Becoming Interculturally Competent Through Education and Training: 18 - Brossura

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1847691625 ISBN 13: 9781847691620

Casa editrice: Multilingual Matters Ltd, 2009

Riassunto

The development of intercultural competence is the avowed purpose of teachers/trainers in commercial training and further and higher education, and yet the approaches are often seen as different and even in opposition. This book shows that there is complementarity in ‘education’ and ‘training’ in theory and in practice. The first group of chapters focuses on analysis of intercultural experience and the competence needed to be successful in that experience. The following chapters describe the practice of courses in both commercial and educational contexts where it becomes evident that ‘education’ and ‘training’ are indeed complementary without denying the tensions which exist and the expectations different learner groups may have. This book is thus not simply another discussion of the theory of interculturality but a juxtaposition of theory and practice to the benefit of both.

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Informazioni sugli autori

Anwei Feng is Reader in education at University of Wales, Bangor and has research interests in intercultural studies and bilingualism in education.

Mike Byram is Professor Emeritus in Education at the University of Durham with research interest in policy and practice in intercultural education and language teaching.

Mike Fleming is Professor of Education at Durham University with research interests in drama and arts education as well as intercultural education.

Anwei Feng is Reader in education at University of Wales, Bangor and has research interests in intercultural studies and bilingualism in education.Mike Byram is Professor Emeritus in Education at the University of Durham with research interest in policy and practice in intercultural education and language teaching.Mike Fleming is Professor of Education at Durham University with research interests in drama and arts education as well as intercultural education.

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Becoming Interculturally Competent through Education and Training

By Anwei Feng, Mike Byram, Mike Fleming

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2009 Anwei Feng, Mike Byram, Mike Fleming and the authors of individual chapters
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84769-162-0

Contents

About the Authors, vii, 
Foreword, xi, 
Adrian Holliday, 
Foreword, xv, 
Anne Davidson-Lund, 
Introduction Mike Fleming, 1, 
Part 1: Investigations of Intercultural Encounters and Learning, 
1 Cultures of Organisations Meet Ethno-linguistic Cultures: Narratives in Job Interviews Celia Roberts, 15, 
2 Exporting the Multiple Market Experience and the SME Intercultural Paradigm Terry Mughan, 32, 
3 Evolving Intercultural Identity During Living and Studying Abroad: Five Mexican Women Graduate Students Phyllis Ryan, 53, 
4 Becoming Interculturally Competent in a Third Space Anwei Feng, 71, 
Part 2: Reflections on Teaching and Learning Programmes, 
5 A Critical Perspective on Teaching Intercultural Competence in a Management Department Gavin Jack, 95, 
6 Applying the Principles: Instruments for Intercultural Business Training Barry Tomalin, 115, 
7 Intercultural Teacher: A Case Study of a Course Ulla Lundgren, 132, 
8 Using 'Human Global Positioning System' as a Navigation Tool to the Hidden Dimension of Culture Claudia Finkbeiner, 151, 
9 Professional Training: Creating Intercultural Space in Multi-ethnic Workplaces Catharine Arakelian, 174, 
10 The Pragmatics of Intercultural Competence in Education and Training: A Cross-national Experiment on 'Diversity Management' Manuela Guilherme, Evelyne Glaser and María del Carmen Mendez Garcia, 193, 
Afterword Mike Byram, 211, 
Index, 214, 

CHAPTER 1

Cultures of Organisations Meet Ethno-linguistic Cultures: Narratives in Job Interviews

CELIA ROBERTS

What power, what interests wrap this local world so tight that it feels like the natural order of things to its inhabitants? Agar, 2000

Introduction

Traditionally, 'culture' has been understood in terms of belonging and otherness as if people felt part of one group and so separate from another. The global flows of people into increasingly multilingual cities have been matched by a critique of this cultural absolutism. In cities such as London 'hyper-diversity' (Kyambi, 2005) requires groups to work and interact together – to find ways of being intercultural, simply to get things done. In these settings, interculturality is not an ideal to be worked towards but a 'muddling through', shot through, often, with stresses and misunderstandings. Besides ethno-linguistic cultural practices there are organisational ones. Recent studies of the discourses of organisations have shown that this 'culture' is changing as the interests of organisations change. This chapter looks at how the British job interview is a prime site for seeing this cultural change at work and its impact on migrants to the UK who are caught between togetherness and otherness as they become more settled in this country. In particular, I focus on narratives in the job interview since they are so central to identity construction. Examples from real job interviews will illustrate narratives at work.

Theoretical Backdrop

Interculturality in the context of institutional encounters will be looked at from three perspectives.

(1) Language and cultural processes

Talk cannot be unpicked from cultural processes. As Agar says 'language and culture are wired in together' (Agar, 1991) in what we can call communicative style. Ethnographic evidence suggests how difficult it is for individuals who move to new linguistic/cultural environments to transform some aspects of how they interact, however fluent they become in the new language. Those features of communicative style that are hardest to shift usually have to do with self and stance – how to present yourself to others and how to align with them. Indeed, whether people should try to make these changes is questionable. Sociolinguistic work on how culture enters into talk-in-interaction (Gumperz, 1982, 1996; House et al., 2003) looks at how rhetoric, pragmatics and metapragmatics and politeness convey intention and speaker stance. When speakers take a longer turn to tell a story, give an explanation or make a request, the persuadability of talk depends crucially upon the presentation of self in performance and how information is conveyed to make it processable.

Judgements of speakers by listeners in potentially intercultural situations (not all encounters where people are from different cultural backgrounds are intercultural, Auer (1998)) depend on what linguistic ideologies are brought to the interaction. Whether these are conscious or not (Silverstein, 1992), they legitimate social domination (Bourdieu, 1991) through a process of 'symbolic valorisation' whereby certain languages (or types of language) index a certain moral worth (Blommaert, 2003; Irvine & Gal, 2000; Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994). This 'often makes discrimination on linguistic grounds publicly acceptable whereas corresponding ethnic or racial discrimination is not' (Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994: 62). In gatekeeping settings such as the job interview, the asymmetrical relationship between the interviewer and candidate means that marked cultural differences in communicative style and misunderstandings feed into linguistic ideologies and so shape the context of the interaction.

(2) Institutional and organisational cultures

The interview demands certain modes of speaking and certain ways of being from the candidate. It is governed by institutional discourses that control how the interviewer and candidate can speak (Bourdieu, 1991; Thornborrow, 2002), and which, according to Iedema (2003), have in recent years become increasingly 'textualised' and 'normalised' in the post-bureaucratic organisation. As Auer and Kern (2000) point out, the interview is not solely concerned with the reaching of mutual understanding through communication; it is also the site of the production and maintenance of institutional and social order (Makitalo & Saljo, 2002; Mumby, 1988), where the boundary between those who belong in the organisation and those who do not is repeatedly demarcated. In some cases, the task of communication can become overridden by the task of producing and maintaining institutionality.

In most organisations, control over the interaction and validation of its outcomes is achieved by templates for narrative structure and follow-on questions, and a written record of the interview that is converted into marks out of 10 for each question, and so a mathematically quantifiable result. This type of homogenised, replicable interviewing practice requires the candidate to be bureaucratically processable (Iedema, 1999: 63), to construct a simplified, coherent narrative 'version' of themselves (Heydon, 2005; Linde, 1993) which the interviewer can evaluate, score on a scale of 1–10, and note down on a pre-structured form. To meet this requirement may be a particularly difficult task for those candidates 'born abroad' who must 'manipulate their experience – inevitably messy, complicated and confusing – to provide a straight, simple narrative reality' (Jacquemet, 2005: 200; see also Maryns, 2005).

The rules of interview interaction, as with other institutional discourses, are unwritten, and conveyed through subtle contextualisation cues and tacit markers of changes in footing and discursive mode (Goffman, 1974; Gumperz, 1982; Scheuer, 2001). As Bourdieu writes, to understand these institutional rules 'also means to understand without having to be told, to read between the lines' (Bourdieu, 1991: 158). In order to overcome this barrier, candidates need linguistic capital (Bourdieu, 1991). This capital consists of resources, developed over time, to both present oneself and make appropriate inferences from other speakers in particular institutional settings. It is a process of socialisation rather than something that can be taught. In the context of the job interview, linguistic capital includes the ability to synthesise more institutional modes of discourse – more analytic, discreet and euphemised ways of talking – with more personal modes where the candidate engages with the interviewer as a social being and reveals aspects of their 'real personality'.

As well as the wider institutional discourses that constitute job interviews, there are the cultural imperatives of the 'new work order' (Gee et al., 1996). Organisations are now flatter, with less hierarchical management and more responsibility given to relatively low-level workers who are expected to manage themselves in self-organising teams. They are also expected to be flexible and manage the kind of organisational change that is now routine in many sectors of industry and public services. This new work order has affected the job interview. It is now organised around 'competency frameworks' and candidates are expected to talk about their team working competence and their capacity to be flexible and so on. In low-level jobs these competencies are assessed through asking candidates to give narratives of their experience.

(3) Narratives and narrative structure in the job interview

As Makitalo and Saljo (2002) argue, genre-based activities such as interviews invoke specific traditions of argumentation, reasoning and categorisation in order to accomplish interaction and construct certain kinds of subject positions. Over time they form patterns that are sedimented into fixed and obligatory communicative means that become central to the official interview in different organisations, the knowledge it transmits, and the social reality that it constructs. As has been demonstrated by Maryns (2005), Jacquemet (2005) and Kerekes (2003), when an interviewee's narrative responses do not conform to institutional expectations, they are often dismissed as incorrect, untrustworthy or irrelevant.

In one of our major research sites, interviewers were trained to elicit a generic pattern or narrative structure that corresponded closely to the classic narrative structure as set out by Labov (1972: 363). The six-part structure proposed by Labov, and often cited by narrative theorists since, consists of an abstract and orientation, followed by complicating action, evaluation, result or resolution and finally a coda. The extract on 'questioning techniques' shown below is taken from guidelines given to interviewers in one of our research sites, and outlines how a form of Labovian narrative should be elicited by interviewers. It advises that the type of answer interviewers are looking for should, first, lay out the situation described (or the Labovian 'abstract'), then the task that the candidate has to do (orientation), followed by their action (complication), and then the result of the events (resolution, conclusion and evaluation).

In this document, the Labovian narrative structure, which is unconsciously reproduced, is conflated with a deductive argumentative structure – which flags up the main points to be made at the outset of the turn at talk, and follows this with evidence, and then a conclusion that links the claims and evidence. In this model, and in the document quoted above, 'good evidence' is acquired by 'broadly identifying a situation' and then 'drilling down to the finer detail'. Indeed, 'the funnel' image stands in an iconic relationship to the 'standard' narrative and deductive linear rhetorical style. The funnelling model also places a strong emphasis on the need for action and personalisation in narratives – so that the 'task' and 'action', or complication, of the narrative are identified for the interviewer by reference to what that candidate's task and action were. The underlying assumptions evident in the statement that the elicitation of a preexisting 'full story' provides the best evidence of the candidate's attitudes and suitability have their origins in the field of psychology where, as Bamberg argues, 'interviews are considered to be "disclosures" of the inner world of the interviewee, granting entrance for the trained clinician into mind, soul or emotional interiors of the interviewee' (Bamburg, 2006: 139).

This rhetorical model is presented as culturally normal, universally rational. However, rhetorical features such as deductive argumentation, levels of personalisation and the amount and position of action and contextual information in narrative are culturally specific (Auer, 1998; Chafe, 1980; Fitzgerald, 2003; Tannen, 1989). These factors may mean that even if candidates are conforming to the required structure, this may not be recognised by the interviewer. So, there are two potential problems for interviewers' processing of candidates' narratives. First, that the candidates may be employing a 'non-standard' narrative structure. (The extent to which there is a western narrative structure has been challenged but there is no space to discuss this here.) Second, candidates may produce narratives that fit into the Labovian paradigm, but these are misread by interviewers because they are masked by unexpected rhetorical styles.

The conflation of narrative structure and rhetorical features (such as personalisation and deductive argumentation) in the above training diagram may mean that interviewers' prompts and readings of candidate responses could confuse these different requirements. For example, they might not recognise a candidate's description of a complicating action as such, because it is not sufficiently personalised. For example, in our data there were two candidates from former communist states (Poland and Kerala), who repeatedly framed their answers in terms of what 'we' did or what a good worker 'should' do, rather structuring their answer around personal agency. This led to repeated misunderstandings, failure of interviewers to take up their narratives, frequent interruptions of their narratives and rephrasing of questions. These more impersonal discourses are also found in the job interviews with candidates from former East Germany (Auer & Kerns, 2000; Birkner, 2004) and are a good example of ethno-linguistic differences resulting from wider sociopolitical influences.

Data

The costs to the candidate of (perceived) failure to adhere to the narratological and rhetorical requirements of the interview are illustrated in the extract below, taken from an interview between a Filipino candidate, Luis, and his Nigerian interviewer, Abeni, for a manual delivery post.

The preconceptions that the interviewer has about the candidate's ability to provide the requisite narrative structure in this first question of the interview are evident in her slow speech and segmented and stretched vowels (L3–11), and the way in which she specifically demarcates the opening structure and content required. Here, she identifies the name of the company and number of teammates as details, which provide a suitable description of the 'situation', and the candidate's role as the opening of a complication, or 'task-action' section. The interviewer was not so specific in outlining a required response with other interview candidates, who were White British or shared her ethnicity. Abeni also does not tolerate any pauses from Luis, for example his pause after her question in line 5 occasions her further explanations, and when Luis pauses at line 31, she immediately attempts to intervene with a further question. This evidence that Abeni's lack of confi dence in Luis leads to the repeated rephrasing of questions is here corroborated by her comment to the researchers that she quickly judged Luis's communication skills to be poor, that she frequently saw Filipino candidates whom she perceived as having poor communication skills and failed them on these grounds. However, the interviewer could not specify much beyond this about what the sources of these communication issues were. This chapter argues that, in this case at least, they could be partly the result of the repeated hyperexplanation (Erickson & Shultz, 1982), hypercueing, closed questions and interruption, which were employed by the interviewer as strategies to encourage the candidate to conform to specifi c rhetorical requirements.

Abeni repeatedly cuts into Luis' responses in an attempt to make his speech conform to the narrative style she has been trained to look for (L7, L17, L28, L32, L34, L39, L47, L55). She uses interruption, closed questions concerning trivial details and statements summarising his speech; or 'formulations' (Heydon, 2005) as strategies of control and containment. Throughout the interview, the interviewer 'translates' Luis' answers with summary statements before writing them down – thus enacting the process of translating a non-member of the organisation's speech into bureaucratically processable language. Many of these interventions are specifically related to stages in the narrative structure that she has been trained to elicit, and that has become, through routinisation, linked to specifi c content, and therefore more rigidly demarcated. For example, her prompts at lines 17 and 28 seek to elicit contextual information that establishes the 'situation' – in particular, the name of the employer and the number of people in the team. The prompts at lines 34, 39 and 47 seek to elicit 'task'- or 'action'-related information that demonstrates his particular role and achievements. By line 55, the interviewer is already seeking a 'result' or conclusion in terms of the favoured points of this work, before a narrative about team work has even been elicited. This question cuts into an attempted introduction of a new topic by Luis (L52–54) concerning his understanding of the physical and motivational demands of the job, which the interviewer does not sanction. Luis' contribution here is in fact a recycling of a topic which the interviewer introduced just before the extract shown above, in a segment in which she described the physical demands of the job and asked Luis if he understood these, before cutting into his response. Luis' return to this topic was, however, described by the interviewer as 'irrelevant' in post-interview feedback, as it came in the context of the new topic of team working.

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Multilingual Matters Ltd
• Data di pubblicazione: 2009
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1847691625
• ISBN 13: 9781847691620
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 215
• Redattore: Feng Anwei, Byram Mike, Fleming Mike
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile