Although misunderstandings as such have been extensively studied, the ways in which problems of understanding are avoided--especially in cross-cultural communication--have so far received limited attention. This article examines over 24 h of private conversation data from seven established, intercultural couples who use lingua franca English as…

This paper addresses the use of videography combined with group interviews, as a way to better understand the informal learnings of 11-12 year old children in cross-cultural encounters during French-German school exchanges. The complete, consistent video data required the researchers to choose the most significant sequences to highlight the…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the mediational role of gesture and body movement/positioning between a teacher and an English language learner in a second-grade classroom. Responding to Thibault's (2011) call for understanding language through whole-body sense making, aspects of gesture and body positioning were analyzed for…

An area of visual communication that might be classified as a "design failure" is the visual presentation of information about "prescription-only medicines" for patients. This information is provided on packaging, leaflets, brochures, labels and websites. The practical issue is that there are problems in convincing patients to…

Gestures unaccompanied by sound risk not being registered by their intended recipient. We chart examples of this in a video recording of a meeting between people with intellectual disabilities and support staff. The recordings reveal that individuals with limited spoken language can, and do, design nonvocal gestures to make intelligible…

Backround: The ability to repair communicative breakdown is an important pragmatic language skill, yet very little is known about it in the population of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Previous investigations have shown that people with ASD, across a variety of ages and language levels, recognized communicative breakdown and…

This paper examines various ways in which communication between patient and doctor can fail, and suggests a framework that will enable researchers to distinguish and analyze the factors involved in the success or failure of verbal communication. (CHK)

The child brings to the classroom a socially conditioned way of behaving, both verbal and nonverbal, which reflects both the maturational process and sociocultural conditioning, and a socially conditioned view of what the norms of the dominant society are and what that society expects of him or her. The school attempts to transmit the cultural…