The present paper appeared as a result of the authors’ involvement in the process of writing and the trial run of the Intercultural Studies for Language Teachers: a postgraduate distance learning course run by the British Council, Sofia and the Teacher Training Institute, Sofia. Being authors of the Media unit on this course, as well as practising teachers, and convinced that a language cannot be taught separately from the cultural values underlying it, we would like to share our experience in teaching culturally significant issues through analysis of the mass media and more precisely, the press. The relationship between face-to-face, mass and intercultural communication will be discussed with special attention paid to introducing an analysis of press representations by decoding layout and identifying potential stereotyping. Apart from being a reflection of certain national, ethnic, social cultures and so on, they are tools used by newspapers in the communication process with their audiences. If they can be decoded they can also be a way of understanding both home and target cultures and thus develop intercultural communication skills needed for understanding the contemporary globalising world.

Globalisation

As the end of the 20^th C was marked by crucial changes to contemporary societies leading to the opposition of modernity and postmodernity, it is inevitable that sociologists and culturalists will be focusing on the interrelation between postmodernity and globalisation at the dawn of the new millennium. The latter process has dramatically affected political, economic, social and cultural interdependence within the world. The global economy, reflecting political change, has resulted in increased consumerism and sociology has shifted its emphasis more onto issues of identity and ethnicity.

As a result culture, in the light of postmodern ideas, has also undergone renewed examination. On the one hand, there is a tendency for national cultures to be eroded at the expense of the creation of a homogeneous global culture and this decline is being accompanied by the emerging of cultures of hybridity which in part substitute them. On the other hand, national identities (and local cultures) seem to be strengthened in an attempt to resist globalisation. Depending on the perspective there are differing definitions of culture. In a wider sense it is defined by sociologists as “the way of life” of a society, or in a more specific definition, interpreted as “comprising the shared meanings and symbols which people use to convey meaning” (see Abbot 1998, p.7-9). According to Bauman (in Abbot 1998), culture is also seen as an “artificial social order, which is continually being reproduced” Therefore those who break the codes also break the rules and are often subjected to hostility.

In order to overcome the danger of this hostility among cultures (e.g. national cultures, ‘small’ and ‘big’ cultures, group cultures) and to prevent it from expanding, we should be aware of the cultural differences resulting from changes to contemporary societies. The increasing importance and the interrelations of the mass media for the shaping of contemporary global culture and the increase in intercultural communication it will bring, will be the focus of the present paper.

From a sociologist’s point of view modernity and postmodernity put different emphases on culture. In a modern society there was a clear distinction between high and mass culture whereas postmodern societies are characterized by a fragmentation of cultural boundaries and blurred differences between them. The triumph of global culture has led to the development of new forms such as cyberculture and management culture, showing the hybrid nature of culture today and why an interdisciplinary response is necessary.

Although historically, intercultural communication has been more closely linked to fields such as anthropology, sociolinguistics, pragmatics or discourse analysis rather than to humanistic disciplines like semiotics, hermeneutics or cultural studies, during the last decade intercultural communication studies have drawn to a notable extent on cultural studies from the work of authors like Byram (1998), Kramsch (1993) and Valdes (1986).

Communication and intercultural communication

Speaking in general terms, communication is related to people’s intrinsic need to be in contact with others. When communication takes place between representatives of different cultures it is termed intercultural communication. According to Porter and Samovar (1994: 7), intercultural communication is the process of interaction between people from different cultures and occurs whenever a message produced in one culture must be processed in another. But intercultural communication is more than just trying to communicate with foreigners. It is a multidisciplinary field which has as much relevance in trying to understand, and overcome, the barriers of communication between different people and different groups within the same country or within large organisations.

Processes of globalisation influence our daily lives, while many people cross national borders for the purpose of study, work, business, or simply entertainment. Intercultural communication becomes an integral part their routine and that is why it is important to prepare our students for successful communication with other cultures. Knowing a language is no longer enough, while equipping students with knowledge of another society may prove insufficient too, as no society is in a static condition with changes to beliefs, patterns of behaviour and the meanings attributed to them (Byram 1997: 15). It is far more beneficial for learners to be taught how to find out about other cultures and how to decode the meaning of realia from them. Such an analysis, in Byram’s words, can then become comparative by shifting “attention back on their own practices, beliefs and identities” (Byram 1997: 15) which should lead to a deeper understanding of the home culture.

There are as many different opportunities for developing cultural skills, as there are different sources of culturally valid information. However, owing to limitations of space and time, we have decided to focus on the press and how it can be analysed and used to develop skills for successful intercultural communication.

Aspects of Mass Communication

Face-to face communication is the type we experience most often, characterised by speech, a need to send out/ receive a message in which signs and code should be meaningful to both sender and receiver, there is direct feedback from the recipient, and the whole is comprehended through the social experience of the culture that has formed the ‘readers’. This type of communication has always been practised, however more recently we have been exposed to another type, namely mass communication. This is a product of the ‘culture of mediation’ (O’Sullivan et al. [1] 1994: 13) not involving face-to-face contact, nor bound to a specific place. In it the media, as a reflection of both the commercial and technological development of human societies (O’Sullivan et al. 1994: 13), have been playing an increasingly important role since the 19^th C. Although it shares a lot of common characteristics with face-to-face communication, it has its own specific features as can be seen in the table below. 

 

(authors’ table)

Representation through layout and the issue of stereotyping

The media today make it possible for the boundaries of our own immediate cultures to expand, in terms of time and locality, as news is brought to us about events all over the world. The representation of news however is always culturally loaded, or in other words it “embodies their authors’ way of experiencing and interpreting the world” (Murphy-Lejeune, Cain & Kramsch 1996: 52). Thus it makes it important that students can decode representations in media texts. As it has been put by media specialists: “representation is the process of putting into concrete forms (i.e. different signifiers), an abstract ideological concept so you can look out for representations of women, workers, Wales; or the family, love, war; or of individualism, industry, class and so on”. (O’Sullivan et al. [2] 1994: 265) Learning how to decipher representations in the press undoubtedly means acquiring a skill which can be used to understand one’s own and others’ cultures better and to communicate interculturally in a more effective way Representation in the press can be dealt with from different angles, we are not going to discuss all of them but briefly introduce two, layout and the issue of stereotyping, both of which we have found very fruitful to explore in class.

Layout - the structural features of the page - are impregnated with social values constituting a perspective on events as well as providing ‘conventional significances’ meaningful to the people who habitually use the respective medium (Fowler 1991: 25). There are certain conventions used in our cultures which we never usually question, however, they may blind us to the fact that there are other ways of doing or perceiving things. It is important to be aware that conventions are integrated and mixed together in the same way as texts on the page. This can result in an extra layer of meaning being constructed by what shapes a text, or precedes or follows it. Therefore there is a strong relationship between layout and the creation of meaning. To understand this relationship we have to be aware of the different codes by which meaning is created. Since newspapers present not only texts, but make use of additional devices like photographs, different typefaces, colours and so on, being able to decipher meaning, means knowing the different codes. They have been classified as ‘technical’, ‘symbolic’ and ‘written’ by McMahon and Quinn (1988 in O’Sullivan et al. [1] 1994: 84). Technical includes, e.g. for photographs: camera angle, lens choice, framing, shutter speed, depth of field, lighting and exposure, juxtaposition and so on; written - headlines, captions, speech bubbles and style; and symbolic - objects, setting, body language, clothing and colour.

When applying the above categorisation to an analysis of newspapers, O’Sullivan et al. [1] suggest we use the following ‘toolkit’:

(After O’Sullivan et al. [1] 1994: 87-88)

The above technique can be applied to any newspaper (its front or inside pages) in order to establish its specific ways of communicating meaningful messages to readers. It has also proved of value in the classroom as it offers a perspective on the print media different to a purely linguistic one. Students can be asked to examine a text in order to find answers to questions from the table and further, to analyse the cultural implications of those answers. Being able to decipher what is behind the layout can help students understand issues such as cultural values or ideology.

Another closely related issue is the issue of stereotyping. Stereotyping can be defined as “a cultural ideological statement”, or “simply another word for overgeneralisation”, or “a way of thinking that does not acknowledge internal differences within a group”… (Intercultural Studies for Language Teachers: A postgraduate distance Learning Course Module 2 Unit 3 p. 52). Stereotyping can be either positive or negative but always interferes with successful communication as it blinds the analyst to major areas of difference and possible reasons for such. It has to do with giving ‘labels’ to nations, groups of people like gender, class, occupation in a simplified manner “which implicitly or explicitly represents a set of values, judgements and assumptions concerning their behaviour, characteristics of history” (O’Sullivan T [2] 1994: 300-1). As a result we can trace the use for instance of ‘the English’, ‘the upper-middle class’ ‘politicians’, etc to analyse whether the representation in the text serves to inform and reinforce an existing stereotype or to challenge it. Consequently, a task which can be set up in class is to ask students to identify potential stereotypes in a media text and try to find out whether they have been challenged or supported by the way in which an event or issue has been represented.

Conclusion

According to Kramsch (in Carter and Nunan, 2001, p.205), in a networked, interdependent world intercultural communication will have to deal with shifting identities rather than with stable and homogeneous national cultures. This will result in setting new tasks and questions in front of the FL teacher - not only how to teach more effectively, but also how to reflect, address and deal with social processes connected with intercultural rights, identity, world peace. The authors have attempted to outline the directions into which the interrelation among the key concepts of culture, intercultural communication and the media could be explored in teaching a foreign language, cultural studies or intercultural communication through authentic media texts from the press, and through this analysis lay down the tools needed to address and deal with those issues.

This article was first published in the proceedings from a conference on Smaller languages in the Big World held in the New Bulgarian University, Sofia, Bulgaria:

Smaller languages in the Big World: Sociolinguistics and ELT eds. Desmond Thomas & Maria Georgieva. Papers of the International Conference held in Sofia, October 2001 British Council, Bulgaria, LETTERA

 

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British Council and Teacher Training Institute, Sofia Intercultural Studies for Language Teachers: A postgraduate Distance Learning Course Module 2 Unit 3

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