This book explores representations of social media in European media discourses across different socio-historical contexts, demonstrating how such analysis can illuminate the tension between global and local in media discourses in today’s globalised world. The volume draws on data from a trilingual corpus from different editions of the free daily Metro from Finland, France, and Greece spanning a five-year period, with a focus on Facebook and Twitter. Adopting a French discourse analysis approach, which takes as its point of departure the notion of “discourse as the social practice of representing”, the book integrates qualitative and quantitative analyses to investigate the social and political role depictions of social media play in specific socio-historical contexts. This approach brings to the fore both commonalities and differences in the popularity of specific platforms and coverage of specific news topics and hot-button issues. In so doing, the volume elucidates the ways in which global practices become integrated and immersed into local contexts, offering avenues for future research on social media in news discourses. This book will be of interest to scholars in applied linguistics, intercultural communication, discourse analysis, media studies, and cultural studies.

European Identity examines how Europe is represented linguistically in the news media of four EU countries, France, Italy, Poland, and the UK, through the use of an electronic corpus built from newspapers and television news transcripts. This multilingual comparable corpus, is composed of the entire contents of four newspapers published in each country, collected over two periods of three months, and the transcriptions of two TV news broadcasts, collected over two periods of two months. The theoretical and methodological frameworks adopted include discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The individual chapters investigate various aspects of European identity as it is discursively construed in the news media of the different countries, such as Europe as a political and geographic entity, European Union institutions, European history, citizenship, and immigration. Based on a bottom-up orientation and using both quantitative and qualitative methods, all chapters but one use a comparative approach to the data, juxtaposing the journalist representations of Europe in two or more languages. The fundamental aim of the volume is to demonstrate how linguistic analysis, and in particular the study of large amounts of linguistic data, can make a vital contribution to the analysis of political and social issues

This book illustrates new virtual intercultural practices for language learning from primary to tertiary education and highlights the transversality of these practices throughout the language curriculum. The current English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) perspective sets the framework as a possible vector of cultural exchanges in a variety of contexts, and from which the different authors coming from Europe and all over the world present their studies. The book deploys diverse educational exchanges within a wide range of technological tools and with varied approaches to the intercultural dimension in language learning. Through these virtual exchanges, different languages and educational cultures come together to create emerging communities of practice co-constructed for the limited time-space of the collaborative projects. This volume opens a dialogue with researchers from different backgrounds and theoretical and methodological perspectives as technology can no longer be apprehended without its purposeful human and semiotic meanings and, conversely, human and semiotic meanings can no longer be apprehended without Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Going beyond strict polarised views on the technology or humanistic approaches, this book presents a more nuanced, interrelated stance and will appeal to researchers, scholars, post graduate students, and teachers in applied linguistics, language learning and teaching, education, information studies, cultural studies, and intercultural communication.

In light of increasing globalization, this collection makes the case for global citizenship education as a way forward for transforming foreign language learning and teaching to better address current and future global challenges in times of unprecedented change. The volume maps a multi-dimensional approach within foreign language pedagogy to take up the challenge of "educating the global citizen". Drawing on sociocultural, pedagogical, cosmopolitan, digital and civic-minded perspectives, the book explores the challenges in constructing epistemological frameworks in increasingly global environments, the need for developing context-sensitive educational practices, the potential of linking up with work from related disciplines, and the impact of these considerations on different educational settings. The collection reflects an international range of voices, attuned to global and local nuances, to offer a holistic compilation of conceptual innovations to showcase the relevance of global citizenship issues in foreign language education and encourage future research. This book will be of interest to scholars in intercultural education, foreign language education, and language teaching, as well as policymakers and foreign language teachers. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

This collection lends a critical decolonising lens to intercultural communication research, bringing together perspectives on how forms of education embedded in the arts and humanities can open up intercultural understanding among young people in conditions of conflict and protracted crises. The book draws on case studies from a range of educational contexts in the Global South which engage in creative arts methodologies to foreground decolonising approaches to intercultural communication in which researchers question their own power in the research process. The volume offers intercultural resources that can be used by researchers and community support groups to foster active intercultural communication, dialogue, participation, and responsibility among young people in these settings and those who may be marginalised from them. The collection also highlights the reflexive accounts of researchers working in a transnational, interdisciplinary, and multilingual research network and the subsequent opportunities and challenges of working in such networks. Advocating for intercultural understanding among young people in higher education and a greater focus on social justice in intercultural communication research, this book will be of interest to students and researchers in applied linguistics, language education, intercultural education, and multilingualism.

This book critically reflects on the challenges faced by refugee aspirant professionals in securing employment and the ways in which professional intercultural competence development and attendant language learning practices can help facilitate the professional (re)integration in these communities. The volume draws on data from a large-scale research project that saw refugee aspirant professionals, researchers, and volunteer language teachers working together to develop and operationalise key intercultural skills needed for professional employment in the UK, the Netherlands, and Austria, ultimately culminating in a toolkit of free online resources co-designed to meet the needs of communities and facilitate the development of these practices across Europe. Detailed analyses of the data drawn from the project allow for critical reflections on co-production in intercultural spaces and researchers’ positionality, power relations, and ethical choices in multilingual contexts. Taken together, the book offers both theoretical and practical considerations for application beyond the European context toward better facilitating the professional (re)integration of migrant communities on a more global scale. The book will be of particular interest to students and researchers in intercultural communication, refugee studies, and language education.

This collection critically examines tourism as a site of intercultural communication, drawing on the analytical tools afforded by the discipline toward better understanding contemporary tourism discourses and the broader societal structures of power and ideologies in which they are situated. The volume interrogates culture and interculturality in tourism in detailed analyses of discursive details in tourism interactions and focuses on the notion of culture as a process or phenomenon engaged in or enacted on by individuals. Drawing on discourse analytic and ethnographic approaches, the book brings together perspectives from the lived experiences of residents, hosts and ethnographers to explore the extent to which linguistic and cultural differences are constructed, identities negotiated, and power relations maintained and perpetuated in tourism encounters. The volume draws on insights from those working across a range of geographic contexts and explores the interplay of these issues in English as well as other languages and language varieties used in tourism interactions. With its focus on critical approaches to understanding language and culture, this book will appeal to students and scholars in intercultural communication, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, and tourism studies.

This collection argues for the need to promote intercultural understanding as a clear goal for teaching and learning pragmatics in second and foreign language education. The volume sees the learning of pragmatics as a challenging yet enriching process whereby the individual expands their capacity for understanding how meaning making processes influence social relationships and how assumptions about social relationships shape the interpretation and use of language in context. This locates pragmatics within a humanistically oriented conception of learning where success is defined relative to the enrichment of human understanding and appreciation of difference. The book argues that intercultural understanding is not an “add on” to language learning but central to the learner’s ability to understand and construct meaning with individuals from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Chapters analyse teachers’ and learners’ ways of making sense of pragmatics, how their assumptions about social relationships impact their perceptions of language use, and how reflection on pragmatic judgments opens up possibilities for developing intercultural understanding. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in intercultural communication, language education, and applied linguistics.

Discourse and Social Media is a unique and timely collection that breaks ground on how discourse scholars, coming from a range of disciplinary perspectives, can critically analyse different social media, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and News. The book fills a gap in the market for a multi-disciplinary collection for analysing the discourse of social media. In providing a thorough review of the field to date, the opening chapter considers some of the common and divergent interests and priorities that exist in social media discourse analysis. It also discusses the wider methodological and theoretical implications which social media analysis brings to the process of discourse analysis, as new forms of connections and communication call us to re-think the static models that we have been using. The rest of the collection draws on different traditions in discourse studies, including Critical Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics, Foucaultian analysis and Multimodality, to bring several unique approaches to critically analysing social media from a discourse perspective. Each ground-breaking chapter shows how different forms of social media data can best be selected, analysed, and dealt with critically. As a whole, Discourse and Social Media provides a go-to resource for social media scholars, as well as graduate students. The book is a significant contribution to the development of the field at this present shifting time. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Multicultural Discourses.

This book deals with the construction of the ‘other’ in European media at a time when the recently expanded EU is facing new political, economic and social challenges. The aim of the book is to document the diverse discursive forms of othering, ranging from differentiation to discrimination, that are directed against various ‘other Europeans’ in both institutionalized media and such non-elite semi-public contexts as discussion forums and citizen blogs. Drawing on data from British, Polish, French, Czech, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish and Estonian contexts, the individual papers investigate how various social groupings – regions, nations, ethnicities, communities, cultures – are discursively constructed as ‘outsiders’ rather than ‘insiders’, as ‘them’ rather than ‘us’. While most of the papers are grounded in linguistics and critical discourse studies, the book will also appeal to numerous other social scientists interested in the interface between language, media and social issues.