How to Use the Book

The book is designed to be used as a key textbook and workbook for students on communications and cultural studies courses, or on other courses that have modules to do with intercultural communication, e.g. international business studies courses or teacher and health worker education courses.

This book aims to develop a sensitive approach to culture as a concept. It seeks to undermine generalised notions of culture that students may bring to the issue of intercultural communication. It promotes the idea that people are complex cultural beings and that the use of a thick-brush approach to cultural identity is therefore pernicious to constructive intercultural communication. Cultural reductionism and stereotyping are therefore actively worked against in the book.

Books in the Routledge Applied Linguistics series are ‘flexi-texts’ that you can use to suit your own style of learning. The book Intercultural Communication is divided into three secitions.

Section A - Introduction
Section A sets out key concepts. This is done through presenting contextual examples (scenarios) that raise issues of culture and communication. The section aims to develop a working framework that students can then use and apply to an analysis of intercultural communication

Section B - Extension
Section B introduces students to key texts from important writers and thinkers in the area of intercultural communication. Specific extracts of key texts are reproduced for students to read and key ideas are highlighted related to the key concepts in Section A. Tasks encourage readers to further engage with the ideas in the texts, and to relate these ideas to their own lives and experiences.

Section C - Exploration
Section C realizes the discussions of the first two sections within a series of research tasks, and establishes a methodology for addressing intercultural communication. Basic tools are provided which aim to develop skills for researching and investigating culture and intercultural communication. It is expected that students themselves will work to make their own links between the three sections of the book and students are seen as active theory-builders and testers.

The book can be read like a traditional textbook, straight through from beginning to end. This will take you comprehensively through the broad field of study. However, the book can be read ‘horizontally’ in a hypertext style. To aid you in this there are many cross-references in the text, providing links between sections. You are thus able to pursue a theme or a concept.

The three sections are divided into three overarching themes that link together. These are Identity, Otherization, and Representation. Identity deals with the way in which we all bring with us our own discourses and feelings of culture and negotiate these in communication. Otherization deals with a major hindrance to communication in the way in which we over-generalize, stereotype and reduce the people we communicate with to something different or less than they are. Representation looks at the way in which culture is communicated in society, through the media, professional discourses and everyday language. It focuses on how we need critically to recognize and address the ways in which these representations influence our own perceptions if we are to communicate effectively.