Languages for intercultural communication and education

Conclusion
This chapter has focused on interviews, since this type of interaction is
common in communicative textbooks, where it is usually treated as a
means of exchanging information. Interviews are also an obvious way of
collecting data for ethnographic projects. As we have seen, smooth inter-
views depend on the participants sharing cultural frames of reference, and
the questions and responses to interviews can tell us as much about the
assumptions and attitudes of the interviewers as they do about the inter-
viewees. Interviews are therefore valuable ways of exploring both the
target culture
and
the learners’ home culture. As we have also seen, the
assumptions and attitudes of participants are not always directly articu-
lated, and so interviews need to be carefully analysed in order to see how
they indirectly present themselves, their values and their beliefs.
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Chapter 7
Developing Visual Literacy
This chapter turns from ethnography and begins to consider other ways of
‘decoding’ a culture. First of all, we consider the visual representations of
cultural information, and how to ‘read’ them critically. Topics addressed
include:
•
Defining ‘visual literacy’.
•
Using images in the ELT classroom.
•
Understanding visual composition.
•
Understanding the grammar and vocabulary of visual images.
•
Combining visual and textual information.
•
The ‘iconography’ of English in non-anglophone countries.