Communities of Practice and Writing Cultures

Abstract

Taking communities of practice as an underpinning concept, we look at writing cultures in this chapter, speaking and embodying cultures in Chap. 5, learning and goals in education in Chap. 6, and communication in workplaces in the final chapter (Chap. 7). Often, communities of practice as a concept and unit of analysis are compared with speech communities, which is probably the most generally adopted ‘community’ concept in linguistics and applied linguistics as their interests reside in shared linguistic practices, and linguistic similarities and variations. We, however, adopt the notion of communities of practice in our discussion because our focus is on socialisation and interaction which are core to understanding intercultural communication. In relation to writing cultures, early attempts to study conventions of writing in different languages were more crude comparisons, with an ethnocentric or even imperialistic viewpoint that English was better than any other language. This simplistic perspective was bitterly criticised by many scholars. In response, research moved on to analysing and interpreting written products with broader perspectives including how we can understand written texts as historical and cultural products, and how multilingual writers can display our/their voices and identity in English writing, the dominant language in many prestigious and international domains, such as academia.