Intercultural communication and language teaching (P02597)

? Credit Points : 20 ? SCQF Level : 11 ? Acronym : EDU-P-P02597

This course is suitable for both practising teachers and for non-teachers who have an interest in analysing how language is used in everyday communication in a variety of cultures, and in building aspects of findings about real language into their language classes.

The course will cover social rules and functions, the political implications, and the structures of interaction. More precisely, the approaches to analysis covered are:

• Introduction: globalisation and the development of the digital media and its effect on communication. World English or Englishes
• Speech act theory and cooperative principle
• Conversation analysis and classroom exchange structure
• Corpus linguistics and electronic discourse
• Introducing theories of inter-cultural comparison representations of problematic intercultural encounters
• Politeness principle and critical discourse analysis
• Key cultural dimensions: power distance, individualism and collectivism, masculinity or femininity, uncertainty avoidance and long-term or short-term orientation
• Analysing the significance of non-verbal communication in varying cultural contexts: personal distance, body language, facial and bodily gestures, pitch and intonation in the spoken language
• Culture and language teaching

There are two overarching themes that draw all the approaches together:

• the intercultural comparison: we will read about and discuss findings across cultures
• the application to language teaching: we will discuss how much the findings can be applied in the language classroom and what techniques can be used

Entry Requirements

? Costs : Students are required to purchase the core texts marked in bold.

Subject Areas

Home subject area

Education, (The Moray House School of Education, Schedule C)

Delivery Information

? Normal year taken : Postgraduate

? Delivery Period : Semester 2 (Blocks 3-4)

? Contact Teaching Time : 3 hour(s) per week for 10 weeks

First Class Information

Date	Start	End	Room	Area	Additional Information
14/01/2009	10:00	13:00

Summary of Intended Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of the course, participants will have demonstrated an ability to:

• apply a variety of approaches to language analysis to samples of authentic English
• critically compare the merits of different approaches
• identify the intercultural aspects of approaches to language analysis
• discuss the broader issues of communication between cultures
• apply approaches to language analysis to cultures other than that of UK
• evaluate the usefulness of applying such approaches to language teaching
• evaluate the role of language analysis in producing materials for teaching
• evaluate current research issues in pragmatics/language teaching methodology

Assessment Information

Assessment will consist of a folio of coursework (30%) together with a longer assignment (70%).

Folio of coursework
This is worth 30% of the course mark, and the total number of words is 1,500. Participants will put together a folio of texts, analysis and discussion developed in the workshops.

Assignment

This is worth 70% of the course mark, and the total number of words is 2500. The assignment addresses the issues in greater depth, supporting the discussion by reference to the reading, taking a critical position vis-à-vis approaches, theories, methodological debates, as well as evaluating relevant current research issues.