INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION AND ACADEMIC DISCOURSE: SEARCH FOR MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING

Nowadays, the use of English as the lingua franca of the modern
academic community in various scientific knowledge areas
occurs in an international context that goes beyond national
cultures. However, the so-called academic English itself is a
product of intercultural communication, as well as some kind of
agreement, demonstrated and reached by the academic
community owing to their communication needs for last fifty
years.
Nevertheless, during the study in the EALF (English as Lingua
Franca in Academic discourse) perspective, the necessity to
rethink some aspects of using English for academic purposes,
such as successful communication (intelligibility), functional and
pragmatic acceptability, intercultural communication, as well as
the problem of monolingualism in academic circles
(monolingualism in academia) were stated.
The paper uses as a basic the definition of academic discourse as
implemented in the system of higher education culturally-marked
communication system, possessing both linguistic and
extralinguistic plans, using a certain system of professionallyoriented signs and taking into account the status-role
characteristics of the main participants of communication
(scientists as researchers and / or teachers, as well as students).
Such consideration allows integrating within the framework of an
integration approach the study of scientific and pedagogical
discourses as two varieties of one generic institutional unity,
often realized by the same participant, who at the same time acts
as a teacher and a researcher.
Any official scientific communication has signs of cultural
correlation with the oral and written tradition that its author has
learned and practices despite the goal to contribute in the most
standardized form to the common fund of world civilization
knowledge. The intercultural competence development in a
particular academic community depends on its needs (for
example, the need to manifest its cultural identity) and various
extra-linguistic factors (academic traditions, institutional
conventions and knowledge concepts). Academic discourse,
despite the status of qualified participants, localized chronotop,
conventionally organized goal, intentionally “fixed” strategies,
limited nomenclature of genres, and a strictly specified precedent
phenomena arsenal (names, statements, texts and situations),
however reveals features that are clearly beyond the fairly rigidly
established genre framework and allows the academic identity of
its participants to be shown.
It was found that due to a particular cultural tradition, the style
influences academic and scientific writing in the 2nd foreign (in
this case, English) language: authors who have an excellent
academic style in their native language tend to pass it on to their
2-English-language texts. It concerns not only the linguistic
characteristics, but also rhetorical ways: the argumentation of
Asian scholars, for example, may seem less structured to an
English editor; German and Spanish authors do not follow the
linear structure adopted by British colleagues, etc.
At the same time, the “language personality” of a scientist has the
opportunity to “break” the frameworks regulated by the
conventional norm and go beyond them, demonstrating that
he/she belongs to a certain scientific school, research and
terminological tradition.
In addition, the traditional introduction of foreign terms (mostly
originating from the ancient Greek) into the terminological
apparatus of another language can generate terminological
doublets when the same phenomenon receives several
designations, etc.
In view of the foregoing, editors of high-rated scientific
publications are encouraged to remember that English academic
discourse, understood as EALF, is just a means for the
international scientific communication and should be considered
within a broad intercultural aspect. In general, it is interesting that
today the international scientific community in the globalized
English-speaking scientific context has clearly positioned the
desire and right not only to preserve, but also to demonstrate its
academic identity formed in the higher education institution
(alma mater) of their country.
Key words: academic identity, scientific discourse, English as an
academic lingua franca, academic interculturality, academic
discourse