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TSLP 833: Intercultural Communications
Mary Lou McCloskey, Ph.D.
Georgia State University Department of Applied Linguistics and ESL

We all have stories to tell about what can happen when intercultural communication goes awry. Here is our class's collection.

"Winemaking" Jill Burns
"A Bottle of Pope?" Jesse Hayden
"No Intiendo" Mary Lou McCloskey

WINEMAKING

Upon arriving in Italy, we Americans were given an Italian Culture class. One of the assignments for this class was to choose some aspect of the Italian culture, do some research on it, and present it to a group of Italians at a dinner for our host families.

I chose to do wine making. I did my research and prepared my presentation. As you may know, grapes have a lot to do with wine making. I could not figure out why the Italians would laugh every time I mentioned the word "grape."

In Italian, the word for grape is "uva." During my entire presentation, I used the word "uova" (egg) instead. So the gist of my story was, "In order to make good wine, one must wait for his eggs to grow......When the eggs are ripe, a wine maker must extract the juice out of them for the wine......The key to superior Italian wine is in the quality of eggs grown in Italy."

Jill Burns

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A BOTTLE OF POPE?

As a pre-teen, I lived in Germany and went to a German school. My homeroom teacher was also the English as a foreign language teacher.

One day shortly after my arrival, she asked me, "Who is the Pope?" I was raised in a family that was so religiously mixed that religion was never discussed! I thought she had mispronounced the word "pop" (as in soda pop), so I couldn't figure out why she had used the question word "who?"

After a great deal of perplexed thought, I finally responded by saying "I don't know what a Pope is." Needless to say, she was appalled by my blatent display of ignorance. Given my lack of knowledge and my "horrid" American accent (though I tried to fake a British accent when Frau Strausse would call on me to read the dialogs in the English textbook), I don't think I did much to improve the image of the "ugly," ignorant American during my sojourn in Germany.!