Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach (Language in Society)

The second edition of this lively introduction serves as a guide to the main concepts and problems of intercultural communication. Viewed from within the framework of interactive sociolinguistics associated with Tannen, Gumperz, and others, the authors focus in particular on the discourse of westerners and of Asians, the discourse of men and women, corporate discourse and the discourse of professional organizations, and intergenerational discourse.In this newly revised edition, the first chapter now includes a section that sets out the authors' distinction between cross-cultural communication and intercultural communication. Another section outlines the methodology of ethnography that is the practical basis of the authors' research. In the new final chapter, the authors return to this methodology and show how they and others have been able to use it and this book to do new research in intercultural communication and how this work has been used in conducting training and consultation programs.

While making use of research in pragmatics, discourse analysis, organizational communication, social psychology, and the ethnography of communication, this book presents students, researchers, and practitioners with a comprehensive and unified framework for the analysis of intercultural discourse.