Adrian Holliday: Intercultural communication, part 2

This video, with Professor Adrian Holliday, is an excerpt from a two-hour workshop filmed at the University of Guanajuato, Mexico.

One of the themes is about two language students, Beata and Kira who are faced with foreign cultural content in a textbook. In the workshop Adrian uses his grammar of culture to discuss and make sense of the different issues. Below is the second video in the series together with Professor Holliday's accompanying text. 

Watch part 2 'Positioning yourself' below

Particular social & political structures

There are certainly national structures which make us different to each other. However, individuals can draw on these as resources in different ways at different times. When Beata contrasts her culture with that of English she is actually calling up a particular image of ‘her culture’ to help her position herself against the textbook. There is a bit of politics going on. She feels pushed into a corner. She feels that the textbook wants her to be Western like the people in the dialogue when she feels nothing like them. When we feel threatened by new cultural experience we build extreme theories about who ‘we’ are and who ‘they’ are – ideal images of Self and Other – about how our ‘culture’ and ‘values’ is different. Notice the inverted commas here.

Personal trajectories

In reality, things are not so extreme. As we travel through life we are quite creative with culture and cross all sorts of boundaries. An Australian woman enjoys Japanese literature; and an Indian actor plays American women. In Guanajuato in Mexico I heard the band playing the Beatles’ music. I was surprised that it wasn’t Mexican music; but why should I be?

Beata is not stuck in one culture and learning English in another; but she doesn’t know this.

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Watch the other parts of this presentation.

Part 1: Beata's anxiety

Part 3: Finding positive connections

Part 4: Building on existing cultural experience

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