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Editors’ introduction 239

Editors’ introduction

Section 3 explores intercultural communication issues within different sectors
or aspects of life. A number of themes re-occur across the chapters:
– the contribution of research from other disciplines;
– the relative paucity of applied linguistic research;
– misunderstandings and awkward moments in intercultural communication;
– the relative impact of ‘difference’ in intercultural communication;
– intercultural communication training;
– intercultural communication and discrimination.
Chapter 12, by Roberts, focuses on the healthcare sector. At the beginning of
the chapter, Roberts picks up the theme of Section 1 – that intercultural com-
munication is informed by research from different disciplines – and explains the
contribution made by medical anthropology and sociology research to our
understanding of intercultural communication within the health sector. She then
turns to the findings that have emerged from interactional sociolinguistic re-
search. With the help of authentic examples, she analyses how conversational
inferences are made and how conversational involvement is sustained in ethni-
cally and linguistically heterogeneous communities. She illustrates how com-
municative misunderstandings and awkward moments can occur in such con-
texts, and considers the sources of such problems. Towards the end of the
chapter, Roberts briefly explains how oral assessments of medical practitioners
may have discriminatory outcomes for certain groups of ethnic minority candi-
dates, and reports the positive contribution that applied linguistic research has
made here – that many medical practitioners are now looking at oral examin-
ations more from a discourse perspective and acknowledge that the interaction
is jointly constructed by both candidate and examiner. Nevertheless, Roberts
mentions several times that on the whole there is a dearth of applied linguistic
research on intercultural communication in the health sector.
This is a theme that is reiterated by Franklin in chapter 13, in his consider-
ation of intercultural issues in international business and management. He ex-
plains that most intercultural training in the European business sector is based
on cross-national contrastive data of fundamental values and behavioural orien-
tations, and he argues that this is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons:
– such differences are not necessarily noticed by managers in their intercultu-
ral interactions (i.e. difference is not equivalent to difficulty);
– some difficulties that the managers experience are not predicted or ex-
plained by such differences;
– the comparative data on values and behavioural orientations provide trainers
with few insights into how people can improve their intercultural communi-
cation.