Page 421 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

Power and dominance in intercultural communication 399

teacher elicits parts of knowledge from the class in order to ensure that students
maintain involvement and participate in the presentation of new knowledge
(Ehlich and Rehbein 1986: 81–87).
By the time children go to school, they have developed a cultural apparatus
that allows them to manage their lives in the social situations they have en-
countered so far. Once they are at school, they become clients of an institution.
There they encounter teachers, institutional agents with a very different cultural
apparatus. Communication between students and teachers at school is, to a cer-
tain degree, intercultural communication in the narrow sense outlined above,
i.e. it is intercultural communication whenever students and teachers encounter
a problem that is due to a difference in their cultural apparatus.
Within the institution, the onus is on the students to modify – via intercultu-
ral communication in an asymmetrical situation – their cultural apparatus in a
way that they become “proper” clients. The following admonition is a typical
authentic example of this type of intercultural communication:

T[eacher]: People who are wriggling are not looking. (Thwaite 2004: 83)
From the perspective of the institution, students are not expected to use the criti-
cal potential of their cultural apparatus (except for institutionally provided
valves such as school newspapers), but rather its potential for adaptation and
expansion.
This not only comprises the acquisition of, say, punctuality, but also the abil-
ity to manage the client-side of institution-specific interactional patterns such as
the task-solution pattern, the exam-question or the teacher’s presentation with
parts assigned to students. In terms of knowledge management, students’ insti-
tutional survival is virtually guaranteed when they can memorize the linguistic
side of knowledge regarding standard solutions to problems that are not their
own. Kügelgen (1994), an empirically based study of school discourse, paints a
dark picture of what actually arrives in students’ minds apart from mere words
to be uttered at the right time.
Students’ expanded cultural apparatus also comprises a cultural sub-appar-
atus, so to speak, of institutional survival consisting, for instance, of tactical
questions (to pretend interest and thus escape the teacher’s attention for a while)
and maxims (“Cheat where you can but don’t get caught!”) (Ehlich and Rehbein
1977: 66), etc.
To sum up: Communication between agents of an institution and their
clients has – because of their different cultural apparatus – per se an intercultu-
ral dimension whenever a problem occurs that points to these differences. Since
the communicative situation in institutions is asymmetrical, the onus is usually
on the clients to adjust, modify and expand their cultural apparatus to make this
communication work. As we have seen, the very fact of institutionalization of
areas essential to a society’s reproduction may lead to intrinsic contradictions