Introduction

Intercultural or cross-cultural communication is an interdisciplinary field of research that studies how people understand each other across group boundaries of various sorts: national, geographical, ethnic, occupational, class or gender. In the United States it has traditionally been related to the behavioural sciences, psychology and professional business training; in Europe it is mostly associated with anthropology and the language sciences. Researchers generally view intercultural communication as a problem created by differences in behaviours and world views among people who speak different languages and who belong to different cultures. However, these problems may not be very different from those encountered in communication among people who share the same national language and culture.

Background

TESOL has always had as its goal the facilitation of communication among people who do not share the same language and national culture. But before the Second World War, the term ‘culture’ meant knowledge about great works of literature, social institutions and historical events, acquired through the translation of written texts. The rise of linguistics and of the social sciences after the Second World War, and the demands of market economies, gave prominence to spoken language and to communication across cultures in situations of everyday life.

While the term ‘intercultural communication’ became prominent in TESOL only in the 1980s, as the necessary supplement to communicative language teaching first developed in Europe in the early 1970s, the field itself can be traced to the work in the 1950s of Georgetown University linguist Robert Lado and of anthropologist and US Foreign Service Institute (FSI) officer Edward T. Hall. Lado's Linguistics Across Cultures (1957) was the first attempt to link language and culture in an educationally relevant way; Lado had an enormous influence on the teaching of English around the world.