Page 422 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

400 Winfried Thielmann

the institution can only partially overcome: Knowledge acquired at school can-
not have the same quality as knowledge acquired through the individual, inter-
est-driven solution of an authentic problem, even though pedagogical refine-
ment of, say, the task–solution pattern may give students the illusion that they
have done so. While the institutional agents have developed routines to at least
partially overcome the institution’s inherent contradictions on their part, clients
have to absorb the interactional consequences of these contradictions into their
cultural apparatus.
Of course, these issues can be discussed in the terms of power and domi-
nance. Students are in the teacher’s domain of power (Ehlich and Rehbein 1977:
22), they have to do – within the institutional limits, of course – what the teacher
wants. Students and teachers are at the bottom of a hierarchy topped by, say, a
minister – a hierarchy that, frequently in mysterious ways, decides on the con-
tent of what is being taught. Power is also – somehow – embodied in the ideo-
logical knowledge (i.e. a representation of society’s structure that is inadequate
but necessary for the society’s reproduction as it is [Ehlich and Rehbein 1986:
167–168]) schools have to pass on by virtue of being schools.
I hope that I have been able to demonstrate, however, that it is the structure
and dynamics of institutions themselves that require the most crucial – and often
painful – changes on the part of the individual. And institutions are something
no complex society can do without.

3. Asymmetrical intercultural communication in a broader sense

In this section I shall examine three very different authentic examples of asym-
metrical intercultural communication in a broader sense, i.e. with actants be-
longing to or deriving from different societies.

3.1. Ethnocentrism – the failure of intercultural communication in prison
The particular asymmetries of legal institutions and their impact on communi-
cation have for some time been in the focus of linguists’ attention (Hoffmann
[1989] offers a collection of mostly empirically based studies from various per-
spectives). Aspects investigated include discourse types and strategies in the
court room (Hoffmann 1983, 2002), the impact of class on legal proceedings
(Wodak 1985), and problems of understanding resulting from the disfunctional-
ity of discourse types within the institution (Hoffmann 1980). Koerfer’s study of
interpreter-mediated discourse in the court room (1994) deals explicitly with
intercultural communication in the broader sense (for an account of the state of
research in this area see Schröder 2000 and also Eades and Meierkord in this
volume).