Intercultural communicative styles in Qatar: Greek and Qataris

Abstract

This chapter investigates the intercultural communicative styles used by female Qatari students and their Greek instructor in their academic interactions at Qatar University. “Intercultural communicative style,” namely the way we share information with others through language, is seen as both shaping and shaped by one's culture. The two research questions pursued are the following: (1) What are the basic communicative styles used by female Qatari students and their instructor and how are they similar to and different from each other? and (2) how do they contribute toward the construction of these people's perceptions of culture? My methodology includes linguistic ethnography, translating into participant observation, field notes from both inside and outside the classroom, and ethnographic interviews with my students. In addition, my data include e-mail exchanges in the context of lectures from sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and language and culture courses I taught at Qatar University during the period 2010-2013, and interview data, where my students are asked to reflect upon their intercultural communicative experience from their interaction with me. The rationale behind having these diverse data is to validate my findings through the comparison between the levels of production (i.e., linguistic behavior inside the classroom) and perception (i.e., what people think they are doing in terms of their intercultural communicative performance). The analysis sheds light on the ways whereby communicative styles help us decipher the whole process of culture construction, and it is set to explore the potential ways whereby sociolinguistics and cultural studies can be used as a means of improving people's (academic) lives in Qatar and elsewhere.