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 asbuilding 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, butcountries 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 anEnglish language newspaper,The Daily Star.
The currently proposed research study will examinethe relationship between the writer and their diverseaudiences as negotiated through rhetorical patterns. These audiences include native English-speaking Americans in the US who have no experience in the Arab world, native-English 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 communicationoriginating from the Arabic-speaking worldin 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:
1)Who do Arab journalists of Arab-world English newspapers see as their audience(s)?
2)What efforts do these journalists make to communicate effectively with their audience(s)?
3)What categories of rhetoric create communicative challenges for readers when reading English-medium argumentative texts by Arab writers?
4)Are these problems experienced differently by the various reader groups?
5)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.