Amina: Where does your interest in the field of intercultural communication come from?

Troy: I would say that my interest in ‘intercultural’ things started very early, possibly when I was about 7 years old and had just discovered a bilingual Bible written in English and Japanese at my grandmother’s house. Attempting to read it, I was not only intrigued and puzzled by the content of what I read in English but also by the curious squiggles of Japanese that I could see on the page yet not decipher. That was just the start of a long journey with the Japanese language that involved formal study of the language and culture and eventually living in Japan from the age of 21-35. It wasn’t until I had lived in Japan for a little while that I realized that formal language skills really only get you so far. Firstly, my own status as a “foreigner” had a larger than expected impact on how people would relate to me, and whilst that involved some painful learning and disappointment, it made me conscious that group identity, social categorization, and insider/outsider ascription are powerful forces that influence communication. I wished that I had learnt about such things during my language study. A mounting sense of the importance of addressing intercultural issues in foreign language teaching is really what led me to my current research agenda and the desire to explore how concepts and theories from outside mainstream language learning theory -- specifically from fields such as social psychology and intercultural communication – could help establish a more intercultural understanding of language learning and use.

Amina: Which projects are you working on?

Troy: For a long time, I have been looking at how reflection on language use, particularly speech acts and politeness phenomena, can help individuals become more aware of how assumptions about social relationships and identity markers can influence judgments about what is considered ‘appropriate’ language use. I am also analyzing how judgments about language use are intertwined with judgments about individuals themselves. In a lot of my work, I look at how opportunities for reflection are co-constructed in classroom talk and how this helps learners challenge their assumptions. Although most of my work has been in an EFL context, lately I’ve been working with Dr Hanako Fujino at Oxford Brookes University on the development of intercultural understanding in Japanese language education. We are looking both at how to create tasks that promote intercultural reflection in the classroom and also how language learners experience identity-related challenges during study abroad. We are thinking about what we can do to effectively prepare Japanese language learners to maximize the opportunities for intercultural learning before and after studying in Japan.

Aside from my formal research, one kind of ‘project’ that I have at the moment is to encourage appreciation for diverse intercultural scholarship and for those scholars that have made a particularly significant contribution to the field. My New Year’s resolution in Jan 2020 was to spend the year with an enhanced sense of appreciation for all those people that have helped me or inspired me in my (academic) life. Early on in this process, I started to feel that in the field overall, maybe we spend too much time trying to find problems in intercultural concepts, theories, models etc., and not enough time appreciating that current dialogue wouldn’t be happening without this work. To be sure, there is an important role for academic critique, but I also feel that sometimes we fall too easily into patterns of popular critique and therefore casually dismiss certain scholars or theories as unworthy of attention. When scholarship is driven by a tribal mentality, I feel it can only fail, especially when it comes to intercultural research, where we should generally value diverse perspectives.

Amina: What can you tell us about Castledown journal and the ICE journal?

Troy: One of the ways I try to accomplish what I said above is through the journal Intercultural Communication Education (ICE). This is one of a suite of open access journals launched by Castledown Publishers in 2018 based on its goal of contributing to academic equality, especially in the field of language education and intercultural communication. Although the field of IC already has a range of well-established journals, ICE specifically aims to connect language education and intercultural communication, and to be of wide relevance to educators and professional scholars. That’s why the journal can accept short articles (e.g. 4000-5000 words) that deal with innovative teaching practices or context-sensitive discussion of an issue, as well as regular research articles (6000-8000 words). As Editor, I am very open to different perspectives and approaches, and I often liaise with authors quite closely throughout the review process. You can find out more about the journal here: https://www.castledown.com/journals/ice/

Amina: Do you have any advice for educators to learn more about IC / challenge themselves to apply IC at work?

Troy: The field of intercultural communication is very broad and diverse, so it can be a challenge to discern which work is most relevant to language teachers. Books on intercultural communication typically have only little to say about language and almost nothing about language teaching. There are two main book series which I would recommend as a starting point. One is the Languages for Intercultural Communication and Education series (Multilingual Matters) and the other is Routledge Studies in Language and Intercultural Communication. Many of the books are likely to provide theoretical and pedagogical inspiration for those working in TESOL and other areas of language education. I hesitate to impose my own views on potential readers, so I would just encourage language educators to think about what it means to them to prepare their learners for communication with individuals who might have very different assumptions about language, communication, and social relationships.