Cultural Interfaces in Academic Setting and Beyond

267 Pages·2014·3.614 MB·English

by  Andrzej Łyda, Krystyna Warchał

Cultural Interfaces
in Academic Setting and Beyond

Uniwersytet Śląski
Katowice
2
3

Cultural Interfaces
in Academic Setting and Beyond

Ed. by Krystyna Warchał and Andrzej Łyda

Uniwersytet Śląski
Katowice
4

ISBN:

Druk:
5

Contents

Introduction
Krystyna Warchał, Andrzej Łyda ........................................................... 9

Section I: Multilingual Setting .......................................................... 17

Multilingualism and Foreign Language Learning: Some Terminological and
Methodological Issues
Teresa Maria Włosowicz ...................................................................... 19

Academic Discourse and Self-efficacy in Diverse Settings
Beata Webb .......................................................................................... 35

Reading to Learn at the Academic Level: A Study of EFL Readers’ Strategies
Halina Chodkiewicz ............................................................................... 51

Section II: Academic Genres ............................................................. 69

A Contrastive Genre-based Analysis of Research Article Introductions and
Discussions in English and Polish Languages and Its Pedagogical Implications
Ewa Donesch-Jeżo ................................................................................ 71

Hedges in Undergraduate Writing: Czech and German Students Compared
Martina Malášková ................................................................................ 91
6
The Way to Abstraction. The X’s Way Construction in Academic Discourse
Konrad Szcześniak ................................................................................ 105

Preparing Students for the Delivery of Poster Presentations in English
Aleksandra Łuczak ................................................................................ 119

Mission Statement: The Common Core of Business and Academic Corporate
Culture
Piotr Mamet ........................................................................................ 137

When a Linguist Dies... Academe in Obituaries
Gabriela Cichy ....................................................................................... 155

The Epistemic Dimension of Attitudinal Meanings Expressed by Polish and
English Writers of Letters to the Editor
Tatiana Szczygłowska ............................................................................ 169

Section III: Building Up the Academic Community ............................. 191

Building up a Community of Users of English as a Lingua Franca for Academic
Purposes in a Polish-Ukrainian Intercultural Project
Anna Niżegorodcew ............................................................................... 193

Polish-Finnish Intercultural Academic Cooperation
Liliana Szczuka-Dorna ............................................................................ 205

Raising Intercultural Awareness of Monolingual EFL Students in an Interna-
tional Educational Project: Challenges and Possibilities of the ABC’s Model
Ewa Bandura .......................................................................................... 231
7
Section IV: Academic Peripheries ....................................................... 243

The Meaning Loss and Meaning Modification in Polish-English and English-
Polish Translation of Official Documents
Edyta Źrałka ............................................................................................ 245

No Name, No Horse. Putting a Bridle on Cultural and Linguistic Differences in
Translation of the Names of Horse Breeds, Strains and Types for the English-
Polish Language Pair
Eleonora Pawłowicz ............................................................................... 257
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9
Introduction
Krystyna Warchał and Andrzej Łyda

University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland
1. Cultural academic interfaces: Introductory remarks
This volume, entitled Cultural Interfaces in Academic Setting and Beyond,
comprises fifteen articles, which share a focus on the issue of culture and cul-
ture contact in academia and in academic and professional dialogue. We take
a broad view of culture as “the distinctive ways of living, thinking and behav-
ing” of any group of people identified with reference to a geographical loca-
tion, as in, e.g., Finnish culture, a selected prominent feature, as in student
culture, or shared interests, values and practices, as in academic culture
(Goddard, 2005:67). Viewed in this way, culture is not only a necessary ele-
ment of the background against which academic communication takes place
but an active component of the ongoing discourse reflected in such fea-
tures as the terminology used, the repertoire of available genres and their
preferred linguistic realisation, epistemic judgments, and the amount and
type of evaluative language, to name but a few.
A half-century of research has shown that members of different cultures
may construe a communicative situation – be it an academic lecture, job in-
terview, or student essay – in their own, culture-specific ways, set their goals
differently, and apply different rhetorical strategies to achieve these goals
(see, e.g., Kaplan, 1966, 1987; Clyne 1987a; Mauranen 1993a,b; Duszak 1994;
Čmejrková, 1996; Čmejrková and Daneš, 1997; Vassileva, 1997; Martin-
Martin and Burgess, 2004; Fløttum et al., 2006; Siepmann, 2006; Vold, 2006;
Mur Dueñas, 2008; and contributions to Suomela-Salmi and Dervin, 2009,
Arabski and Wojtaszek, 2011, and Łyda and Warchał, 2014) and that these
culture- and language-based predispositions often influence speakers’ lin-
guistics choices in other cultural and language contexts (see, e.g., Clyne,
1987b, 1994; contributions to Connor and Kaplan, 1987 and Belcher and
Braine, 1995; Connor, 1996; Ädel, 2006). The present volume continues this
line of research offering some implications as to how to better understand
the existing differences in the context of intercultural and cross-cultural
communication — including communicating research results, teaching on
academic level and translation — and, in some cases, prepare language us-
10
ers for a more effective dialogue in L2 or in an additional language and a
more rewarding cooperation.
The term “interfaces” used in the title is not coincidental. It draws atten-
tion to the fact that speaking of cultural contact we are not thinking of cul-
tures as isolated, hermetic objects separated by clearly defined borders
which at some points must meet but rather as interacting entities which grow
and evolve in each other’s presence. It implies a certain freedom and ease in
the exchange of information, a shared code in which this exchange can pro-
ceed, multidirectionality of influence, and perhaps even a common territory,
a place where they interlock and merge. From our perspective of academic
and academy-related settings, culture contact is thus not an episode or oc-
currence but a dynamic and productive process which stimulates academic
dialogue.
2. Contributions to the book
This volume is organised into four sections: the first devoted to the problem
of multilingual setting of academic activities, the second dealing with various
aspects of academic genres, the third moving the discussion to intercultural
academic projects, and the fourth one sending the reader to the peripheries
of academic discourse and even beyond it.
The first section after this introduction, Multilingual Setting, groups three
papers. In the opening paper Maria Teresa Włosowicz undertakes an analysis
of the existing terminology in the fields of second language acquisition and
foreign language learning as well as multilingualism. The importance of the
analysis for academic discourse theoreticians and practitioners lies in the au-
thor’s attempt to clarify terminological inconsistencies that seem to have
arisen with the introduction of such terms as bilingualism, multilingualism,
the third language, English as an additional language, and finally English as a
lingua franca. Reviewing recent innovations in this area Włosowicz does not
confine herself to a critical discussion of English terms but investigates termi-
nological resources in other languages thus pointing to conceptual differ-
ences in formally equivalent expressions. Her conclusion is that the choice of
terminology and methodology should be relevant to the purpose of a particu-
lar study.
In her contribution to this volume Beata Webb examines the self-efficacy
of university students in Australia with the major focus of her research put on
self-efficacy associated to academic discourse. Taking into account the
students’ diversity resulting from the high degree of internationalisation of
the Australian education, she demonstrates the impact of students’ linguistic