Cross-Cultural Communication in Foreign Language Discourse

The book that Dr. Mohammed Guamguami has completed is impressive in both its scope and its aim. The teaching of English as a foreign language, or any foreign language for that matter, is an especially vexed endeavor. As Dr. Guamguami points out, the need for linking culture to foreign language teaching has been recognized since the 1990s, since language and culture are deeply intertwined, and therefore, teaching a foreign language in a cultural vacuum leaves students with an abstract system of signifiers without an adequate understanding of their signifieds. The difficulty, then, lies in understanding the dynamic of the relationship between language and culture and how to exploit it for teaching foreign language with improved effectiveness. Dr. Guamguami's book investigates this problem and, through extensive research and careful analysis, points to possible solutions. The key to solving this problem, Dr. Guamguami contends, is to recognize the discursive nature of language and culture and to view their interrelatedness in the dialogic sense.