Chapter 1 - Key Concepts in Intercultural Communication

Summary

Scholarship on intercultural communication has emerged out of interdisciplinary research in anthropology, communication studies, education, linguistics, and more recently, applied linguistics. In order to establish a shared understanding of intercultural communication, this chapter clarifies how key concepts such as culture and communication are operationalized in this book. The chapter also presents culture as layered, and of communication as dynamically co-constructed by participants and the social context in which their interaction takes place. Additionally, this chapter introduces prominent models of intercultural communication from a social-scientific perspective, which can offer fruitful points of analysis in second/foreign language pedagogy.