Australian Review of Applied Linguistics. Supplement Series - Volume 7, Issue 1, 1990

This paper reports on a project examining the use of English between speakers of differing non-English speaking backgrounds in an industrial context. This is the most multilingual sphere of Australian life, and at the same time the one in which non-English speakers are most likely to use English. Five workplaces have been selected reflecting a diversity of industry type: automotive, electronics, textiles and health; location in Melbourne: north, west, east and south-east; and three of the workplaces are subsidiaries of multi-national companies from the United States, Japan, and West Germany respectively. Data collected to date has highlighted problems pertaining to: levels of directness, cultural expectations of context; turn-taking and discourse sequencing.

When people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds have to work together, this often leads to negative stereotyping, as the result of clashing rules of interaction. This article, based on ‘on the job’ recorded data, looks at the particular case of French people living and working in Australia, in relation to one specific type of exchange: the request. It isolates three major types of causes of tension and misunderstandings between them and native speakers of Australian English: differences in politeness strategies, differences in the assessment of what constitutes a ‘face-threatening act’ and clashes between ‘face wants’ and other wants.

The paper presents an analysis of a video tape-recorded negotiation and follow-up interviews with the Australian and Japanese business personnel in the negotiation. The findings indicate that in such intercultural situations interactants apply a variety of disparate communicative and sociocultural norms, particularly with regard to the function of an encounter, and the structuring and content of the proposal. This norm disparity sometimes results in one party evaluating the interaction of the other as inadequate. Although the analysis confirms some of the general stereotypes about Japanese business communication, others are negated.

Several studies across languages (Cohen and Olshtain, 1981; Olshtain, 1983; Trosborg, 1987; Holmes, 1989) investigated the different social and contextual factors that influence native speakers to select one or a group of “semantic formula(s)” (Fraser, 1981) in the act of apologizing. Nevertheless the literature is still in its infancy (Fraser, 1981 and Holmes, 1989) in respect to the gender differences between speaker (apologizer) and hearer (recipient), and in the comparison between Spanish and English. This paper aims to investigate the strategies and the semantic formulas that Chilean Spanish and Australian English native speakers use in the act of apologizing. A role play eliciting an apology was carried out in the participants’ mother tongue. Twenty two Chileans (twelve females and ten males) who had lived for not more than three years in Australia and twenty Australians (ten males and ten females) who, like the Chileans, varied in age from 17 to 30 were the informants in this study.

Results show that Chilean and Australian cultural values were reflected in the act of apologizing. Chileans in comparison to Australians make less use of the apology strategy “explicit expression of apology”. Nevertheless they appear to give more explanations than Australians in the act of apologizing. Differences were also found in both languages in the use of “speaker and hearer oriented apologies” and in the use of some strategies and intensifiers, in which the addressee’s gender played an important role in both languages.

This paper is a first report on an interdisciplinary project dealing with cross-cultural communication in health and medicine undertakebn by the Centre for Community Languages in the Professions. In this paper health professionals’ perceptions of communication difficulties are examined, especially their understanding of the role of language in cross-cultural communication. The project revealed that health professionals who had regular contact with people from diverse cultural backgrounds were aware of the influence culture can exert on the attitudes and the behaviour of NESB people in relation to health care. In general they had some difficulty in establishing the role of language in cultural misunderstandings if both parties (interactants) communicated through the same language.