Language in the Academy

Cultural Reflexivity and Intercultural Dynamics

By (author) Dr. Joan Turner

Publication date:

01 December 2010

Publisher

Multilingual Matters

Dimensions:

210x148mm
6x8"

ISBN-13: 9781847693228

This book takes a critical look at why issues of language in higher education are routinely marginalised, despite the growing internationalisation of universities. Through analyses of a variety of intercultural encounters, the book highlights the range of interpretative possibilities available for understanding these encounters, and suggests the role that the reality of the contemporary intercultural dynamic between the Socratic and Confucian pedagogic traditions can play in driving change to the pedagogic practices of higher education. Another important aim of the book is to examine language in the academy as an object of cultural theory. While rooted in the practical and empirical reality of teaching and using language in higher education, this book argues for the importance of examining the institutional interface between language and higher education, and of critically exploring the values inscribed in the pedagogy and evaluation of academic language.

Chapter One Introductory Overview

Chapter Two Language, Language Pedagogies, and Intercultural Communication in Contemporary Higher Education

Chapter Three Language in the Academy: The Discourse of Remediation

Chapter Four Languaging in the Academy: Language as Dynamic Practice

Chapter Five Occidentalist Inscription: The Historical Construction of Contemporary Representations of Language in the Academy

Chapter Six Disciplining Language: Rhetorical Values and the Regulation of Academic Writing

Chapter Seven Power/Knowledge and the Construction of Rhetorical Subjects

Chapter Eight Subject to Confucian Rhetorical Culture

Chapter Nine The Power/Knowledge Effects of the Socratic Dialogue

Chapter Ten Socratic Subjects: The Western Tutor as Midwife

Chapter Eleven Resisting the Tao of Talk: Verbalisation in Intercultural Context

Chapter Twelve The Way of Learning: The Spatial Relations of Learning and Teaching in the Confucian/Taoist Tradition

Chapter Thirteen The Discursive Dance of the Intercultural

Chapter Fourteen The Critical Rhetoric of Being Critical

This is a stimulating and timely book which puts language as 'cultural object' at the heart of debates about the nature and purpose of higher education in the twenty first century. Drawing on extensive scholarship and many years of teaching in UK higher education, Joan Turner turns our gaze towards the taken-for-granted assumptions about language in the academy, not least in the contemporary context of ‘intercultural communication’, and calls for greater reflexivity about the practices in which we- as scholars, teachers and students- engage. This book will promote much needed discussion about assumptions and ideologies surrounding language use in the academy.