Page 25 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

Introduction 3

2. What are the ‘problems’ that need to be addressed?

Needless to say, intercultural communication can proceed very smoothly and
successfully, and conversely, intracultural communication can be fraught with
difficulties. Moreover, not every misunderstanding in intercultural encounters
relates to cultural backgrounds. Sometimes social conflicts can be ‘cultural-
ized’, in that the notion of culture is used as an excuse to mask political or econ-
omic conflicts or asymmetries. For example, in many Western countries, children
with migration backgrounds are low achievers at school (see Scherr and Thiel-
mann in this volume), and this often has more to do with insufficient language
training programmes than with cultural problems.
Many social issues remain largely covert within a society, because they are
regarded as normal within that culture. These include, for example, the fact that
women and foreigners in many fields less often advance to the centre of power,
and that they rarely reach the executive suites anywhere. Admission is not ex-
plicitly denied to them; rather, they are impeded in access through a low evalu-
ation of their habitus (Bourdieu 1984), to which speech behaviour belongs. In
the evaluation of a communication-stylistic habitus, conflicts of historicity and
interests come into play. Not all social institutions necessarily value equality of
opportunity. Culture is a system of diversities and tensions, and includes differ-
ences of power, differences in access to legitimate means of expressing power,
and struggles over these means. This is especially true of the media. In the USA,
for example, the state has almost completely withdrawn from Afro-American
ghettos; in France the state likewise only very sporadically intervenes in big-
city immigrant ghettos (to name only two examples). The schools in such dis-
tricts scarcely deserve the name (Bourdieu 1997). The ghetto-worlds form their
own subsystems, with a low standard of living, higher criminality, much viol-
ence and their own interactional norms and networks of connections. It makes
little sense simply to confront such situations with a plea for recognition of di-
versity, because underlying many interethnic communication conflicts there are
dynamics of inequality that are inscribed in the specific social order of that cul-
ture, with very different consequences for the participants.
So, then, what are the frequent ‘real-world problems’ in intercultural com-
munication that the field, and hence this Handbook, need to address? The
chapters in this volume deal with a very wide range of issues, including the fol-
lowing:
– Misunderstandings and the impact of cultural factors on the making of
meaning;
– Conflict and the impact of cultural factors on relationship management and
development;
– Gatekeeping and discrimination;
– The impact of unequal power relations on communication;