Intercultural communication- Critical Review Assignment

In the excerpt from Ron Scollon book, Intercultural communication: A

discourse approach, published in 2011, he discusses the meaning of culture and how
the way that we perceive things and the knowledge that we have about the world
affects the way we communicate. This piece encourages one to consider all
interactions as intercultural communications, leading to a better understanding of
what people mean by taking in consideration people's background and personal
definition of culture (Scollon, Ron). Scollon’s ideas are complemented by Jan
Blommaert´s article, Citizenship, Language and Superdiversity (Blommaert, Jan), and
Kathleen Heugh´s paper, Mobility, migration and sustainability: re-figuring
languages in diversity (Heugh, Kathleen), who both talk about the emergence of
super-diversity due to increased migration, the evolution of cultures, and the effect
that this has on our communication.
Scollon begins his piece with an example of intercultural communication that
works to illustrate how culture and intercultural communication is often not what we
think it is and in fact, much more complex. He then explains that there is often
confusion upon the definition of culture, due to the fact that people have different
ideas about what it is. He concludes that many views of culture are useful in social
life and accurate to a certain degree, and so it is best to view culture as a tool for
thinking called a heuristic. The only problem with this is view of culture that while it
can help us clear up our ideas on this concept, it might lead us down the path of
“lumping”,”binarism”, or bias if we are not careful, since there tends to be the
question of where to stop dividing people up?
Scollon then continues to develop the idea of culture by saying that the very
essence of culture is not something one owns, but rather something one does, meaning
that culture is a verb. He elaborates on this idea with the ideas of Brian Street, who
says that literacy is more than understanding text, but rather being fluent in any type
of communication that allows you to interact with certain people and particular
groups. The author then continues to explain how just like when we do anything, we
must have “cultural tools” available to us in order to “do” culture. These cultural tools
can be physical, chopsticks for example, or abstract, an example is language, and
carries their own meanings. These cultural tools imply something about the people
who use them depending on how they are used and the way people interpret their use.
These tools also evolve and are part of “toolkits” that are composed of many tools that
work together and originate from the same place. Scallon calls these tool kits,
discourse systems. To illustrate these concepts one could use the example of a person
who is part of the student culture and also Latin American culture. They have in their
backpack certain tools to help them such as textbooks, but also tools as the knowledge
of where the best food is on campus. They wouldn't use their tool of being a native
Spanish speaker in an Adelaide based university, unless they came in contact with
someone who was also part of Latin American culture and possibly had the same
toolkit with Spanish as language they knew. The idea that these tools hold their own
meanings could be demonstrated that when this student speaks Spanish others could
think she is showing off or trying to hide something from those who don't understand,
when in fact she is just trying to connect with someone through this discourse system
that she has not accessed as much as she would like.
Once he has established the reader with a context on the basis of culture,
Scollon carries on to apply these concepts in examining the way we communicate
interculturally. Communication as a whole, as Scollon explains, is far from simple
because “people often don’t say what they mean, and they often don't mean what they
say”(Scollon R, 2011). Scollon explains these using Stephen Levinson's four points
on communication. First, Language is ambiguous by nature, meaning that on all levels
there are different meanings to things based on one's knowledge of the world. Second,
that due to these ambitious, we must draw inferences about meaning. Third, Levinson
points out that these inferences tend to be fixed, as in we already have “marked”
assumptions about what certain people mean when they say something, and lastly,
that these inferences happen very quickly.
Scollon concludes this piece by stating how we can never really express what
we mean since we cannot control the meaning to things, in the sense that something
can mean different things to different people. He also explains how English is the
place of increased interdiscourse miscommunication since it is becoming a global
language, and to be careful with what implication culture has upon our
communication.
In the article by Jan Blommaert she discusses the way that increased migration
and the development of technology is affecting the way we socialize and even
creating super-diversity. In correlation with Ron Scollon’s text, since people are
moving more places and connecting in newer ways we see his ideas of
communication increase due to the super-diversity that Blommaert discusses. She also
talks about a concept that closely connects with Scollon’s ideas of the complexity of
culture when she talks about “registers”. She explains that the way that we are able to
interact with different people from different niches and identities, or cultures, as
Scollon would define it, is due to these registers and the facility in which we switch
between these manners of being determines our communicative competence. Scollon’s
ideas of culture are complimented by these ideas in that they both acknowledge that
there is more cultural implication in our daily communications than what people
usually perceive (Blommaert,Jan).
The article by Kathleen Heugh develops on the topic of diversity due to
increased migration as a point of conflict and increased political importance. She
expresses, using many examples, the way that super-diversity and sustainable
diversity are affecting many cultures in Australia and around the world. The Idea that
increased diversity is affecting the relationships of cultures is a theme that correlates
with Scollon´s piece. His article could be a tool to improving or simply understanding
what happens when two cultures communicate, which is the topic arising in many of
the examples in Heughs article. If there is a greater understanding and awareness,
universally, of the way miscommunication occurs when it has to do with cultural
differences maybe there would be more effort or empathy to when these situations do
occur.
Ron Scollon’s work published in 2011, Intercultural communication: A
discourse approach, gives insight to the true complexity behind culture and the way
that we communicate. He makes points in a very clear manner that allows the
audience to assess their own identity and knowledge of the world and possibly apply
his cultural views on the way one communicates. The super diversity that Jan
Blommaert and Kathleen Heugh discuss in their articles is a factor that ties closely
with the increased amount of interdiscourse communication that occurs, and therefore
fortifies Ron Scollon´s ideas about culture and communication.

References:

Blommaeret, J 2013, “Citizenship, language, and superdiversity: towards

complexity”, Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 12:3, pp 193-196

Heugh, K 2013, Mobility, migration and sustainability: re-figuring languages in

diversity, De Gruyter, Mounton.

Scollon, R, Scollon, S & Jones, RH 2011, Intercultural communication: A discourse

approach, 3rd edn, Blackwell, Oxford, pp 1-24.