The Importance Of Intercultural Communication

Before teaching my intermediate English class this semester, I have never worked with such an ethnically diverse group of L2 learners. Coming from eight different countries, my students have shown me a blueprint of World Englishes being spoken by international language users for intercultural communication. However, their individually different accents have often contributed to miscomprehension and miscommunication during peer interaction. As a language teacher, I am also faced with the difficulty to understand the vernacular English of my African student — Max (Field Journal #3, Jan. 25, 2016). While my Brazilian student Barbara finds it effortless to communicate with Max, she frequently tells me how much she hates her own accent and the influence

3, 2016). Based on what I have learned and experienced from my graduate studies, I believe that language is tightly associated with culture, and that language learning is always situated in a particular sociocultural context. Thus, exploring the role of English as an international language in fostering the globalizing cross-cultural communication is of vital importance to understand the culturally different ideologies about ESL learning. During the classroom interaction, I realized that viewing linguistic and cultural diversity as an obstacle or burden was quite common among my students, which explained why they desired to escape from their L1 influence and move toward Americanization culturally and linguistically. For example, Barbara claimed that, in her cultural context, English should be the focus of school education, “because English is the most useful language”, whereas minority languages can be interesting if one wants to “know more about the history of minority peoples” (Field Journal #6, Feb. 3, 2016). From my perspective, her acceptance of the English-dominant monolingual ideology reflects the legitimation of language-as-problem orientation in her social and cultural context (Ruíz, 1984). Such culturally legitimized monolingual reductionism is often witnessed in nations and regions that were colonized in history, and such colonial culture can cause great impact on minority language users’ perceptions about to which extent majority and minority content should be covered in language eduction (Hornberger, 2003). Indeed, most students in my class have displayed a tendency to accept the unexamined assumption that a powerful and profitable language like English deserves more time and efforts to learn, whereas their L1s ought to be used