Page 163 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

Intercultural communication and communicative genres 141

The following example illustrates how misinstruction can lead to hypercor-
rection on the level of style and genre. In China, students of German are taught
that Germans are very ‘direct’ themselves and that they prefer ‘directness’ in
others. They are not told, however, what constitutes this peculiar German ‘di-
rectness’ nor when it is to be used. In initial contacts with Germans many Chi-
nese act upon this piece of ‘knowledge’ in order to meet what they assume to be
the expectations of the German addressees. They leave the safe ground of their
own conventions and venture upon the thin ice of German ‘directness’. This was
amply demonstrated by a perusal of letters written by Chinese students and
scholars to German professors (Günthner 1993; Günthner and Luckmann 2001,
2002). Hypercorrection prevailed and produced something whose structural
features were neither a German nor a Chinese genre, but a kind of hybrid genre
whose regular structure bears the mark of an attempted solution of a communi-
cative problem.
Customarily and expectedly, these letters begin with an address. This is fol-
lowed by an apology for ‘imposing’ upon the addressee. This is followed
abruptly by a list of requests and demands. A typical example:

Dear Prof. Dr. Schmidt, 20
Pardon me for troubling you with my problem. My name is Liu Xiaobing. I am work-
ing at the university in Nanjing as a physics teacher. I would like to work for you.
Therefore I need a position in your laboratory. Would you be able to provide this for
me? Unfortunately my scholarship from the Chinese government only lasts for one
year. But I would like to write my dissertation with you. Please be so kind and ar-
range a scholarship for my dissertation. Important research material is difficult to
come by in China. Therefore I need to get some literature from you. Please send the
books to my private address in Nanjing.
Pardon me for my annoyance.
(own translation; S.G.)
This example shows how problematic context-free attributions of seemingly
culture-specific communicative practices can turn out to be. They not only tend
to reproduce stereotypes but may even have severe consequences.
Furthermore, the example reveals that participants in intercultural com-
munication not only stick to their own genre traditions but also use various strat-
egies of adaptation, compromise etc. Thus, new hybrid forms are emerging.
Intercultural communication thus cannot be reduced to the transmission of one’s
own conventions to the situation at hand; intercultural encounters have their
own dynamics and may lead to new forms of communicating (Günthner 1993;
Koole and ten Thije 1994).
New forms emerging in intercultural communication may not necessarily
lead to negative consequences, as in the examples above, where the Chinese stu-
dents often received negative answers from the German professors, or in the
East–West German job interviews, where East German applicants reacted to the