CIICPD 2023

Critical Incidents: A narratological perspective and its implications for intercultural learning. A corpus analysis Doris Fetscher, Susanne Klein

1. Introduction The use of ‘critical incident’ (in English and German) in the context of intercultural training is often confusing. On the one hand, critical incident (CI) means the spontaneous production of oral or written narratives about critical events in intercultural encounters; on the other hand, it designates didactic material created to initiate processes of intercultural learning. Such materials are mostly based on authentic experiences and can be presented in different formats, e.g. complex case studies (Barmeyer and Franklin, 2016) or brief written texts about critical encounters, focusing on stereotypical misunderstandings so as to underline different attributions to behaviour (e.g. a culture assimilator from Thomas, Schenk and Heisel (2015)). Today the latter form is somewhat criticised because of its high potential to reinforce stereotyping, culturalisation and othering (Groß, 2022). The following example, Studienhalber in Deutschland. Interkulturelles Orientierungstraining für amerikanische Studenten, Schüler und Praktikanten 1 , represents one of the first intercultural training materials on the basis of the above-mentioned culture assimilator (Markowsky and Thomas, 1995: 38) in Germany: Situation 6 Gloria was in a café with Fritz, a German friend. As they talked, Fritz examined the necklace Gloria wore. When Gloria finally asked Fritz if he liked it, he said the necklace was of poor quality and that he didn’t like it very much. Gloria found this answer very rude and was surprised that Fritz made such insulting remarks. For what reason did Fritz use such harsh language? 1. Fritz wanted to impress Gloria with his knowledge of jewellery. 2. Flirting is considered unmanly in Germany. 3. For Germans, honesty is often more important than politeness. 4. German men often act like this when they want more from a woman. From their reaction, they can see what their chances are. 2 The texts are always written in the third person, from the perspective of the person who experiences the irritation (here the American student Gloria) and are focused on the conflict. In their introduction to the training programme, Markowsky and Thomas (1995) explain their research setting, which is complex: they first conducted interviews with American students about their experiences with Germans. On the basis of the devised categories (through content analysis), they created a questionnaire to be 1 “In Germany for studies. Intercultural orientation training for American students, pupils and interns.” [translated by the authors] 2 Translated by the authors.

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