Course aims:

1. Introduce students to concepts, theories, principles and skills for understanding communication between persons from different cultural backgrounds and in different cultural contexts
2. Provide students with an opportunity to reflect on how cultural context influences identity construction and negotiation in intercultural communication
3. Explore the features of effective communication with people from different cultural backgrounds and in diverse contexts, in the broad framework of “native” and “other” cultures, as well in the more fluid and dynamic contexts of intercultural communication

Course Entry Requirements:

-

Course contents:

C1. Communication and applied linguistics C2. Culture, communication, context and power C3. Language, identity and intercultural communication C4. Interculturality and intercultural pragmatics C5. Conceptualizing intercultural (communicative) competence and intercultural citizenship C6. Intercultural rhetoric and intercultural communication C7. Nonverbal communication: the messages of emotion, action, space, and silence C8. Speech acts, facework and politeness: relationship-building across cultures C9. Gender, language, identity, and intercultural communication C10. Cultural identity, representation and othering C11. Other language learning, identity and intercultural communication in contexts of conflict C12. Intercultural contact, hybridity, and third space C13. Beyond cultural categories: communication, adaptation and transformation C14. Acculturating intergroup vitalities, accommodation and contact

Teaching methods:

Lecture, Conversation, Cooperative learning, Debate, Team-based learning, Active learning systems, Active listening, Problem solving.

Learning outcomes:

1. By the end of the course students will be able to appropriately use of the conceptual and methodological schemata of humanities for a cross-disciplinary investigation of cultural events and situations 2. By the end of the course students will be able to describe the research methods specific to a cross-disciplinary investigation of cultural events and situations 3. By the end of the course students will be able to explain in a pluridisciplinary context complex cultural phenomena 4. By the end of the course students will be able to apply the optimum method for the study of a complex cultural phenomenon and to argument their choice

Learning outcomes verification and assessment criteria:

Lecture, Conversation, Cooperative learning, Debate, Team-based learning, Active learning systems, Active listening, Problem solving

Recommended reading:

Kramsch, C., Language and culture, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998,
Scollon, R., Scollon, S. B. K., & Jones, R. H., Intercultural communication: a discourse approach (3rd ed.), Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, 2012,
Byram, M., Teaching and assessing intercultural communicative competence, Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, 1997,