Negotiating Intercultural Border Crossings: How People from Diverse Cultural and Linguistic Backgrounds Negotiate Communication and Establish Relations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There has been a wealth of studies from a variety of disciplines that explore the complex relations between language and culture. However, many of these investigations tend to focus disproportionately on how cultural differences often contribute to misunderstanding, communication breakdowns and failures. Indeed, it can be argued that the problematic nature of communication among individuals from different cultural background has turned intercultural communication research into a “celebration of miscommunication” (Sarangi & Roberts 1993). The present study seeks to bring out the need to move in the direction of paying more attention to communication successes. This is not to underestimate the potential challenges and difficulties that might arise in intercultural encounters; but rather to narrow the gap between the things that go right and things that go wrong. As this study will attempt to illustrate, success in communication is “by far, the most natural and common state-of-affairs” (Kelly, Elliot & Fant 2001).This research analyzes naturally occurring audio-recorded data collected from a 12-week ethnographic study of an employment preparation program for Canadian immigrants where English is used as a common language. Research participants consist of teachers and adult students who come from different national and ethnic origins. Findings illustrate how group members subvert institutional classroom discourse, challenge (im) politeness conventions and create new rules for negotiating meaning while at the same time maintaining solidarity and harmony. As Blommaert (1998) argues, when members of different cultures meet, “people shift into a medium which is no one's property,” and “cultural conventions get sacrificed in a split second.” BLOMMAERT, J. (1998) Different approaches to intercultural communication: a critical survey. Lernen und Arbeiten in einer international vernetzten und multikulturellen Gesellschaft, Expertentagung. University of Bremen.KELLY, M., ELLIOT, I., FANT, L (eds.) Third Level, third space: Intercultural communication and language in European Higher Education. Bern, Peter Lang.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.019 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".