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This article aims to explicate the connection between discourse analysis and interculturality in intercultural-communication education. Although communication researchers and students have been using discourse analysis as a method to investigate conversations in intercultural situations for decades, interculturality as a concept has been largely untapped in analysis and applications. Drawing from interdisciplinary insights, this article will discuss how the concept of interculturality and the lens of discourse analysis contribute to the study and teaching of intercultural communication.
Post-colonialism, globalization, and transnationalism have brought about the unprecedented dense co-existence of heterogeneity within and without national borders (Piller, 2011). To set out to equip the current and future generations to live and work in a new reality that “culture is in a constant state of flux and cross-fertilisation” (Piller, 2011, p. 70) amidst all kinds of diversities at the interpersonal, communal, societal, and international levels, watchful educators are modifying the focus of intercultural education. Academics in a number of fields of study, namely, intercultural-communication studies, multicultural education, sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, and anthropology, have challenged the notion of “culture” as a fixed boundary, a static environment, or a constraining force. The emerging vision of “the social and cultural mutations linked to the increasing complexity and heterogenization of the social fabric” is urging a “rethinking of cultural knowledge beyond the form of a knowledge of cultures” (Abdallah-Pretceille, 2006, p. 478). In order to remain relevant, intercultural-communication education is shifting away from drilling on “banal nationalism” (Piller, 2011, p. 72) and moving toward nurturing competencies required for the “sphere of interculturality” (Kramsch, 1996, p. 205).
Interculturality is a concept particularly helpful for instructors and learners of intercultural communication. It concerns “the encounter of people from different countries, bearing in mind that they do not just represent a ‘culture’ but also different social classes, genders, generations, and religions that intersect” (Dervin, 2016, p. 58). In terms of communication, interculturality is “a situationally emergent and co-constructed phenomenon that relies both on relatively definable cultural norms and models as well as continually evolving features” (Keckskes, 2011, p. 67). In other words, interculturality entails interactions between two or more participants of different backgrounds and each has an influence on how the other(s) think, behave, perform, and communicate (Dervin, 2016). It is an evolving, transactional intercultural communication process that involves gives and takes from all interactants.
The notion of interculturality has shifted our attention from the cultural to the intercultural, from the national to the situational. Such a shift is derived from the line of thinking that “it is not possible to fix the nature of particular ‘cultures’ and then work out how best to help people to communicate between them” (Holliday, 2011, p. 15). Each of us belongs to many cultures, and the combinations of cultural influences vary from person to person. In other words, “cultural realities are individually constructed around individual circumstances, and can transcend national culture description and boundaries” (Holliday 2011, p. 61).
Thus, the goal of intercultural education in today’s world of endless and limitless cultural mixing is shifting from communicative competence (Canale and Swain, 1980) to intercultural communicative competence (Bryam, 2009), which denotes the ability “to mediate/interpret the values, beliefs and behaviors” of oneself and of others and to “stand on the bridge or indeed be the bridge” among individuals in intercultural encounters (p.12). To be the bridge in spheres of interculturality, we should no longer drill on the use of pragmatics norms in a particular language, a particular culture, or a particular country. Rather, “intercultures are ad hoc creations” (Keckskes, 2011, p. 67). They are created in a communicative process in which cultural norms and models brought into the interaction from prior experience of interlocutors blend with features created ad hoc in a synergetic way.