The goal of the present study is to explore bilinguals' intercultural style of requesting in a workplace setting and thereby contribute to the understanding of bilingual pragmatic competence. The relatively unexplored intercultural style hypothesis suggests that bilinguals show a unique pragmatic pattern related to but distinct from the contact…

In conversations between immigrants and officials, problems of understanding are often noticeable. About 280 recordings realised at the Argentine Aliens' Department and at several public authorities in Germany show that knowledge divergences regarding linguistic, cultural and institutional knowledge result in (sometimes grave) difficulties of…

A cross-cultural training seminar involving French, German, and American language teachers is described. The program was designed to examine the influence of teachers' cultural perceptions on selection of authentic instructional materials, sources of linguistic misunderstandings, and teachers' strategies for resolving cultural conflict. (MSE)