‘If we know about culture it will be easier to work with one another’: developing skills for handling corporate meetings with multinational participation

Abstract

The current international nature of socio-economic activities is reshaping workplace settings and creating the need for large numbers of employees to perform successful communicative acts with a wider range of interactants than in the past, often using a language other than their mother tongue. Against this backdrop much emphasis has been placed on the need for training current and future employees in order to develop their work-related communication skills. In this context, the paper reports on an ongoing study into workplace discourse and its implications for pedagogic practice. I discuss here operationalisations of the concept of culture in pedagogic materials, and focus on the meeting event as presented through texts published in some widely used Business English textbooks in the UK. Special attention is paid to the underlying assumptions about culture and preferred norms for handling meetings which feature multinational participation Á as presented by the textbooks but also in relevant academic literature. The discussion also draws on data from multinational companies in Europe. The analysis shows that textbooks often take a macro-level view of culture and treat it as an entity with distinct boundaries. This paper closes by making a case for sociolinguistic research findings to feed back into the language classroom to complement language for specific purposes textbooks for further developing learners' socio-pragmatic skills.La caractère international des activités socio-économiques actuelles transforme la configuration du lieu de travail et entraîne ainsi le besoin d'un nombre important d'employés d'accomplir des actes communicatifs avec une palette d'interlocuteurs de plus en plus variée, et ce dans une langue souvent autre que leur langue maternelle. Sur cette toile de fond, l'emphase a été placée sur la nécessité de former les employés actuels et futurs afin de développer leurs compétences en matière de linguistique et de communication. C'est dans ce contexte que cet article établit le compte-rendu d'une étude en cours sur le discours dans le lieu de travail et sur les conséquences de celui-ci sur les pratiques pédagogiques. J'examine ici les 'opérationalisations' du concept de culture dans les matériels pédagogiques et me concentre sur l'évènement de la réunion telle qu'elle est présentée dans les textes publiés dans des manuels de l'Anglais des Affaires couramment utilisés au Royaume-Uni. Une attention particulière est portée aux hypothèses concernant la culture et les normes privilégiées afin de gérer les réunions à caractère multinational Á comme le présentent les manuels mais également les travaux universitaires sur le sujet. La discussion repose également sur des données provenant de compagnies multinationales en Europe. L'analyse montre que le point de vue des manuels sur la culture est souvent statique et traite celle-ci comme une 'unité' homogène avec des limites bien définies. Cet article se conclut *en défendant que les résultats des recherches sociolinguistiques pourraient être utiles dans les...

Culture, curriculum design, syllabus and course development in the light of BELF

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Doing culture, doing race: everyday discourses of ‘culture’ and ‘cultural difference’ in the English as a second language classroom

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