Michael Handford

'It's not rocket science': metaphors and idioms in conflictual business meetings

Abstract This study examines the use of metaphors and idioms (MIDs) in two conflictual business encounters from two corpora of spoken business and workplace interactions. As overtly conflictual or aggressive forms of communication are unusual in business encounters, these meetings are anomalous within both corpora. While MIDs have been described as devices employed to develop interpersonal convergence and solidarity in face-to-face conversation (Carter, Language and creativity: The art of common talk, Routledge, 2004), this study examines their use to create the opposite effect—to mark divergence. All the MIDs in the data were identified and categorized according to type (metaphors, formulae, and anomalous collocations) and function (evaluation, intimacy, intensity, and discourse). The results showed that the two meetings contained a higher concentration of MIDs than other comparable nonconflictual encounters in the corpora. The MIDs identified performed similar functions in the two meetings and were used most frequently to express intensity. The intimacy function was used to express divergence more frequently than convergence, and often marked highly conflictual or even rude exchanges in the interaction.

Cultural identities in international, interorganisational meetings: a corpus-informed discourse analysis of indexical we

To date, there have been very few studies employing corpus techniques in the analysis of intercultural interactions. This study analyses the indexing of cultural identities in international, interorganisational meetings. The approach used draws on methods and insights from corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, professional communication, intercultural studies and identity studies. It explores how a statistically significant single item, we, in specialised corpora of authentic professional meetings, signals different identities at different moments in the unfolding discourse. Specifically, two research questions are answered: What cultural identities are explicitly indexed in business meetings through we? What can corpus linguistics contribute to IC studies? While the first question comprises the bulk of the paper, the second question is discussed in the final section, along with limitations of the approach applied here.

The internationalising university: an intercultural endeavour?

There are currently more than four million people worldwide studying in higher education (HE) institutions located outside their country of origin, and numbers are growing (OECD 2013). ‘Internationalisation’ has been framed as the institutional response to this burgeoning phenomenon. International student mobility and HE ‘internationalisation’ more broadly raise many questions of an intercultural nature. What is becoming increasingly clear is that the various manifestations of internationalisation currently operationalised are not in themselves panaceas for institutions seeking to engage positively with the globalising education ‘market’, and that greater numbers of international students or a higher global institutional ranking do not necessarily reflect a higher degree of beneficial intercultural interaction or education. The seven papers in this Special Issue of the JMMD discuss from an intercultural perspective emerging issues and their effects on universities and wider societies related to the phenomenon of internationalistion in HE around the world. The focus for the Special Issue reflects ongoing debates within the emerging field of intercultural communication research which formed the basis of symposia and colloquia at the 43rd British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) Annual Conference (Aberdeen, UK, 2010), the 3rd BAAL Intercultural Communication Special Interest Group Annual Seminar (Newcastle, UK, 2013), and the International Conference on Language and Social Psychology (ICLASP) XIII (Leeuwarden, Netherlands, 2012) and ICLASP XIV (Hawai’i, USA, 2014). For this Special Issue, contributors were asked to address the question of whether the ‘internationalising’ university was an intercultural endeavour. In response, James Jian-Min Sun and Sik Hung Ng investigate the impact of the English language’s growing influence on entry requirements and on universities’ efforts to improve rankings in the People’s Republic of China. Adrian Holliday’s focus is on the extent to which doctoral students in a British University feel that doing a PhD is a particularly ‘Western’ activity, and the impact their experience of study is having on their cultural identity, broadly defined. Helen Spencer-Oatey and Daniel Dauber highlight the importance being placed on intercultural communication and teamworking skills as graduate attributes, and explore student perceptions of the realities of international groupworking in HE in the UK. Lixian Jin and Martin Cortazzi frame the idea of ‘cultures of learning’ as an inclusive and appropriate response to an international learning environment in the UK, and highlight how students (both ‘home’ and ‘international’), staff and HE institutions in general might embrace more internationalised content and learning processes. Margaret Pitts and Catherine Brookes’ paper examines student discourse revealing cultural assumptions and tensions in international exchanges between students in the USA and Singapore, and shows how the mere opportunity for international connection does not in itself bring meaningful intercultural dialogue. Hans Ladegaard’s contribution explores the lack of integration of ‘international’ students on a campus in Hong Kong, and the reasons that lie behind this – characterised as negative outgroup stereotypes and prejudice – which, he argues, can be alleviated through intercultural dialogue which addresses taboos and ethnocentricity. Zhu Hua, Michael Handford and

Framing interculturality: a corpus-based analysis of online promotional discourse of higher education intercultural communication courses

ABSTRACT This paper examines how intercultural communication (ICC) and the notion of culture are framed in on-line promotional discourse of higher education (HE) ICC courses. It analyses a specialised corpus comprised of 14,842 words from 43 course websites of masters programmes in ICC in the UK and the US – internationally, the two largest providers of such programmes. Through combining corpus tools with a ‘situated meaning’ approach, the analysis reveals that while a small number of courses acknowledge cultural ‘complexity’, culture is still very often reduced to an essentialised and static notion, despite growing criticism against such an approach in ICC literature. ICC is valorised as a combination of desirable skills and knowledge conducive to effective communication of different cultural groups and for those working in international arenas. Significant differences between the UK and US courses are identified with regard to the extent of associations with diversity-related social categories. The lack of interpretive, critical, and constructivist positions on culture in promotional discourse is discussed in the context of neoliberal discourse and the current thinking towards professional competences dominant in Britain, North America, and other parts of the world.

The Dynamic Interplay between Language and Social Context in the Language Classroom: Interpersonal Turn Taking for ELF Learners

How important is social context when considering language learning? When comparing cognitive and sociocultural approaches, the former still form the considerable bulk of research into SLA (Zuengler & Miller, 2006; Dornyei, 2009). Nevertheless, several approaches that attempt to account for second language learning from a social perspective have more recently been developed, including those working with Vygotskian sociocultural theory (Lantolf, 2000) and language socialisation (Ochs, 1996). The present study draws on work in language socialisation, specifically that of Ochs (1988, 1996), and also functionally/socially oriented discourse analysis (e.g., Halliday, 1989; Gee, 2011, 2012) to enable learners to achieve their communicative goals through effective manipulation of the social context through discursive choices. It approaches language acquisition in terms of ‘the systematic relationship between the social environment on the one hand, and the functional organisation of language on the other’ (Halliday, 1989, p. 11) and prioritises a sociocultural perspective in the language classroom. As such, while this study contrasts with others explored in the present volume in that it does not draw directly on dynamic systems theory, it shares with DST an interest with change over time (see Dornyei, 2009, p. 111), an acknowledgement of the importance of social and environmental factors, and views language ‘not as a collection of rules and target forms to be acquired, but rather a by-product of communicative processes’ (Ellis cited in Dornyei, 2009, p. 104).