ABSTRACT
The area of Intercultural Communication (IC) has gained significant importance in recent years. With a global economy and increasingly internationalised workspaces, there is a high demand to prepare students and employees for the realities of interacting across cultures. Stereotyping and negative representations of social groups remain core barriers to the successful development of IC skills. Fostering an understanding of the power of language in constructing representations of cultural groups is, therefore, fundamental in developing students’ critical cultural awareness and reinforcing the important notion of empathy.
This chapter considers the value of Micro Corpus Projects in enabling students to undertake meaningful analysis of important social contexts specifically in the case of the representation of minority groups including refugees and the LGBTQ community, to explore the impact of representations. Through a discussion of case studies, this chapter demonstrates the value of mixed Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis methods in the analysis of authentic discourse from sources such as newspapers, classroom interactions, textbooks and online discussion threads, for the development of IC skills in the classroom. The discussion considers the problematic nature of language in constructing negative representations and also highlights the role of Micro Corpus Projects in encouraging engagement with core critical skills. The chapter demonstrates that through this type of project, students can not only consider the societal impacts of negative representations but also elevate the voices of minority groups by evidencing the importance of positive identity construction.
