The construction of intercultural discourse

Team discussions of educational advisers
Erscheinungsjahr 1994
ISBN: 978-90-5183-600-4
Verlag: Brill | Rodopi

Buch, Englisch, Band 2, 272 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 431 g

Reihe: Utrecht Studies in Language and Communication

This book breaks open the 'black box' of the workplace, where successful immigrants work together with their Dutch colleagues. In their intercultural team meetings the work itself consists of communication and the question is how that work is done.
The teams consist of Dutch, Turkish, Moroccan, and Surinamese educational experts whose job it is to advise schools and teachers on the form and content of language teaching.
Their meetings are structured according to institutional patterns, such as 'interactive planning' and 'reporting', and according to intercultural discourse structures. For instance, Dutch team members identify their immigrant colleagues as 'immigrant specialists' and are themselves identified as 'institutional specialists'. Further, the intercultural pattern 'thematizing and unthematizing racism' provides the team members with communicative methods to deal with the societal contradictions that exist between different cultural groups, in the Netherlands as well as elsewhere. These intercultural discourse structures concur with the institutional patterns so that, for instance, they affect the outcomes of planning discussions.
Most studies on intercultural communication focus on misunderstandings and miscommunications. This book demonstrates that also communication without miscommunication can be shown to be intercultural.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Koole, Tom

Thije, Jan D. ten

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1: Immigrant employees in a Dutch institution. Part One: Introduction. 2: Immigration multilingualism and educational advice in the Netherlands. 3: Research methods and corpus. Part Two: Towards a model for the analysis of intercultural communication. 4: Intercultural communication and the concept of culture. 5: The pragmatics of multilingualism. Part Three: Analyses. 6: A pragmatic analysis of educational advising. 7: Different perspectives in reporting. 8: Making plans in interaction. 9: The meaning of institutional key words. 10: The interference of intercultural and institutional positions. 11: Thematising and unthematising racism. 12: Conclusions.