Pragmatic failure of intercultural communication in higher education. A spoken discourse analysis

Research Paper (postgraduate) from the year 2012 in the subject Communications - Intercultural Communication, , language: English, abstract: The researcher of this paper is interested in analyzing spoken discourse. Due to the absence of cross-cultural awareness there could be a high obstacle in understanding the message that is perfect linguistically. This could generally mirror pragmatic failure and in particular, in the classrooms. This research paper therefore aims at analyzing many conversations to the language in use in different contexts for achieving the following: -Highlighting the importance of intercultural awareness betweenEnglish speakers / learners as well as the problems caused by itsabsence. -Analyzing different spoken discourses on pragmatic failure interms of words, sentence, discourse and Intonation. -Defining the intercultural competence, pragmatic competenceand discourse analysis. -Presenting the relationship between the discourse analysis andculture. -Recommending pedagogical implications to English authors,teachers, educational policy makers and learners. As the number of non-native speakers has become recently increasing and has surpassed the number of native speakers, the culture of non-native speakers could not be ignored in the interaction between non-native speakers to native speakers or between the non-native speakers to native-speakers. Hence, the importance of cultural dimension in communicative competence has been also increasing between English learners and speakers.

Elsayed Mahmoud has a Master's Degree from BUID in TESOL. In addition, he holds a Master's Degree in translation from AUC. His PhD is in Pragmatics. He is an English lecturer at CUA. His objective is to enhance the English level of cross-cultural students and provide the researchers, English instructors, and educational decision-makers with suitable techniques to scaffold their cross-cultural students.