Developing an Action Theory for Intercultural Communication: Evidence, Applications and Politics
| Dates: | 14 November 2013 |
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| Times: | 14:00 - 15:20 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Who is it for: | Current University students, General public, University staff |
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| Speaker: | Adrian Holliday |
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This seminar shall consider how reconstructed ethnographic narratives contribute to a social action theory for intercultural communication. The narratives demonstrate a level and type of evidence which is hard to collect in traditional forms of research. They show the everyday details of how people construct culture, subscribe to different discourses of culture, and represent underlying universal cultural processes which can be applied to any ‘local’ or ‘foreign’ setting. Some of the discourses are however prejudicial and destructive, and show how we can all fall into ‘culture’ traps of the type which underpin world conflict.
Speaker
Adrian Holliday
Role: Professor of Applied Linguistics
Organisation: Canterbury Christ Church University
Biography: Adrian Holliday directs doctoral research in the critical sociology of TESOL and intercultural communication. His PhD is from Lancaster University. He taught and developed materials in technical English at the British Council in Iran in the 1970s and then at Lancaster University. In the 1980s he was a founder of Higher Languages Institute at Damascus University, specialising in English for science and medicine, and was then involved in a national university curriculum project located at CDELT, Ain Shams University, Cairo. He has written about appropriate methodology, native-speakerism, qualitative research methods and intercultural communication. His recent book, Understanding Intercultural Communication: Negotiating A Grammar of Culture (Routledge, 2013) has been applied to how English language students can build on their own cultural backgrounds, identities and experience to take full ownership of English.
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G7
Humanities Bridgeford Street
Manchester
