Languages; Cultures; Personalities

This chapter outlines and considers key philosophies and understandings in the areas of Languages, Cultures, and Personalities. It considers the abstract objectivist language philosophies of Saussure compared with more individual subjectivist philosophies of Bakhtin and others. It discusses the focus of ‘traditional’ linguistic theory (e.g. Corpus linguistics; genre analysis) on text, and of alternative language philosophies (e.g. Wittgenstein; Voloshinov) on the importance of context to language. This consideration focuses on the degree to which the languages of teaching need to be delivered, used, and also tested in its specific subject context. The chapter also considers conceptions of culture through theories of ‘essentialists’ such as Hofstede, Trompenaars, and Hall where cultures are categorized by ‘nation’, critiques of these theories from those such as Holliday and McSweeney, and the importance of ‘smaller’ cultures such as organizational and local cultures. Here the particular cultures individuals may need to engage with when working abroad are considered; both in terms of the ‘country’ but also in terms of local interactions and local institutions. The chapter further considers the role of Personalities in how individuals successfully work and transition within new environments, and discusses recent quantitative work (e.g. Hu et al., 2020; Harari et al., 2018) underlining the importance of personality in cultural adjustment, as well as qualitative work in related areas (e.g. Thompson, 2018). Through these considerations we outline both the roles of each aspect (language; culture; personality) in adjustment and transitioning but also consider how they may operate together, and where appropriate allude briefly to our own data.