Applied Intercultural Linguistics

Are you enthusiastic about exploring "foreign" cultures? Are you eager to learn how people from other cultures think, speak and act, and why they do so? Are you interested in studying how people exchange ideas and try to understand each other? How can the society and culture in which people grow up influence their world views, their behaviour and every communicative setting? This course of study offers you a diversified perspective on communication by teaching you concepts and methods from the fields of applied linguistics, intercultural communication and cultural studies. This will help you understand why people from different cultures act differently, and it will enhance your ability to perform in intercultural settings. It will teach you where knowledge originates, how speech patterns are formed, how these patterns can be analysed and how they differ across cultures and how the media that people use to communicate influences the content of the message. By the end of the programme, you will be able to apply different methods to different types of communication and analyse face-to-face, text-based and image-based communication as well as all other forms of cultural representation. In the first year of study, courses will mainly be taught in German and English, but later on, you may expand your communicative competence in other foreign languages, such as Russian, Spanish and French. In addition to the linguistic perspective, a few selected courses in information science will offer you insight into how humans process and assess information and how they interact with machines and via machines in complex global information and communication systems. Domains of study: Applied linguistics Linguistic action theories Speech act theory Intercultural communication Cultural studies Pragmatics Multilingualism and multilingual communication English as a "lingua franca" (ELF)