Page 420 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

398 Winfried Thielmann

Helga (five years old,
looking into the fridge): Mum, where’s the juice?
Mother: It’s still on the table where you left it.

Helga has a need and tries to use her own resources to locate the item that fulfils
the need. But she encounters an obstacle. She can categorize this obstacle as a
specific knowledge deficit (“where”) within what she already knows (“that the
juice must be somewhere”). She also knows that her mother usually knows
where things are. She asks her mother a question, and her mother supplies the
knowledge element Helga needs. This exchange of words will have conse-
quences in extralinguistic reality: juice will be consumed.
The question-answer-pattern (Ehlich and Rehbein 1979) is a societal prob-
lem solution for the purpose of knowledge management the child has already
learned. At school, however, she will encounter an unfamiliar usage of this pat-
tern: It is usually the teachers who ask questions, and they do not do so because
they want to know something, but because they want to know if one knows.
Helga will have to make the transition from a child to a student within an insti-
tution and will have to learn how to handle an institutional transformation of the
question-answer pattern that serves a completely different kind of knowledge
management. She will have to modify and expand her cultural apparatus.

2.3. Intercultural communication in a narrow sense: power and dominance
within intercultural communication at school
School is a cultural apparatus turned institution: Schools exist in societies that –
to ensure their reproduction – need to pass on a complex ensemble of standard
problem solutions to the next generation (Ehlich and Rehbein 1986: 11, Scherr
in this volume). Because of this very purpose, schools suffer from an inherent
contradiction. They have to pass on standard solutions to problems that are
not problematic for their clientele. As Ehlich and Rehbein demonstrate (1986:
11–13), the core of problem-solving consists of an interest-driven lack of under-
standing, the productive bafflement arising from a blockage of an action path.
Schools, however, have to pass on a great number of standard problem solutions
very quickly. Because of this, they have to:
a) leave out crucial stages of the actual problem-solving process (especially
the stage of productive bafflement)
b) as a consequence of a), abstract from the “reality out here” and generally
pass on knowledge through language only.
To overcome these inherent contradictions, schools have developed specific
solutions, for instance the task-solution pattern (Ehlich and Rehbein 1986: 14)
and the teacher’s presentation with parts assigned to students, during which the