Celia Thompson presented her research on at the BAAL-ICSIG Seminar 2012 at the Dept of Languages, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK, on 17-18 May 2012.

1. ‘Re-discovering myself’:
Identity formations and transcultural
communication training
in a global context
Dr Celia Thompson
University of Melbourne, Australia
4th British Association of Applied Linguistics Intercultural
Communication Special Interest Group Symposium
17-18 May 2012, Open University Milton Keynes, UK

2. Overview
• Aim of paper and background to transcultural
communication pedagogy
• Setting the theoretical scene:
-Why transcultural communication?
- Identity creation and the symbolic nature of language
- Dialogism; the subject-in-process-and-on-trial
• Teaching materials: Personal histories
• A dialogic transcultural communication activity
• Preliminary analysis of student interview data
• Concluding comments and where to next?

3. Aim, background & theoretical
landscape
• My teaching background and aim of paper;
• The importance of ‘trans’cultural communication: -
multidirectional movement, flow and mixing;
- “transnational flow of people” (Canagarajah, 2007a, p.
935); - ‘translanguaging’, ‘translingual language practices’
(Makoni & Pennycook, 2007).
• Identity is constructed through language, which operates in
symbolic ways:
“The word ‘symbolic’, … refers not only to the representation of
people and objects in the world but to the construction of perceptions,
attitudes, beliefs, aspirations, values through the use of symbolic
forms” (Kramsch, 2009, p. 7).

4. Dialogism & Bakhtin
• ‘Dialogue’ occurs not only between different individuals
(‘external’ dialogue), but also occurs within the individual
in what he terms ‘interior’ or ‘internal’ dialogue (1981, p.
427): a “dialogue with the self” (1984, p. 213);
• In these exchanges that take place within all individuals,
the words that are used are ‘double-voiced’. Within each
of these double-voicings, Bakhtin believes a conflict
between voices occurs as each strives to communicate with
the other:
“These voices are not self-enclosed or deaf to one another. They hear
each other constantly, call back and forth to each other, and are
reflected in one another” (1984, pp. 74-75).

5. The subject-in-process-and-on-
trial & Kristeva
Kristeva theorises subjectivity as a heterogeneous
ongoing process of (trans)formation and becoming
(Kristeva 1986, p. 30) in which “identities” engage with
one another to produce meanings; these meanings
however, are not fixed but are in a constant state
of flux and may change over time (Kristeva 1996, pp.
190-191).

6. A dialogic transcultural
communication classroom activity
Aim
To encourage students from multilingual backgrounds to
identify and reflect on their personal experiences of
communicating with others from within and beyond their
own cultures; in so doing, students will be expected to
engage with, discuss and reflect on the interrelationships
between language, identity, culture and communication.

7. Pedagogical resources:
Personal narratives
Text (i) : Bell (2001)

8. Jeannie Bell
(adapted from 2001, pp.45-52)
“We weren’t taught our language, we were deliberately
denied access to this public knowledge. It was demanded
of us that we learn to speak and write English, so we could
be assimilated, integrated, educated, or whatever. There
was this deliberate cultural and linguistic genocide going
on. People were made to believe that the only acceptable
form of communication and lifestyle was one that mirrored
the white one.”

9. Text (ii) Said (2001)

10. Edward Said
(adapted from 2001, pp. 223-245)
“I was born in Jerusalem in 1935. My parents were
commuting between Palestine and Egypt. We
were always on the move. We would spend part of
the year in Egypt, part of the year in Palestine, and
the summer in Lebanon. In addition to the fact that
my father had American citizenship, and I was by
inheritance therefore American and Palestinian at
the same time, I was living in Egypt and I wasn’t
an Egyptian. I, too, was this strange composite.”

11. Text (iii) Barenboim & Said
(2003)
Given the tensions between countries in the Middle East,
Said’s friendship and professional relationship with Daniel
Barenboim, who was born into a Russian Jewish family,
who had lived in Argentina and migrated to Israel, is a
very interesting one to explore. It was their professional
collaboration that led to the formation of the West-Eastern
Divan Orchestra and resulted in students from different
Middle Eastern backgrounds overcoming many of their
unquestioned cultural assumptions about ‘the Other’ in
order to play music successfully together.

12. Barenboim & Said (2003)
“It wasn’t only the Israelis and the Arabs who
didn’t care for each other. There were some Arabs
who didn’t care for other Arabs as well as Israelis
who cordially disliked other Israelis. And it was
remarkable to witness the group, despite the
tensions of the first week or ten days, turn
themselves into a real orchestra … One set of
identities was superseded by another set.”
(Said in Barenboim & Said 2003, p. 9)

13. Text (iv) Obama (2004)

14. Obama (2004)
“ … she recognized my name. That had never happened
before, I realised; not in Hawaii, not in Indonesia, not in
L.A. or New York or Chicago. For the first time in my life,
I felt the comfort, the firmness of identity that a name
might provide, how could it carry an entire history in other
people’s memories … No one here in Kenya would ask
how to spell my name, or mangle it with an unfamiliar
tongue. My name belonged so I belonged, drawn into a
web of relationships, alliances, and grudges that I did not
yet understand.” (Obama 2004, p. 305)

15. Step 1: Defining ‘transcultural
communication’
• Elicit from students what they understand by the
term ‘transcultural communication’(Students could be
directed to consider the interrelationships between language, identity,
culture and communication: concepts that are embedded within the
notion of ‘transcultural communication’);
• This could be done first in small groups and then
comments pooled for whole class discussion;
• Next, key quotations from Bakhtin (1984),
Canagarajah (2007a), Kristeva (1986; 1996),
Makoni & Pennycook (2007) and Said (2001) can
be given for students to discuss in small groups.

16. Step 2: Discussion of sample text
extracts
• In groups of four, students should read text extracts
1 to 4 (This activity can be directed specifically to correspond to the
pedagogical focus of the learning activity. For multilingual students studying
English, for example, it will be important to elicit and discuss any unknown
lexical items that may be present in the extracts);
• Next, students should select (by underlining) key
comments/points in the text extracts that they find
particularly interesting and relevant (or different) to
their own experiences of transcultural
communication encounters;
• Students then explain the reasons for these
selections to other students in their group.

17. Step 3: Exploring students’ own
transcultural communication experiences
• In pairs, students should create a series of questions that
are designed to elicit and explore students’ own
transcultural communication experiences and reflections:
These questions should be finalised in writing;
• Each member of each pair should then find another student
to whom they will pose the questions they have designed.

18. Step 4: The interview
• In these newly formed pairs (created in the final stage of
Step 3 above), students ask and respond to each other’s
questions about their own transcultural communication
experiences;
• The length and complexity (e.g. How much should
students refer to relevant literature on transcultural
communication in their discussion of their interviewees’
responses?) of the task can be adapted to take into account
students’ level of study and the potential percentage
assessment weighting allocated to the activity.

19. Step 5: Review of the task
• Obtain student feedback on the activity to reflect on
areas for revision and improvement for the next
iteration of the task;
• It would also be possible, with students’ permission,
to make their work available for incoming students
in order to build on and extend class materials for
this kind of activity for future learners.

20. Preliminary findings: Student
language backgrounds
• Random sample of 30 from 120 postgraduate pre-
university academic orientation ‘bridging’ program;
• Setting: Major urban Australian university;
• Students identified 43 different languages;
• 5 speakers of Urdu; 4 of Bahasa Indonesian, Bangla and
Luganda; 3 of Arabic and Hindi; 2 of Dzonkha, French,
Mandarin, Nepali, Pashto, Pidgin (PNG) and Punjabi;
• All other languages were spoken by one student only.

21. Preliminary analysis of student
interview data
• More than 50% of those interviewed (16 out of 30) felt
“comfortable” speaking the language(s) they grew up with;
• Students’ feelings about learning and speaking English
were not so uniform: 5 reported difficulty in expressing
their ideas and feelings in English (and other languages)
that they had learned through formal education; 4 students
felt “uncomfortable” and 3 students felt “comfortable”
using English.

22. Individual comments about language
students grew up with
• Feel free;
• Feel normal;
• Feel ‘being in command’;
• Feel proud;
• Feel unique/different;
• Rediscovering myself;
• Sense of nationality.

23. Individual comments about language
of formal education
• Difficult to communicate using mixed languages;
• I feel elated and try to learn new words and expressions in
order to be an eloquent speaker;
• I feel sophisticated;
• No emotional attachment;
• Taken out of own culture;
• Try to read between the lines especially in academic
writing.

24. Concluding reflections
• Impact of globalisation on all linguistic and
cultural identity formations and traditional
relations of power between and within
different languages and cultures;
• Power relations no longer fixed but
dynamic, unstable and unpredictable;

25. Concluding reflections
• Dialogic and transformative process of
‘inter-animating’ and ‘re-accenting’ of all
languages and cultures engaged in
communicative interactions;
• Increased movement between and
engagement with different transnationally
constituted ‘communities of practice’;

26. Concluding reflections
• Emergence of new, multiple and evolving
transculturally formed identities raises
possibilities for increased recognition and
validation of linguistic and cultural
diversity and practices.

27. Where to next?
• Theoretical directions: Towards a critical
transcultural communication pedagogy that
fosters ongoing reflection about the role of
power, language, culture and identity in
transcultural communicative interactions
(see Byram, 2008 & 2010; Dasli, 2011;
Guilherme, 2002 on critical global
citizenship);

28. Where to next?
• Curriculum design: Student-centred and
problem-based that encourages a multi-
perspectival and critical approach to transcultural
communication training (e.g. elicit from students
specific work-related examples of problems they
have encountered in different transcultural
contexts; develop classroom activities and role-
plays based on these scenarios for further
discussion).