Investigating the Role of Language in the Identity Construction of Scholars: Coming to Terms with Inter-Cultural Communicative Competence

Many people across the globe are today experiencing an era characterised by increasingly dynamic population mobility. It is, consequently, a time where previously held assumptions about individual and group identities, and about the social and political semiotics that shape them, seem inadequate. Languages and cultures are at the heart of what has been termed this "superdiversity". In contemporary superdiverse societies, the question of language poses a particularly difficult challenge, with new cultural realities giving rise to new questions. In in such circumstances, how can linguistic and cultural identities be defined? The future is likely to witness tensions and oppositions between centrifugal and centripetal forces; and tendencies towards globalisation allow some to suggest that culture is becoming increasingly uniform. This book illustrates the narrowness and reductiveness of such suggestions, and underlines the importance of embracing centrifugal forces. Central to this, and to the practices argued for in this book, is the need for greater intercultural awareness on the part of teachers, curriculum planners, teacher educators and, of course, their students. The book explores major hindrances to communication in the way in which we over-generalise, stereotype and reduce the people with whom we communicate to something different or less than they are.

About the Author :
Dr John Wankah Foncha is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Education of the University of Limpopo, South Africa, having received his MA in Linguistics and PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. His research interests include identity, intercultural communication competence, reading and writing pedagogies, teaching English as a second language and text-based approaches to language teaching and learning.Dr Sivakumar Sivasubramaniam is Professor and Head of Language Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, and is a National Research Foundation-rated Researcher in South Africa. He serves as Chief Editor of the Journal of English as an International Language and as Associate Editor of the Asian EFL Journal. His research interests include response-centred reading/writing pedagogies, literature-based language pedagogies, second language advocacy, narratives in language education and text-based approaches to academic and social literacy practices.Dr John Adamson is a Professor at the University of Niigata Prefecture, Japan, having received his EdD from Leicester University, UK. As Chief Editor of the Asian EFL Journal and Managing Editor of its publishing group English Language Education, he is active in editorial work and has established two other journals, the Asian ESP Journal and The Linguistics Journal. He is a co-editor of Innovating EFL Teaching in Asia (2011), Exploring EFL Fluency in Asia (2014), Accepting Alternative Voices in EFL Journal Articles (with Roger Nunn, 2009) and Editorial and Authorial Voices in EFL Academic Publishing (2012).Dr Roger Nunn is Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Communication at the Petroleum Institute in Abu Dhabi. He is a founding member of English Scholars beyond Borders, and Chief Editor of the Asian ESP Journal. He combines a practical teaching background with research into a wide range of language related issues, and recently led a project examining critical reasoning in academic discourse. He has published widely on the academic and pedagogical applications of a holistic, multi-centric international approach to academic competence.