Journal of Asian Pacific Communication - Volume 17, Issue 1, 2007

In the fifteen years from 1989 to 2003 considerable development has occurred in the area of international languages teaching in New Zealand’s schools. 1989 marked the beginning of serious moves to encourage the New Zealand government to develop a comprehensive national languages policy that would consider all aspects of language provision in an officially ‘bilingual’, and, in reality, multilingual and multicultural nation. 2003 witnessed a strategic step forward with a government supported recommendation that would make language learning an entitlement for all public school pupils of eleven to fourteen years of age. This paper examines this fifteen-year period, focusing on international languages of trade and tourism. It seeks to get in on the inside of understanding the policy process with a view to distinguishing what has been said from what has been done. We show that a situation that was uncoordinated and ad hoc prior to 1989 is, despite slow progress, taking more coherent shape.

Australia’s policies on languages of the late 1980s were characterized by a balance between the community and broader needs of the nation on the one hand and European and Asian languages on the other. In a climate of ever stronger economic rationalism, globalization and shrinking resources these policies shifted to economic benefit arguments in the 1990s; community-based policies came under attack. European languages suffered more at first, but recently Asian languages have also been jeopardized. This raises several questions: Should Asian (and other) languages continue to be promoted for community or for national needs? Should there be an emphasis on English, the national language, and should migrants be incited to shift to it in light of the growing use of English worldwide and especially in the Asia-Pacific region? This paper explores different facets of the debate about policy and planning with regard to English and Asian languages and the political tension that links them.

This paper uses audio and video data to examine the discourse of a New Zealand IT company director in business meetings. Three examples of the director dealing with behaviour by his subordinates that he wants to influence are analysed by drawing on a collection of discourse analytic frameworks including conversation analysis, social constructionism, politeness theory, and a community of practice framework. The examples reveal that the director employs a range of discursive strategies to express his disapproval and to rationalise his feedback. At times he adopts indirect and mitigated strategies, while at other times he uses explicit and authoritative strategies. Moreover, the examples also demonstrate the dynamic nature and the complexity of interaction. The analysis shows that the director’s choice of strategies in these examples is a response to the specific discourse context and represents the result of negotiation between interlocutors, and that the giving of negative feedback occurs as a sequence of utterances instead of one single utterance. Finally it is suggested that the strategies used by the director are relevant resources because of the close relationships between the director and his subordinates and the shared repertoire of the focus workplace.

Drawing on data from three New Zealand worksites, an analysis of transcripts suggests a pattern of regulation, compliance and resistance, in which small talk aids the exercise of power. To consider the implications of workplace dialogues for L2 workers, the study looks at recorded conversations in the light of Gee’s (1999) concept of “building tasks” in discourse analysis, revealing the importance of “language and beyond” — language that carries constant reference to social realities, inside and outside worksites, that construct interactions among workers. The paper derives conclusions for language instruction, language learners and the personnel of workplaces, arguing that language instruction (e.g., teachers and curriculum developers) can benefit from an awareness of the above issues and include attention to social realities in language courses. Despite debate in the literature, the argument supports the analysis of authentic texts, “battered texts”, and the findings of linguistic analysis in L2 teaching, and proposes consciousness-raising in workplaces.

This article reports on a study that investigates texts on websites for wineries in Australia and New Zealand. The article focuses on evaluative language in website texts, exploring two interrelated issues. One issue concerns the kind of image that linguistic features help build up for wineries, wine regions, and Australia and New Zealand as New World wine producers. In seeking to shed light on implicit and explicit values underlying the texts, it gives attention to the aspects of local culture and natural elements most frequently represented in the texts, and if or how European wine-making traditions, European settlement, and the indigenous culture are portrayed in the texts. A second issue has to do with the way shared knowledge is built up in the texts and the kind of shared knowledge readers are assumed to have about local elements such as land and climate, traditions, wine-making processes, and local history.

In the Asia Pacific region acquiring communicative competence in intercultural interactions in English is an increasingly important goal for adult English language learners. One aspect of communicative competence that has been little researched to date is competence in interpreting the nonverbal channels of communication that accompany speakers’ verbal messages. For Thai learners of English the differences between Thai and English native speakers in many features of nonverbal communicative behaviour can lead to misunderstanding and miscommunication. In this study the understanding of English native speakers’ nonverbal communication and attitudes to such communication is investigated with a group (n = 73) of Thai university students. Using experimental classroom-based research the effectiveness of two teaching approaches using American and Australian films have been evaluated. One of these approaches involves explicit teaching about nonverbal communication used by English native speakers, whereas the other approach does not teach about nonverbal communication, but exposes the students to nonverbal codes whilst explicitly teaching the linguistic features of interactions in the chosen films. Results of pre and post teaching intervention assessments support the importance of explicit teaching for Thai background English learners’ enhanced appreciation of the nonverbal communication of English native speakers.

To facilitate the study of business and organizational communication in a global environment, useful models and frameworks are essential. The current study further extends previously established language-based communication zones models by integrating professional genre competence within the framework of a more recently developed language-based communication zones model (see Babcock & Du-Babcock, 2001). It is hoped that by adding professional genre competence dimensions to this theoretical framework a more comprehensive framework can be identified, and thereby better represent the dynamic and multiply-influenced processes integral to international business communication. Research-based empirical data from the US, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China (where language-based communication zones make up the communication networks) were collected and analyzed. Building upon previously established theoretical models, the current study reconfigures eight language-based communication zones by redrawing Babcock and Du-Babcock’s (2001) model to take account of the professional genre competencies of interactants. Eighteen parallel and non-parallel patterns are developed within the language-based communication zones. Cases are provided to illustrate key concepts of the reconfigured language-based communication zones.