Experiences with the data, analysis, and results in the Finnish Contrastive Discourse Analysis Project (1985-1988) at the University of Oulu are reported. The purpose of the project was to describe the conversational skills of advanced Finnish speakers of English, and especially to determine the level of their social competence or their ability to…

In this era of rapid globalization of business opportunities, many managers face the need to communicate with foreign counterparts who do not speak English. The solution, in many cases, is to use an interpreter. Interpreters, however, may make mistakes, and irritation, embarrassment and even major problems may arise from errors in translation.…

Cultural diversity in the classroom provides the opportunity for children to learn about the customs, clothes, and languages of other countries. Various art forms offer a vehicle for boys and girls to communicate in nonverbal play. A "two-faced" happy-sad puppet provides a nonverbal means for very young or nonnative speaking children to indicate…

This paper discusses the problems surrounding intercultural business communication as well as approaches to teaching college level business students appropriate communication skills for intercultural settings. Considered are the classification of countries by cultural context, i.e. how large a role culture, social values, and traditional social…

Elementary preservice teachers in institutions certified by the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) in the southern U.S. completed the Cultural Diversity Awareness Inventory. Results indicated that subjects exhibited cultural sensitivity in the areas of the culturally diverse family, cross-cultural communication,…

This book addresses the patterns of school failure that are often faced by subordinated minority groups in the United States by presenting a socioacademic framework based on the notion that all groups can have comparable access to quality schooling, can realize comparable participation in the schooling, and can derive comparable education benefits…

Materials for a workshop on vocational education for limited-English-proficient (LEP) students are gathered. An annotated outline presents the content and sequence of the workshop, which reviews the problems and suggests solutions to working with students who have a restricted understanding of the language of instruction. Issues addressed include…

This 26-item annotated bibliography is composed of materials for teaching Italian language arts and content area material at the secondary and elementary levels. For each of the entries, the following information is indicated: target language, educational level, material type, content area, title, date of publication, author/developer, publisher…

An interlingual communication support system that shows semantic matches and mismatches among languages being used for any transaction is discussed. The system uses a thesaurus approach to the meaning structure of language, which is hierarchical, but uses a cross-hierarchical approach to access different meanings for selection of the appropriate…

Communication between individuals from different cultures can fail simply because of the culturally-oriented assumptions that speakers make about one another's responses. The higher rate of discipline referrals among African-American males involves behavior that is related to cultural and communicative issues. In an effort to build their…

Writing in English in New Zealand today is being invigorated by the strength of the Maori oral tradition: its use of metaphor, its expression of Maori values. It is the Maori tradition that is the source of a unique New Zealand identity, which emerges through the language and literature of Aotearoa (New Zealand), the use of strongly rooted Maori…

The textbuilding conventions of courtship narratives told by older women of contrasting ethnic minorities are examined. Listener responses to the stories indicate that storytelling conventions are not shared or understood by all listeners. It is proposed that membership in different speech communities based on factors such as age, sex, ethnicity,…

While not an instructional panacea, peer involvement in second language learning can provide a rich and productive supplement to the second language classroom experience. It casts learners and teachers into new roles that may lead to a variety of benefits, enriching the total educational and social environment. The systematic use of peer teachers…

A course in German for business on the college level must engage in cross-cultural training as well as teach specialized vocabulary and conversational German for international business dealings. Materials and methods for such a course are described. Some generally untapped sources for material on corporate culture that are suited for use in the…

Suggestions are provided for teachers wishing to develop a course segment on intercultural business communication, based on a hypothetical need for an instructional module in Japanese business culture. It is suggested that the teacher first read related materials and seek out resource people who have lived and worked in the culture. Module…