There is a small body of research which shows how intercultural communication is constituted in and through talk-in-interaction, and can be made relevant or irrelevant by interactants on a moment-by-moment basis. Our paper builds on this literature by investigating how cultural assumptions of national food-eating practices are deployed, contested…

One of the key issues that higher education has to face nowadays is how to educate versatile, creative and knowledgeable specialists who are able to work in the modern multicultural environment. The present study was conducted from May to December 2009 in the fourth-largest tertiary education institution in Latvia providing higher education in…

Short-term study abroad programs of less than a semester are becoming increasingly popular among undergraduate students in the United States. However, little research has examined the changes in students' cultural sensitivity through their participation in such programs or what factors may predict growth and improvement in such areas. This study…

Researching the longitudinal development of second language (L2) learners is essential to understanding influences on their success. This 7-year study of oral skills in adult immigrant learners of English as a second language evaluated comprehensibility, fluency, and accentedness in first-language (L1) Mandarin and Slavic language speakers. The…

Being a study abroad student is not all sweetness and light. By definition, study abroad students are faced with acculturative stress (Berry, 2005) by virtue of encountering differences in assumptions, values, and expectations of daily living in their host culture. Add to that the usual challenge of hearing and speaking a different language, and…

A number of schools in the United States currently utilize multiple strategies to attract a large and multicultural high school student population. As in many other states, Maine's high schools have been recruiting international students to add richness and diversity to their educational settings and surrounding communities. Yet there is minimal…

"Pragmatics & Language Learning. Volume 13" examines the organization of second language and multilingual speakers' talk and pragmatic knowledge across a range of naturalistic and experimental activities. Based on data collected among ESL and EFL learners from a variety of backgrounds, the contributions explore the nexus of pragmatic…

The main aim of the present study was to develop EFL teachers' performance at Sana'a secondary schools in the light of their professional and specialist needs. Based on literature review, related studies and a panel of jury members' points of view and English teachers' interview, a list of four needs was proposed and used as the most necessary…

Previous research has shown that learners of English might experience considerable difficulty when giving constructive criticism to peers in instructional settings. Unlike native speakers, they tend to soften their criticism far less frequently while aggravating it far more often, and thus require pedagogical help in this area. The present study…

This study investigates the cross-cultural realization of request patterns. The goal of the study is to compare the realization of requests produced by adult American English speaking learners of Russian (NNS) to that of native speakers of Russian and native speakers of English to identify the similarities and differences between native and…

A major purpose of courses in intercultural communication is often to improve students' ability to perform well in situations with the potential to be both highly enlightening and highly difficult--in multicultural teams. This article reports the results of exercises in which members of a dysfunctional multicultural class were assigned to teams…

Purpose: Reflections on negotiation processes between farmers and scientists in research projects provide insights into issues of participation, power and equity. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how actors chose places to meet, negotiate and represent technologies. Design/methodology/approach: The research involved semi-structured…

The growing need for intercultural literacy in an increasingly interconnected and computer-mediated world contrasts with the dearth of investigation in best practices when designing simulations aimed at improving intercultural communication. Synthetic cultures inspired by real-world cultural traits, problem-based learning, and a social…

International student mobility amongst and between countries has become increasingly common and forms a central feature of the global higher education system. This paper examines the key learning experiences relating to the student mobility component of the Canadian-European Initiative for Health Promotion Advanced Learning (CEIHPAL) project.…

In this article, we describe a programme of qualitative research and interpretive analysis around an approach to foreign language pedagogy that aimed to develop learners' symbolic competence through experience with and examination of the signs in acts of communication. Learners were presented with the problem of visually representing the abstract…