'If we know about culture it will be easier to work with one another': Developing skills for handling corporate meetings with multinational participation

Angouri, Jo

Abstract

The current international nature of socio-economic activities is reshaping workplace settings and creating the need for large numbers of employees to perform successful communicative acts with a wider range of interactants than in the past, often using a language other than their mother tongue. Against this backdrop much emphasis has been placed on the need for training current and future employees in order to develop their work-related communication skills. In this context, the paper reports on an ongoing study into workplace discourse and its implications for pedagogic practice. I discuss here operationalisations of the concept of culture in pedagogic materials, and focus on the meeting event as presented through texts published in some widely used Business English textbooks in the UK. Special attention is paid to the underlying assumptions about culture and preferred norms for handling meetings which feature multinational participation - as presented by the textbooks but also in relevant academic literature. The discussion also draws on data from multinational companies in Europe. The analysis shows that textbooks often take a macro-level view of culture and treat it as an entity with distinct boundaries. This paper closes by making a case for sociolinguistic research findings to feed back into the language classroom to complement language for specific purposes textbooks for further developing learners' socio-pragmatic skills. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.

Citation

Angouri, J. (2010). 'If we know about culture it will be easier to work with one another': Developing skills for handling corporate meetings with multinational participation. Language and Intercultural Communication, 10(3), 206-224. https://doi.org/10.1080/14708470903348549

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Aug 25, 2010
• Journal: Language and Intercultural Communication
• Print ISSN: 1470-8477
• Electronic ISSN: 1747-759X
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 10
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 206-224
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14708470903348549
• Keywords: workplace discourse, meeting talk, textbooks, intercultural communication, LSP
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/976238
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14708470903348549