and American English

English is not only the dominant language of scholarship in intercultural communication. It is also, by a wide margin, the most prominent second language studied, with English being the anchor, or at least a partner, in languages researched in this domain. And American English has not unexpectedly been the most prominent variety of English in this work. However, for all its dynamism and central location in so many social, technological, political and cultural agendas, the USA is only one exemplar of only one model of cultural identity and practice. The literature is starting to show an emerging trend for intra-Asia comparative studies in intercultural communication. The dominant pairing has been American English with Japanese, corresponding to Japan’s position as a trading partner (Ito 1992). But contrastive studies of English with Chinese are accelerating (Zhang et al. 2013). And we are starting to see intra-Asian pairings like Cambodia and Vietnam (Sar and Rodriguez 2014), or Singapore and Taiwan (Zhang 2012). While the preferred focus is still on two-language comparisons, the literature shows some analyses of more than two languages in empirical research, which goes beyond areal “Asian” stereotypes and targets inductively a richer understanding of commonalities and differences (Morris 2014).

Parallel to this development there is also the question of which model of English we are dealing with. There is the “edifice” view of English (Sussex and Kirkpatrick 2012, p. 223), including both dominant L1 models and English as an International Language (EIL). Then there is English as a Lingua Franca (House 2018), seen essentially as a code employed in intercultural contexts (and see Baker 2011). And finally we have what Canagarajah (2007) has called “Lingua Franca English”, an emergent, negotiated medium where speakers “activate a mutually recognised set of attitudes, forms, and conventions that ensure successful communication in LFE when they find themselves interacting with each other” (2007, p. 925).

4 Western Bias

The literature on intercultural communication in general, and intercultural communication in Asia in particular, has a strong Western bias. Part of this arises from the well-known international domination of English as the language of scholarship, which in some disciplines exceeds 90% of leading journals. Too few non-Asian scholars outside Asia read Asian languages for scholarship, so that research on intercultural communication in Asia, when written in Asian languages, remains inaccessible except to a small specialised group. In terms of topics and subjects in the behavioural sciences there is a further bias which has skewed the balance away from Asia. This is the “WEIRD” phenomenon, as documented by Henrich et al. (2010), where they analysed people who took part as subjects in research in psychology, cognitive science and economics. “WEIRD” stands for “Western”, “educated”, “industrialised”, “rich” and “democratic”. Henrich et al. refer to a study by Arnett (2008) which found that in the top journals in six sub-disciplines of psychology, 96% of the subjects were from WEIRD countries, specifically North America, Europe, Australia and Israel. Fully 99% of the first authors were from Western countries. In their abstract Henrich et al. state that “[…] researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these ‘standard subjects’ are as representative of the species as any other population”. They continue:

WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggest that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity (Henrich et al. 2010, p. 61).

Related aspects of this skewing of subjects and their behaviour were anticipated by Kim’s 2002 book Non-Western perspectives on human communication, which targets both Western-centrism and particularly US-centrism, in the contexts of topics like individualism, conflict negotiation, and silence.

The pro-Western bias documented in studies like these has not yet been substantially realised, let alone addressed or corrected, in international scholarship. However, there has been some movement to rebalance the Western bias in linguistics, communication studies and intercultural communication, and specifically in the field of intercultural communication. To be sure, intercultural communication research has been less laboratory-based than the subjects surveyed by Henrich et al. (2010). But an English/Western emphasis nonetheless persists and pervades, though in the context of other (read usually: non-Western) cultures (Kuo and Chew 2009). Hofstede’s (1984, 1986, 1997) suggested parameters of cultural differences, for instance, were in principle “culture-neutral”, though in practice they had a strong anchor in Western countries and values. The initial four were

•individualism-collectivism;

•uncertainty avoidance;

•power distance (strength of social hierarchy); and

•masculinity-femininity (task orientation versus person-orientation)

to which two were added later:

•long-term orientation;

•indulgence versus self-restraint.

Critiques of Hofstede’s approach have often focused on “individualism–collectivism” and “power distance”, especially in the ways in which they have been easy to apply to the juxtaposition of “Confucian Heritage Cultures” (“CHC”: principally China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam; see Watkins and Biggs 1996) and non-CHC contexts. There has been a growing body of research demonstrating that such East/West dichotomies are far too simple, and that these properties also occur in the communities on the “other” side of the divide, and in gradients rather than dichotomies. And the perspective has been dominated by conceptual frameworks and values originating in the West.

Two key CHC ideas illustrate this bias, and both stem from the writings of Confucius himself (551 BC-479 BC). Their Chinese names are guanxi and mianzi. Both are central to a working understanding of interpersonal relations in CHC countries and contexts. Guanxi – significantly, there is no simple translation in English – involves the reciprocal, and often hierarchical, relationships between people, especially those outside the family. Each individual is involved in an extended, and often extensive, network of guanxi, both personal and professional. Guanxi entails mutual obligations, reciprocity and trust, which in turn are central to maintaining social and economic order. At the interpersonal level this is in some respects not too different from a Westerner’s network of friends and colleagues: you share things with friends and give them priority in your interpersonal dealings. But when it involves individuals in their institutional, corporate or commercial roles there is an immediate potential clash with Western values, according to which some aspects of guanxi can be seen as a form of corruption (Dunfee and Warren 2001). Guanxi represents one of the areas of cultural tension in the contemporary CHC world as it moves to incorporate aspects of globalisation, meaning Western values (for more on guanxi, see Curtis 2018).

Mianzi is commonly translated as “face”, and it is closely involved with the concepts of politeness in different cultures (Brown and Levinson 1987; Cai and Donohue 1997). But Asian stereotypes of self-effacement and especially mianzi are not well understood in the West. Mianzi is one’s sense of self-respect and dignity as we present it to the world, and as we wish to be seen. It is rude and inconsiderate to challenge another person or their competence to their face or in public. Mianzi also interacts in a complex way with guanxi. In this perspective “face” can be seen as a strategy that individuals use to maintain their identity and self-respect, as well as their social standing in the guanxi network. CHC students, for instance, are well known for being chary of taking part in classroom discussions, because being seen to be mistaken in front of others is a threat to one’s mianzi (Singhal and Nagao 1993). Furthermore, in interpersonal situations it can be acceptable not to tell the truth, so long as this is understood by the interlocutor. According to mianzi and guanxi, personal dignity and social harmony take precedence over truthfulness, which is the reverse of what is common in Western interactions.

Issues such as these raise a series of questions in which a coherent focus on language and cultural communication outside the Western context assumes particular importance (see Bryant and Yang 2004; Chen 2009; Wang and Kuo 2010). That is one of the rationales for the present volume (Ito 1992; Kim 2002). As we have seen, the literature on intercultural communication still perpetuates the Western bias in several ways. It is overwhelmingly written and discussed in English. And where contrastive studies of languages and cultural practices have been involved, they have predominantly involved contrasts of English with another language.

The present volume unashamedly continues the first of these biases by publishing in English. We do so for the pragmatic, but also selfish, reason of reaching as many readers as possible. But we also move some distance towards a more Asia-centric perspective. The majority of the contributors to this volume are either Asian, or based in Asia, or both. The Asian-based contributors come from the PRC, Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Thailand and Vietnam. Two chapters (by Curtis, and Lian & Sussex) propose theoretical models based on Asian contexts, concepts and data. House (2018) treats English as a lingua franca within Asian frameworks. And the chapter by Sussex on pain brings an emerging domain of scholarship into Asian contexts.

5 The Present Book

The book has three points of departure:

  • Q1. What are the challenges of intercultural communication vis-à-vis these invisible (or partly visible) constructed boundaries that intersect society, even in today’s increasingly fluid, dynamic, hybridised and globalised world?

  • Q2. What challenges to intercultural communication, as individuals/cultures/groups interact with each other, are posed by considerations of ideology and values, which may not always be fully conscious or explicitly articulated, but which are nevertheless powerful forces affecting decision-making behaviour?

  • Q3. What are the challenges facing, on the one hand, governments and educational institutions, and, on the other hand, individual educators and students, in adapting to an increasingly internationalised educational environment?

We begin, in one sense, with a paradox. The title of this book refers boldly to “Asia”. And yet Asia is a fiction, or at best a loose geographical way of referring to a heterogeneous collection of countries, languages, cultures and practices. In this respect it is not unlike the use of “European” or “Western”. For those outside Asia, referring to it in this way seems natural and unproblematic. For those within, the term obscures a rich structure of differences:

An ungainly conglomeration ranging from Siberia to Saudi Arabia and Japan to Turkey, containing 60% of the world’s population, the implausible notion of “Asia” is itself Eurocentric, being merely a label of convenience for non-European areas of the Eurasian continent (Kim 2010, 167).

And yet there is a sense in which speaking of “Asia” in this way does make sense. Not only do the countries of Asia form a coherent landmass; that they have also, in various ways, shared some key trends in their histories, and particularly in their recent developments. We do not imply that there is some higher-level entity called “Asia” with a supra-national reification. But we do use the term “Asia” as a convenient shorthand for a conceptual, cultural and geographical space within which lie the issues which this book addresses.

Fundamental to those issues is the presence and status of English, squarely in the middle of the map of intercultural communication in Asia. This was the focus of the first Macao International Forum in 2010 (Kirkpatrick and Sussex 2012). The penetration of English into the fabric of Asian societies, initially after the end of the Second World War, but with astonishing acceleration since the advent of the Internet in the 1980s, has been unique and deeply resonant. With the possible exception of North Korea, all the countries of Asia, and certainly those covered in this book, bear indelible and possibly permanent imprints of English (Wee et al. 2013). In this book, the bridge between English and intercultural communication is covered in the chapter on English as a lingua franca by House; and in the chapter by Snow on the realisation of these issues in an English-language syllabus. English, without a doubt, is undoubtedly a challenge. It presents opportunities and threats, as well as temptations, to the languages in countries who are hosting its not always gentle invasion.

But the challenges are not always concerned with English as a linguistic or semiotic system. They can equally involve ideological values systems. And here there are indeed some commonalities which make some sense of the term “Asia”. This is Kim again:

While differences do exist between nations in Asia, their similarities, due to the influence of Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, or Hinduism, are also undeniable (Kim 2010, p. 167).

These issues are also distinctively Asian, in that, while these value systems are found outside Asia, it is only in Asia that they are found together and to this depth.

In the literature on intercultural communication, ideologies and values have probably been represented most often in the form of stereotypes: typical patterns of beliefs which align with different contrasting cultural behaviours. These questions in turn demand an institutional response, both by governments and specifically by education systems, if the people for whom they are responsible are not to be left behind, as other countries ramp up their efforts to make their citizens interculturally and communicatively competent. The proposed changes have mostly related to English, often in conjunction with specialisations like business studies.

6 Overview of the Chapters

The chapters in the volumeFootnote 1 form five thematic sections. They are all concerned with intercultural communication, as we defined it at the start of the Introduction: with either the act of communicating across cultural boundaries, or with the properties of the cultures at either end of that act of communication, or both.

6.1 Section 1: Models, Intercultural Competence and Education

Andy CURTIS (“Individual, Institutional and International: Three aspects of intercultural communication”), building on the earlier work of Hinde (1998) and others, develops the idea of the “Individual as cultural artifact”, which is in opposition to many of the most widely accepted definitions of “culture”, which are premised on the notion of large numbers of people sharing beliefs, customs and values. This chapter considers the question: What would happen to our definitions of “culture” if each of us constituted an entire culture within our individual selves? That would be the first “I” in this three-part conceptualisation of intercultural communicative competence.

The second part of this chapter looks at the relationships between individuals and institutions, the ways in which individuals create institutions as extensions and manifestations of societal cultures, and the ways in which those institutions, as artifacts, reflect the cultural values and beliefs of the individuals and groups who created them. This part of the chapter also discusses what can happen when the culture of an individual clashes with the culture of an institution, and looks at the importance of social connections and social networks known as guanxi.

The third part of the chapter considers the possibility that “Internet culture” constitutes an emerging form of “international culture”. If so, there are at least two opposing positions possible here: that the Internet has No Culture or No Cultures, or that the Internet is All Cultures. Internet addiction is also explored, as a new clinical phenomenon, which raises the question of what other cultures, if any, have generated their own particular pathologies.

Andrew LIAN and Roland SUSSEX (“Towards a critical epistemology for learning languages and cultures in 21st-century Asia”) start from the enormous social and economic changes currently under way in Asia, especially those involving China, India and the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the adoption of English as the common language of the region. Growing personal mobility will bring about rapidly increasing demands linguistically and culturally. Traditional national and cultural boundaries will be less distinct, and learners will need a new set of tools which go beyond the traditional structured language class. This chapter offers flexible and dynamic alternatives to current pedagogic models which are more suited to the conditions of twenty-first century Asia, and in particular, models which allow individuals to explore and develop knowledge and understanding on their own initiative and for their individual purposes. It begins by seeking ways to challenge the learner’s “operational histories”, or habitual patterns of understanding established by experience, and then helps them to develop new learning strategies, where students navigate at will through networks of knowledge representations and other helpful (ideally optimised) resources to meet their needs as perceived by themselves or by advisers – human members of their personal learning environments.

This model is developed and illustrated further with a detailed example drawn from a recent empirical study on the learning of English pronunciation by Chinese EFL students (He and Sangarun 2015) based on verbotonal theory (Guberina and Asp 1981; Guberina 1972).

For Don SNOW (“Intercultural communication in English courses in Asia: What should we teach about?)” increasing globalisation means more intercultural encounters, especially in Asia. Societies and educational institutions are therefore faced with the question of which intercultural factors they should teach?

Intercultural communication training is principally provided in courses in English and other foreign languages. But there is only limited space for teaching the key concepts of intercultural communication, and among these a key issue is when speakers attempt to interpret the words and actions of someone from a different culture. This chapter therefore focuses on three factors: ethnocentrism, in-group bias and stereotyping. These three factors are important in “attribute substitution”, and can interfere with the process of interpretation. By teaching these factors explicitly we can help learners better understand how interpretation works in intercultural contexts.

6.2 Section 2: Values and Communication in Cultural Contexts

Thi Hong Nhung PHAM (“Confucian values as challenges for communication in intercultural workplace contexts: Evidence from Vietnamese – Anglo-cultural interactions”) poses the question: to what extent are insights into Confucian values able to describe and elucidate intercultural communication in Asia, especially where misunderstandings and frustrations arise? A corpus of Vietnamese self-reported incidents and follow-up in-depth interview data on English language interactions between a Vietnamese and an English speaker was used to investigate three factors, modified from Spencer-Oatey (2002) – Face, Equity Rights, and Association Rights.

The behaviour and concerns of the Vietnamese speaker show a fundamental influence from Confucian values. Many Vietnamese people place a high value on Anglo-cultural behaviour which is consistent with the Vietnamese Confucian concern for Face, especially individual Quality Face, and for Empathy. The data show that the Vietnamese concern for their personal Face, and to have full freedom of action, is secondary to their wish for solidarity with their co-worker.

6.3 Section 3: English as a Lingua Franca in Asia

Juliane HOUSE (“English as a global lingua franca: The threat to other languages, intercultural communication and translation?”) sees English as the first truly international global language, and that includes Asia. But the success of English has given rise to criticism about its alleged cultural neutrality, about its role as an elitist language, and about its alleged tendency to have a negative effect on local languages. Other critiques focus on the insufficient competence of people using English as a lingua franca, which will inhibit its success; and on claims that using English heavily will have a negative impact on other languages, not to mention the speakers’ ability to think in their mother tongue.

House reviews these arguments in the light of recent research, including that of her own research group in Hamburg, Germany. Her conclusion is that English can be absolved of these criticisms, in that ideological objections against English as a lingua franca do not stand up to scrutiny. The use of English as a global language offers enormous opportunities for international intercultural communication. And the growth of English as a language of instruction at various levels will change international education scenarios in Asia and elsewhere.

6.4 Section 4: Focal Areas of Intercultural Communication

Istvan KECSKES (“How does intercultural communication differ from intracultural communication?”) takes a socio-cognitive approach to intra-cultural and intercultural communication. His key concept is that these form not a dichotomy but a continuum.

Speakers who share a high level of language proficiency operate closer to intracultural communication. If speakers come from different ethnic backgrounds, they shift progressively towards inter-cultural communication: the common ground on which they negotiate is emergent rather than “core” – frameworks derived from assumed and shared values. In such contexts they build their frames of communication bottom-up, there is more reliance on the language which they create in the course of the interaction (rather than pre-existing language and frames), and they rely more on context, paying more conscious attention to what is said and its implications. This analysis allows us to see that the conventional opposition of intra- and intercultural communication, which has dominated the literature so far, in fact obscures a number of important insights.

Joanna RADWAŃSKA-WILLIAMS (“The linguistic landscape of Macao”) sees the geosemiotics of Macao as a special case of intercultural communication (Scollon and Scollon 2003). Public signs in Macau are typically at least trilingual, involving Chinese, Portuguese and English. This fact reflects the distinctive historical and cultural composition of a city which was once a Portuguese colony, and was only relatively recently returned to China in 1999. Her chapter is a case study of the main street of Macau, and its “geosemiotic” meanings of objects which are physically situated in the spaces of urban agglomerations. Her analysis of the data lead to two important conclusions relating to ethnicity and ideology. Ethnicity is seen from the perspective of multilingualism in the signage, both formal and informal. And ideology is principally involved in the interpretation of spatial and visual semiotics. These meanings show how Macao reflects dynamic tensions in its role as a tourist hub and a Special Administrative Region of China.

Roland SUSSEX (“Pain as an issue of intercultural communication”) addresses the unusual topic of pain in intercultural communication. Pain talk – the way patients and health care professionals talk about pain – is of fundamental importance to diagnosis and treatment. Pain talk is crucially mediated by cultural values and conventions. These conventions include the persistent negative associative networks of pain words, including pain, hurt, ache and sore, and as pain is the body’s early-warning system that something is amiss, it is a vital clue to diagnosticians and therapists. And yet there is only a modest literature about pain talk within cultures, let alone across cultures. The dominant cultural paradigms are based on English, with some attention to Spanish, especially in the USA.

Pain talk analysis is not only a matter of English-based word-semantics. This is shown in use of metaphors and metonyms for medical conditions in French, and pain vocabulary in Japanese, both of which are substantially different from English. More widely, pain talk is also realised in discourse. And it is susceptible to complex potential misunderstandings of value systems, interpersonal dynamics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and cultural linguistics, and specifically in intercultural pragmatics in conversational contexts involving patients and health care professionals. These factors are not only of great inherent intellectual interest, but they are becoming increasingly relevant in an applied and practical sense in the globalising world of the twenty-first century, including medical tourism, especially in Asia.

Kimie OSHIMA (“Functions of humor in intercultural communication: Disarm, tolerance, and solidarity”) argues that having a sense of humour helps one to think “outside the box”. It helps people overcome their social and cultural preconceptions. Humour is therefore, in its own way, similar in its role as a skill in intercultural understanding and communication. People with a well-developed sense of humour are often more skilful as intercultural communicators, as can be seen in Hawaii, a notably successful and peaceful interethnic society.

The classroom use of jokes to create a humorous environment has been shown to help students learn more effectively and positively. It can foster analytical, critical and divergent thinking. On the other hand, humour which transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries can reveal what speakers have in common. The chapter draws on a course “Intercultural communication (Rakugo in English)”, which shows how a traditional Japanese genre of performance can be delivered in English to reveal common values and humour.

6.5 Section 5: Identity

Doreen WU and Chaoyuan LI (“Emotional branding on social media: A cross-cultural discourse analysis of global brands on Twitter and Weibo”) show that new communication technologies, far from being “culturally neutral”, reveal cultural influences related to communication circumstances and outcomes. Most of the literature is couched in terms of contrastive nation-state cultures (Hofstede 1984, 1986, 1997), or cultural variability in communication (Gudykunst and Kim 1997; Gudykunst and Mody 2002), or Triandis’ horizontal/vertical individualism/collectivism model (1995).

The chapter goes behind pre-determined cultural categories and examines the nature of virtual language, culture and ideology, from the point of view of their implications for the internationalisation of education. The data are taken from Twitter and Weibo, including examples of the World’s Top 10 Best Brands (including Google, Microsoft, IBM, Coca Cola, GE, McDonald’s, Samsung and Toyota). The advertisements on Twitter show less variation than on Weibo, and there is a degree of cultural hybridity in the mixing of the three appeals of emotional branding: pragmatist, evangelist and sensualist. The conventional analyses of face and politeness in Chinese (Gu 1990, 1992) may no longer apply.

Finally, Yihong GAO (“China’s fluctuating English education policy discourses and continuing ambivalences in identity construction”) shows how China is restructuring its linguistic and cultural identities in a globalising world, and in the process reorganising linguistic resources. Attitudes towards the teaching of English in China varied from uncritically enthusiastic (the late 1970s to the mid-1990s), to anxiety over the quality of outcomes versus the amount of effort expended (mid-1990s to the first decade of the new millennium), and currently to a fear, especially in the important debates between 2013 and 2014, that English may interfere with Chinese language proficiency and cultural identity.

This accelerated re-evaluation of ideas about the West, which has involved national policy makers, educational institutions, educational experts, learners and netizens, can be seen as a recapitulation of Chinese attitudes over the last 150 years. Unlike most other Asian countries, China did not have a history of British colonialism. In contrast, its monistic view of its language and identity have become a “habitus” (Bourdieu 1991).

7 Envoi

Intercultural communication, then, is on a strong upwards trajectory. It is perhaps not surprising that Kim should claim, though perhaps with some hyperbole, that:

Intercultural communication is arguably the most serious of all the problems confronting humankind, and is the single most vital domain in social science. (Kim 2010, p. 177)