Culture and Identity through English as a Lingua Franca

296 Pages·2015·3.525 MB·English

by  Will Baker

Will Baker
Culture and Identity through English as a Lingua Franca
Developments in English
as a Lingua Franca
Editors
Jennifer Jenkins
Will Baker
Volume 8
Will Baker
Culture and
Identity through
English as a
Lingua Franca
Rethinking Concepts and Goals
in Intercultural Communication
ISBN 978-1-5015-1062-5
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-5015-0214-9
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-0216-3
ISSN 2192-8177
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A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
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detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
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To Jeed, Ben and Katy

Acknowledgements
Firstly, I would like to thank all at DeGruyter Mouton for their support with pub-
lishing this book especially Lara Wysong, Emily Farrell and for encouragement in
the early stages Birgit Sievert.
I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the series editor Jennifer Jenkins whose
guidance from proposal to final manuscript has been invaluable. Furthermore, in
her role as Director of the Centre for Global Englishes at the University of South-
ampton, and as an advisor and colleague throughout my time at the Centre, she
has been very influential in the thinking and evolution of my ideas.
Indeed, the members of the Centre for Global Englishes have been crucial in
shaping the ideas presented in this book, especially through the lively and en-
tertaining seminar series at lunchtimes and afternoons (and often into the pub
afterwards). In particular, I would like to thank Robert Baird and Mariko Kitazawa
whose shared interest in complexity and English as a lingua franca (ELF) resulted
in a joint publication on the subject (Baird, Baker and Kitazawa 2014) which has
been drawn on liberally, with kind permission, in this book. I also need to thank
Haibo Liu for her data on the National English Curriculum in China and Chittima
Sangiamchit and Yusop Boonsuk for their additional data on English use and
policy in Thailand. Furthermore, I am indebted to other colleagues at the Uni-
versity of Southampton for their help and support, especially Julia Hüttner for
listening to my half-formed (possibly half-baked) ideas and offering sound advice
and Rosamond Mitchell who as my PhD supervisor and first head of department
encouraged and supported my interest in the subjects presented here.
I am indebted to the British Council whose ELT Research Award scheme
(2010–2011) funded and made possible the research reported in chapter seven.
I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewer of the manuscript for such
encouraging and constructive feedback. I am also very grateful to Zhu Hua for
permission to reproduce:
Figure 4.1 Alignment and misalignment between self-orientated and ascribed
identities (Zhu 2014: 217).
And also for kindly sharing an early draft of an article on ELF and intercul-
tural communication (Zhu Hua 2015) which has been very useful in writing this
book.
I am very grateful to Michael Byram for permission to reproduce:
Figure 5.1 Byram’s (1997: 73) model of intercultural communicative com-
petence.
viii   Acknowledgements
Finally, I would like to thank the many researchers, too numerous to mention, at
the annual International ELF conferences who have helped form the thinking in
this book and also to the research participants who gave up their time and con-
stitute so much of the content of this book.
Table of contents

Acknowledgements vii

Chapter 1. Introduction 1

1.1 English as a lingua franca (ELF) 5

1.2 O verview of the book 12

Chapter 2. Intercultural communication and ELF 15

2.1 C haracterising intercultural communication 17

2.2 Critical approaches to intercultural communication 21

2.2.1 Cross-cultural versus intercultural communication 21

2.2.2 Critiques of terminology in intercultural communication 24

2.2.3 C ritiques of approaches in intercultural communication 25

2.2.4 Alternative approaches to intercultural communication 28
2.3 Points of convergence and conflict between intercultural

communication and ELF research 33
2.3.1 P oints of misunderstanding and divergence between intercultural

communication and ELF research 34
2.3.2 P oints of convergence between intercultural communication and

ELF research 39

2.4 C onclusion 43

Chapter 3. Understanding culture through ELF 45

3.1 C onceptions of culture 47

3.1.1 The development of the idea of culture 47

3.1.2 C ulture as product 50

3.1.3 C ulture as discourse 54

3.1.4 Culture as practice 56

3.1.5 Culture as ideology 58

3.2 Culture, nation and globalisation 61

3.2.1 Characterisations of nation 61

3.2.2 Characterisations of globalisation 63

3.2.3 Global flows 65

3.3 Culture and complexity 67
3.3.1 Culture and complexity in the social sciences and applied

linguistics 71

3.4 C ulture and language 76
x   Table of contents

3.4.1 L inguistic relativity 76

3.4.2 Linguaculture and the language-culture nexus 79

3.4.3 Language and culture as emergent complex systems 85

3.5 Culture in ELF research 88

3.6 L anguage and culture through ELF 99

3.7 Conclusion 101

Chapter 4. Culture and identity through English as a lingua franca 105

4.1 Characterising identity 108

4.1.1 S ubjectivity and identity 108

4.1.2 The relevance of identity 108

4.1.3 I dentity and language 110

4.1.4 Identity, difference and others 112

4.2 Cultural identity 114

4.2.1 Cultural identity, ethnicity and race 114

4.2.2 Cultural identity and nationality 115

4.2.3 Cultural identity and globalisation 118

4.2.4 Cultural identity and interculturality 120

4.3 Identity in ELF research 122

4.4 Conclusion 131
Chapter 5. Re-examining intercultural communicative competence: intercultural

awareness 133

5.1 Communicative competence 134

5.1.1 T he foundations of communicative competence 134

5.1.2 R ethinking communicative competence 140

5.2 I ntercultural competence 145

5.3 I ntercultural communicative competence 148

5.4 Alternatives to intercultural communicative competence 156

5.5 Intercultural awareness (ICA) 163

5.6 Conclusion 172
Chapter 6. ELF and intercultural awareness: implications for English language

teaching 174
6.1 Culture, the intercultural and ELF in ELT: critiquing current

approaches 175
6.2 Alternative approaches to culture, the intercultural and ELF

in ELT 182

6.2.1 Intercultural education and ELT 183

6.2.2 Global Englishes, ELF and interculturality in ELT 187