The internet affords its users an unprecedented level of contact with people from other cultural and social groups. It is often assumed that because of this it can facilitate intercultural communication and reduce the perceived distance between cultures. This article will examine this assumption by exploring two questions. Firstly, do the…

US foreign language education is often presented as an opportunity to foster intercultural communication; yet, curricula frequently build borders between an English-speaking "we" and a non-English-speaking "they". Little is known, however, about how language students make sense of their changing linguistic identities as they encounter users of the…

The use of English as a global lingua franca (ELF) raises challenges concerning how we understand the relationship between languages and cultures in intercultural communication. In the dynamic contexts of ELF this relationship needs to be viewed as situated and emergent entailing a new approach to understanding intercultural competence in…

This paper deals with transeditors' innovative subjectivity in facilitating intercultural communication from both the journalistic and the translational perspectives. By applying the basic notions of Douglas Robinson's 'dialogical' mode to the analysis of the translated news carried by "The Global Times" that relates to the Summer Olympic Games…

The article analyses ethnographic data from the study of the home literacy practices of two immigrant families, a Lebanese-Muslim and a Chinese family. It explores the experiences of the immigrant families as they blend the pedagogical practices and behaviours of their own cultures with those of the mainstream culture to ensure academic success in…

This paper examines the connection between translation and narratives of history, with particular attention to Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" and its Spanish version, "La otra historia de los Estados Unidos". It is argued that translation interacts with history in many ways: translation is fundamental to history and, in…

This paper explores the apparent contradiction between the valuing and promoting of diverse literacies in most UK HEIs, and the discursive construction of spoken native-speaker English as the medium of good grades and prestige academic knowledge. During group interviews on their experiences of university internationalisation, 38 undergraduate…

This study explores the ways in which English-speaking immigrants negotiate new linguistic and cultural landscapes. I examine immigration and intercultural communication in a more complex and nuanced manner by researching the ways in which expatriates or "high-end" immigrants relocate and interact with host cultures. I conducted 11 months of…

There is a small body of research which shows how intercultural communication is constituted in and through talk-in-interaction, and can be made relevant or irrelevant by interactants on a moment-by-moment basis. Our paper builds on this literature by investigating how cultural assumptions of national food-eating practices are deployed, contested…

Through scrutinizing three simulated negotiation cases of Chinese MBA students in an American business school, the study illustrates how Chinese face ideology functioned to orient and complicate the students' (pseudo-)business communications with Americans. The students' bone-deep sensitivity to maintaining harmony and interrelationships in the…

This paper explores difficulties students may experience in giving opinions in class, drawing on data gleaned from the administration of questionnaires and interviews to Japanese and British students. The results show that the students from both groups regard highly of giving and exchanging opinions in class; however, there is a marked difference…

Since the rise of the Internet, the act of border crossing has become a pursuit that must necessarily be conceptualized in both real and virtual terms. By using theories connected to virtual communities, new technologies, fan cultures and tourism, this paper seeks to show that the culturally productive activities of a transnational virtual…

This paper deals with Chinglish as Chinese-English translations found on public bilingual signage in the People's Republic of China. After a short review of the existing literature, this study attempts to establish a typology of Chinglish with corpus-based research. Additionally, the corpus serves for geographical and statistical analysis. This…

This article looks at a year-long network-based exchange between two groups of student-teachers in Spain and the USA, who were involved in various network-based collaborative activities as part of their teaching education. Their online interaction was facilitated through diverse communicative modes such as Skype, Moodle, Voicethread and Second…

This article proposes to investigate the role played by material goods in the transnational experience. Previous research has shown that the movement of people across the world comes with a corollary of cultural flows which find their expression in multiple ways. This article looks more specifically at the kind of commodities that international…