[MUSIC] Hello. This is week three of the course Understanding Russians: Context of Intercultural Communication and this week we plan to devote exactly to communication, to communication and its contexts. Why is it so fascinating to study intercultural communication? I believe partly because it allows us to understand certain effects or certain tricks that we find when we look at certain communication contexts and in intercultural communication, there are probably more tricks like that. For instance, if we look at small conversation of the following type. First speaker, has the mail arrived? And the answer, no, it is only half past seven. What can we get out of analyzing this small conversation? Well it looks as if it's not a regular exchange. There is a question about the mail, and the answer's about time. But I'm sure that all of us have completely understood this small conversation, and then got whatever meaning is in it. How could it be? Well, the answer is very simple. We probably understand something not exactly from the meaning of the words that were pronounced, but also from some other places, locations in our mind. Or elsewhere in the world. Or, let's look at a small Russian joke. I translated it into English. Of course, this is the kind of joke that can be translated. Again, first speaker. Teacher, you should have been at school by 8:30. Answer by a student, Why, did anything happen? Well I was telling this joke in Russia for different audiences. For instance, in Moscow, this would usually cause, well, laughter or at least smiles but if I would tell the same joke in St. Petersburg, which I did a couple of times. People in the audience were not laughing or smiling at all. Why? Actually answer to this question explains us where and how we get information that makes sense and makes conversations coherent or funny. Because it's another consequence of coherency. Or why in some situations it doesn't. I must tell you that in Moscow kids go to school by 8:30. It starts at 8:30, which makes this answer by students rather funny, why did anything happen? Because it presupposes that the student that answers this actually doesn't know that he or she is supposed to be at school by that time. Or probably believes that he or she doesn't have this obligation. In Saint Petersburg, the same kids go to school by nine, school starts at nine. So then, the question that the student makes, makes perfect sense. Why, did anything happen, why should I have being at school by 8:30 if the school starts at nine? So the meaning that we construct out of listening to this conversations differs greatly. Not because of the meaning of the words or constructions that are involved in here. Not linguistic expressions but it comes from something else. From the knowledge that we are taking out of the world so to say. Out of the, outside of the language circle. And that's how it is related to intercultural communication because we've been saying all the time that intercultural communication is a kind of communication that goes beyond or across borders of the discourse community. Which involves knowledge that is common for a certain discourse community and which is not common for people, for participants from different discourse communities or cultures. So we need to study communication and look at the communication from the point of view which will help us to understand how we manage to produce utterances and make sense out of them. Look at this picture. It's actually taken from BBC coverage of one important event that happened in Great Britain a few years ago. This is the text that corresponds to this picture, that accompanies this picture. England's Cricketers were given a rapturous reception in Trafalgar Square at the end of the Ashes Victory Parade to celebrate their win over Australia. Well looking at it and listening to it from the point of view of a Russian listener, a Russian viewer of this footage, what sense can we make out of it? Well, of course we're talking about those people who are not British citizens, who are not British by their culture but who understand English very well. So the meanings of all the words are clear to them. Probably they will be confused. I look back at my own experience when first reading this. What do I don't understand because I am not part of the British culture? Though of course, both my students and myself were pretty well read in British Literature, we know a lot about modern British culture and life in the UK, but still we don't know everything. We belong to another discourse community. First, some people may not even understand why all this enthusiasm, why people are so happy, why such a language rapturous reception? Second, not everyone would know what Cricket is, but even if you've read some British literature and you know that Cricket is a game, the meaning of this game for British people is not something that you'd immediately grasp. For instance, you need to know that cricket for Great Britain is the game. It's like the soccer in Brazil or in Russia, or elsewhere. Then, okay we know what Trafalgar Square is, and to understand that if something happens at Trafalgar Square, it is important. But, what is Ashes victory? You need to know that Ashes actually is the name of a person and that Ashes is a special tournament in cricket. I only learned it later when I looked at Wikipedia or some other source to learn about it. Without knowing this, it won't make sense because you don't understand. But these are facts. The most important thing is actually how to understand why these people are so happy. Why such a language? And this you only understand. If you know the meaning of the cricket. If you know that in this tournament, it is the first time in 20 years that the United Kingdom has won and that of course, they believe that winning over Australia, where the British people introduced this game, is especially important. So all these small facts, the facts that have no relation to language at all. All these facts make the meaning. Allow us to construct it. We need to grasp it from somewhere. From Wikipedia, from our knowledge of British culture elsewhere. Another picture is the same thing but about so to say Russian context, taken again from a class on intercultural communication between Russian and American students. Of course American students who saw this picture uploaded by Russian students for them to guess what cultural event is behind it, were quite puzzled. I should say that I was quite puzzled myself too because I wasn't quite sure about the chainsaw. Here we see a Russian monk who is chain sawing an icehole and he does that to celebrate the epiphany. So you need to know the context of when it happens. It happens sometime in January 19th when the epiphany is celebrated in Orthodox Christian world in Russia. So it chainsaws an ice hole to celebrate the Epiphany because people will be immersing themselves in cold water. This is increasingly popular in Russia now. And it makes an interesting, well you would say even mame, a cultural mame for Russians or for people who understand it. But again to make sense out of it you need to know a lot of cultural meanings that are behind this picture, or behind this text, behind this communicative event so to say. So my main thesis after analyzing these two pictures, two representations of British and Russian culture, and that's sort of in a nutshell will be as following. First, linguistic knowledge is but a small fraction of competencies used in communication. There are other type of competencies. And we should better explore it, what is really used in discourse, in order to be able to understand how it all works. Looking at just vocabulary, just grammar constructions, will not, for instance, when learning foreign languages, will not help. So agenda for this week is as follows. We'll try to make sense to analyze, what is theory if applied to communication and intercultural communication. We'll look at main features of the communications situation as applied to this topic. We'll discuss the issue of discourse as interpretation. Language ambiguity which follows from interpretation of discourse agenda. And then we'll look at communication contexts and functions. This agenda is not ranked or it was, it is not maybe in the order that we will be looking at it but these are the main points. And I would stop now but I suggest that you look at this number of quotations from a book by Ron Scollon and Susan Scollon, Intercultural Communication Discourse approach which gives a few main phrases about language and culture and how they are intertwined together. We will be discussing actually these sentences, the meanings of what is said here in the following, in what we have for this week to discuss. I would also say the phrases I would like to prove and to discuss. Most important, that symbols, sounds for those symbols and the rules for combining them vary from culture to culture. If we are talking about language because language is a set of symbols. We'll be talking about language functions that facilitate emotive expression, thought, social interaction, the control of reality, the maintenance of history, and the expression of identity. This is about language functions. It is impossible to separate our use of language from our culture. This is rather clear but put, as I said, in a nutshell. Also, the meanings we have for words are determined by the culture in which we have been raised and socialized. So it's important in terms of discussing the issues of modern times. [MUSIC] [SOUND] [MUSIC]
