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Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Organisationspsychologie (GIO)
Published in: Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Organisationspsychologie (GIO) 3/2011

01-09-2011 | Hauptbeiträge

Using english as a foreign language in international and multicultural consulting: Asset or hindrance?

Author: Mag. Kathrin Kordon

Published in: Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Organisationspsychologie (GIO) | Issue 3/2011

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Abstract

When it comes to an encounter of people of mixed national and ethnical backgrounds, one of the major challenges is undoubtedly the linguistic diversity. Given the widely acknowledged status of English as the world language, English has also become the most widely used language when it comes to professional counselling in intercultural contexts. Due to the growing demand of counselling processes in English, a certain command of the English language has also become indispensible for consultants.
It has to be noted, however, that it’s rarely English native speakers who prompt a “multilingual” group to speak English. In most working contexts it is speakers, for “none of whom is the mother tongue” (House 1999: 74), who agree to use English as common code of understanding, i.e. English as a lingua franca (ELF). Current researches strongly question the status of native English norms as the only point of reference for ‘correct’ usage of English (cf. e.g. Seidlhofer et al. 2006).
Based on empirical data, this contribution chooses an interdisciplinary approach at the interface between linguistics and other social sciences to examine some implications of the use of ELF in professional counselling processes with a strong focus on supervision. It is meant to show that consulting processes in English, among non-native speakers, can be carried out successfully despite clear linguistic deviations from native speaker norms.
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Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
As this chapter is meant to be descriptive rather than ideological, issues concerning language policy remain widely untouched. What should be stressed at this point, however, is the fact that I do not support the idea of monolingualism in science or any other professional discipline. Rather, I believe that linguistic diversity has to be maintained and strongly protected.
 
2
This chapter is a shorter version of the final paper of my academic training as a supervisor and coach at the University of Vienna (Universitätslehrgang für Supervision und Coaching der Universität Wien): http://www.univie.ac.at/lammgasse/ (Kordon 2008).
 
3
The term “supervision” (and its derivatives) are used with the meaning and connotation attributed to it internationally among consultants and not in its Anglo-American meaning: “if you supervise an activity or a person, you make sure that the activity is done correctly or that the person doing a task is behaving correctly” (Collins Cobild English Dictionary 1995, p. 1677).
 
4
A comprehensive overview of descriptive work undertaken in this field can, for example, be found in Seidlhofer (2004, 2005) and Seidlhofer et al. (2006).
 
5
The audio recordings were transcribed according to transcription and spelling conventions that were developed for the compilation of a sizeable, computer-readable corpus of ELF at the English Department of Vienna University (Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (http://www.univie.ac.at/voice). The most important features of the conventions are given in the Appendix. Some changes to the computer-readable transcription key were made in order to make the analysis easily comprehensible. A transcription of the entire intervision is provided in Kordon (2008).
 
6
The intervision group analyzed in the chapter is only a small segment of a sizeable database collected at the Tallinn conference for the author’s PhD thesis.
 
7
Readers interested in this issue may wish to consult Möller (2002) or Petzold et al. (2003).
 
8
The data extracts are chronologically numbered throughout this chapter. Please note that underlined exchanges refer to language-related issues while those in bold face point out issues related to the purpose of the respective phase and to content-related issues discussed in the analysis. When these two foci overlap (i.e., when an exchange is both linguistically and content-wise relevant), the comment is placed in italics.
 
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Metadata
Title
Using english as a foreign language in international and multicultural consulting: Asset or hindrance?
Author
Mag. Kathrin Kordon
Publication date
01-09-2011
Publisher
VS-Verlag
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11612-011-0154-7

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