Core Competencies in Intercultural Teaching and Research

This chapter summarizes much of the previous chapters into a set of five core competencies, including assessment criteria for those seeking to do research or teach across cultures.

Writing Instructions and How-to-do Manuals across Cultures

This chapter demonstrates how culture structures and is embedded in instructional manuals around the world. It examines two car repair instructions from Japan and the United States and two charcoal grill assembly instructions. It provides key units of analysis for professional communicators writing instructional materials for intercultural contexts.

Legal Traditions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Intercultural Professional Communication

This chapter examines the relations between rhetoric and law across cultures, grounding the discussion in U.S. common law, Latin American Civil law, and Asian law. It also explores the writing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a model of developing “international” or “universal” approaches to law and human rights. It concludes by discussing recent events of international law involving intellectual property and global communications.

Distance Education and E-Learning across Cultures

This chapter examines distance education and e-learning across cultures. It first reviews the standards of distance education from five countries, UNESCO, and industry. Next, it shows how the curriculum in distance education must match the cultural and rhetorical traditions of the target culture. It prepares curriculum writers to understand how to adapt and develop distance education courses to the appropriate rhetoric and cultural expectations of the target audience

Website Designs as an Indicator of Globalization

As the first application chapter, this chapter compares the cultural and rhetorical elements of websites around the world, showing strong correlation between website designs and the larger cultural values of the host culture. In this application, the chapter defines and operationalizes the units of analysis for website design, connecting websites to the common human thresholds of interaction.

Approaching Intercultural Rhetoric and Professional Communication

This chapter defines professional communication in intercultural contexts. It presents a workable model of culture, connects that model to rhetoric, and provides a method to analyze rhetorics and cultures in intercultural contexts. It also contextualizes the model of intercultural rhetorical research in prevailing paradigms of rhetoric and professional communication, strongly criticizing the local-only and ethnocentric modes that are so in fashion. It then presents a global model of rhetorical inquiry.

Contrastive Rhetorics and World Englishes

This chapter provides the linguistic base to intercultural rhetorical research, exploring theories of linguistic relativity and contrastive rhetoric. It contextualizes much of this work into a broader social and cultural framework, showing how intercultural rhetorical patterns are not solely based on language, but also on other values, such as the eight common human thresholds of interaction. It also hypothesizes about the cultural and rhetorical relevance of English as a world language

Borders and Etics as Units of Analysis for Intercultural Rhetoric and Professional Communication

This chapter lays out the methodological frame for intercultural inquiry, based on a quasi-structuralist approaching using common human thresholds of interaction. It then explains in detail eight of these common human thresholds of interaction and showing how all eight surface in rhetorical patterns and strategies. The chapter then exemplifies this frame by examining Anzaldúa’s Borderlands.

Teaching Intercultural Rhetoric and Professional Communication

This chapter first examines the cultural and rhetorical assumptions implicit in three popular U.S. rhetoric and writing textbooks, denaturalizing the U.S. foundation for these texts and showing how to adapt them to global and intercultural contexts. The second part describes an intercultural rhetoric and writing class that I have been teaching for 13 years, including syllabus, course goals, assignments, teaching strategies, and assessments. It provides the first comprehensive model of an intercultural rhetoric and writing class.

Intercultural Rhetorical Dimensions of Health Literacy and Medicine

This chapter examines the relations between health/medicine and rhetoric across cultures, demonstrating the need to have culturally and linguistically appropriate health care communications. It compares the rhetorical strategies of two heart health manuals and informed consent, showing how culture is embedded in these documents and how to adapt them to target cultures.