International English Language Communication in the Arab World
As the primary international language of technology, education, global business, and
international diplomacy, English is the most commonly used language of international
communication today. With the accessibility of the internet and satellite television, English is
increasingly used for both sending and receiving messages around the world. As such, the
primary issue of global communication in the 21st century is no longer how to develop entry
points for communication, but rather how to gain access to communities and individuals. The
modern global villager with a message has realized that simply attracting people’s notice is not
sufficient. It is also necessary to gain access to both hearts and minds as well, what is known as
building rapport.
The newspaper is a prime example of an entry point for communication that is becoming
increasingly global, with a corresponding increasingly diverse audience.
Not only can
newspapers from native English-speaking countries be read all over the world, something that
has been the case for some time, but countries where English is not a native or national language
increasingly use newspapers to communicate with English speakers, native and non-native, both
within and beyond their own geographic boundaries. This is no less the case in the Arab world,
where twelve of the twenty-two Arab League member states have their own English language
dailies, with many of the others having weekly, monthly, or quarterly newspapers in English.
As a genre with broad appeal, newspapers provide a good starting point to explore what it
takes to be both a sender and a receiver of intercultural communication. To that end, this
research explores the interaction between reader and writer in the Arab world through an English
language newspaper, The Daily Star.
The currently proposed research study will examine the relationship between the writer
and their diverse audiences as negotiated through rhetorical patterns. These audiences include
native English-speaking Americans in the US who have no experience in the Arab world, nativeEnglish speakers living in the Arab world, non-native English-speaking expatriates living in the
Arab world, and English-speaking Arabs in the Arab world. The intent is to explore whether
there may be a way to optimize rhetorical patterns of English-medium international
communication originating from the Arabic-speaking world in consideration of the cultural
diversity of the above four audiences.
Due to the extensive nature of this topic, this study will explore the following questions:
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Who do Arab journalists of Arab-world English newspapers see as their
audience(s)?
What efforts do these journalists make to communicate effectively with their
audience(s)?
What categories of rhetoric create communicative challenges for readers when
reading English-medium argumentative texts by Arab writers?
Are these problems experienced differently by the various reader groups?
Does exposure to the culture and/or discourse community play a role?
This study is both quantitative and qualitative in its research design.
Likert-scale
responses and short-answer data will be collected for a quantitative analysis of the forty
participants in each of the four reader groups.
Qualitative data will be gathered through
interviews of two participants in each reader group, as well as the journalists. Based on the
responses, text analysis will be conducted to seek correlation between the reader responses and
actual rhetorical structures and patterns.
Although we must be careful not to extend potential conclusions beyond the discourse
community explored in the study, the results are important for those exploring issues of
contrastive rhetoric in international communication.
As is often the case with such initial
ventures, it is likely to inspire more questions than it proposes to answer.