The importance of intercultural communication (IC) as a field of study is beyond question. Its importance is corroborated by the vast body of literature that has built up over the past years, and that continues to grow. Exploring intercultural communication: Language in action is perhaps the latest addition to a growing body of literature that focuses its attention on investigating the interplay between language practice and cultural diversity. It is an undeniably successful attempt to cast light on examining the important role of language in IC. The book is structured around three parts with twelve chapters, followed by effective task commentaries, a glossary of useful key terms, and excellent annotated further readings for each chapter.
The book brings to the fore current or emerging themes in the domain of IC by investigating how IC permeates our everyday life. On the one hand, the book provides an analysis of interactions between people from various cultural and linguistic backgrounds by covering such genres as language school, workplace, business, family, and studying/travelling abroad. On the other hand, it examines everyday interaction to highlight the relationship between language practice and cultural diversity.
The theme for Part 1, ‘Intercultural communication in everyday life’, is to scrutinize the practical challenges and impediments associated with five social settings in which people with different cultural backgrounds establish contact. The five chapters in this section focus on the language classroom, workplace, business, family, and studying/traveling abroad respectively.
Chapter 1 is devoted to the fundamental constructs and theoretical approaches to the role of culture in language classrooms that contribute to guiding the reader toward an understanding of intercultural issues in language teaching and learning. The author reviews several different ways in which culture is handled in multicultural classrooms and offers some strategies to enhance classroom interaction.
Chapter 2 is concerned with workplace interactions where several challenging situations occur. These challenges include structured activities such as meetings and less task-oriented types of speech such as small talk and humor. This chapter demonstrates how employees in a culturally diverse workplace require an understanding of professional and institutional culture, of employees' practices, and of their ways of speaking. These strategies are supplemented with engaging examples and case studies to show how workplace interaction is affected by contextual factors such as power, social distance, genre of activity, and goals of interaction that blend with cultural expectations and norms.
Chapter 3 examines language and cultural issues in two important business activities, namely advertising and negotiation, in which, according to the author, language plays an integral part and provides a major link. Furthermore, it reviews language and communication in other business settings. The case studies provide a valuable tool for the reader to gain a better understanding of the concepts illustrated here.
Chapter 4 sets out to explore two special cases of family situations—namely the migrant family and the intercultural family—where cross cultural differences come into play. According to the author, migrant families and intercultural couples are often at odds over complex intersections between practices, language ideologies, values, and material bases in IC. The chapter provides the reader with an opportunity to explore how a family, as a unit of social organization, lives with differences between its members and how they learn to adjust themselves in the process of discovering and reconciling differences that emerge through their language and interaction. Furthermore, it addresses how people negotiate, stress and minimize differences.
Chapter 5 reviews two potential sites of IC, namely study abroad and tourism, in which people socialize with individuals from another culture. While the former contributes to maximizing intercultural learning through exposure, for tourism, language plays an important role and can enhance tourists' experience of a different culture. In this section Hua presents some of the problems concerning study abroad and tourism. It would have been more useful, however, for the reader if the author had offered solutions to the issues raised with regard to study abroad and tourism earlier in this chapter.
Part 2, ‘Developing intercultural communicative competence’, as the title suggests, maps out strategies for developing successful intercultural communicative competence. The four chapters in this section examine a number of culture-specific ways of communication, investigate conversational interactions among people with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, identify possible causes of misunderstanding in IC, consider factors that may facilitate successful communication, and finally demonstrate skills required for intercultural communicative competence.
Opening chapter 6 with an excellent anecdote, Hua explains several culture-specific ways of communication such as the degree of directness and involvement in conversation, and the distance and space between people. Additionally, the chapter touches upon how directness and indirectness in conversation are negotiated and achieved in different cultures. The author also looks at some notions and models behind these culture-specific ways of communication, namely face-work, rapport, connectedness, and solidarity. It could have been more engaging, however, if Hua had briefly discussed Ervin Goffman's concepts of face and face-work and their roots in the ritual of the social interaction.
Chapter 7 explicates underlying causes of misunderstanding in IC. Central to Hua's concern is the dichotomy often made between ‘misunderstanding’ and ‘nonunderstanding’. The author warns against this and clarifies that not all misunderstandings are caused by different cultural backgrounds; there are other reasons, such as mishearing or misinterpretation of the propositional meaning of certain words. What makes this section, appropriately, understandable for the reader is the use of case studies that illustrate the principles described in the preceding sections.
Chapter 8 identifies key issues concerning a number of practices and strategies among conversational participants so as to achieve communicative efficiency and maintain interpersonal relationships. This section has ample examples to demonstrate what contributes to successful communication. This chapter should be particularly helpful to students who are doing higher degrees and practitioners who may want to develop project proposals.
Chapter 9 moves beyond practices and strategies of meaning negotiations and aims to explore generic abilities and skills required in intercultural communicative competence models, with particular emphasis on foreign language teaching and learning. It sheds light on the pervasiveness and distinctiveness of, and evaluates approaches in, intercultural learning.
Part 3, ‘Studying and researching intercultural communication’, which forms the book's main critique of existing theories, focuses on the major theories, models, and methodological considerations in the study of IC centering on the classic question of the relation between language, culture, and thought, the question of how to define culture, and finally the paradigm- shifting question (‘how does language practice contribute to the construction of intercultural identities’, p. 171) concerning language, interculturality, and identity.
In chapter 10, Hua reviews the Sapir-Whorf theory of language and culture and discusses two versions of it, namely strong and weak. While the strong version assumes that culture through language determines thoughts, the latter posits that language influences thought. The author then examines some relevant issues discussed in the preceding chapters in the light of this classic question.
Chapter 11 draws upon four dominant approaches to the notion of culture pertinent to the domain of IC. The chapter sets out to highlight similarities and differences between these approaches, discuss conflicts within the field, and suggest a way to move forward. In addition, it includes implications that these diverse approaches may have for the study of IC.
Chapter 12 initially provides a brief overview of the multiple dimensions of the construct of identity and examines the link between cultural ethnicity and identity. It also investigates aspects of interculturality, exploring how people employ interactional resources in identification.
If there is a weakness in this book, it might be in the possibility of readers getting lost in the concept of ‘discourse’, for which no definitions are provided. In its broadest sense, discourse analysis is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken, or signed language use or any significant semiotic event. This concept seems challenging to a novice audience with little background knowledge and experience in the field; researchers from the perspective of their own field of studies have identified a wide range of analytical approaches to the study of discourse under the banner of discourse analysis (Stubbe, Lane, Hilder, Vine, Vine, Marra, Holmes & Weatherall Reference Stubbe, Lane, Hilder, Vine, Vine, Marra, Holmes and Weatherall2003). Furthermore, the annotated further reading seems inappropriately placed and would perhaps have been more at home at the end of each chapter.
To sum up, this book makes a fine contribution to the study of intercultural communication. It offers an exhaustive set of extremely detailed instruments that acquaint the novice student and researcher with a good head start in examining intercultural communication by furnishing analytical frameworks and concrete examples that give the student an insight into the mindset of accomplished researchers. Its readership, therefore, transcends the author's intended audience of undergraduate and graduate students.
