Page 78 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

56 Madeleine Brabant, Bernadette Watson and Cindy Gallois

By critiquing these two social-psychological traditions, we highlight the fol-
lowing issues: (1) they address different aspects of intercultural interactions; (2)
by themselves they are too limited; (3) theories that combine the two (e.g. Com-
munication Accommodation Theory: see Gallois, Ogay and Giles 2005) provide
powerful models for predicting and explaining communication success and fail-
ure, and (4) the perspective of psychology in understanding intercultural com-
munication complements those of related disciplines.

1.1. Distinctive features of the psychological perspective
From its earliest days, psychology emphasized individual behaviour. Even
social psychology, which took as its core territory the study of group and larger
processes, still starts with the individual as its unit of analysis and moves thence
to explore the impact of other people and larger social variables on individuals.
Not surprisingly, then, the interest of social psychologists in intercultural com-
munication has tended to focus on individuals’ attitudes and behaviour, with
larger forces being encapsulated in terms of their impact on individual speakers
and listeners. For intercultural communication, this has had consequences both
for theory and methodology.

1.1.1. Theory

1.1.1.1. Focus on motivation
Giles (1973) argued for the inclusion of motivation as a driving factor in all
intergroup communication, rather than constructing speakers as (he argued)
sociolinguistic automata. Since then, social psychologists have emphasized the
motivational drivers in intercultural encounters. For example, Giles noted the
capacity of speakers to change sociolinguistic style depending upon whether
they liked and admired their interlocutor (or disliked the other person); this was
the initial basis for Speech Accommodation Theory. Likewise, Lambert et al.
(1960) noted the impact of language spoken (French or English) on listeners’
evaluations of speakers, and argued that this process was anchored in the atti-
tudes triggered by language. Psychological work in intercultural communi-
cation has always been based on the assumption that the attitudes, interactional
goals, and motives of interlocutors determine their choice of language and non-
verbal behaviour (with an emphasis on variables that are partly or fully under
voluntary control), as well as their evaluation of it.