Joan Turner is a Senior Lecturer and Director of the Centre for Language and Academic Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has worked extensively with international students as they familiarise themselves with the demands of UK academic culture, as well as with home students getting to grips with academic writing. Her research interrogates the context of operation for this work. She has published in the fields of Academic Literacies, Conceptual Metaphor, Cross-cultural pragmatics, English for Academic Purposes, Higher Education, Intercultural Communication, and Writing Research.

This is a stimulating and timely book which puts language as 'cultural object' at the heart of debates about the nature and purpose of higher education in the twenty first century. Drawing on extensive scholarship and many years of teaching in UK higher education, Joan Turner turns our gaze towards the taken-for-granted assumptions about language in the academy, not least in the contemporary context of ‘intercultural communication’, and calls for greater reflexivity about the practices in which we- as scholars, teachers and students- engage. This book will promote much needed discussion about assumptions and ideologies surrounding language use in the academy.

• Chapter One Introductory OverviewChapter Two Language, Language Pedagogies, and Intercultural Communication in Contemporary Higher EducationChapter Three Language in the Academy: The Discourse of RemediationChapter Four Languaging in the Academy: Language as Dynamic PracticeChapter Five Occidentalist Inscription: The Historical Construction of Contemporary Representations of Language in the AcademyChapter Six Disciplining Language: Rhetorical Values and the Regulation of Academic WritingChapter Seven Power/Knowledge and the Construction of Rhetorical SubjectsChapter Eight Subject to Confucian Rhetorical CultureChapter Nine The Power/Knowledge Effects of the Socratic DialogueChapter Ten Socratic Subjects: The Western Tutor as MidwifeChapter Eleven Resisting the Tao of Talk: Verbalisation in Intercultural ContextChapter Twelve The Way of Learning: The Spatial Relations of Learning and Teaching in the Confucian/Taoist TraditionChapter Thirteen The Discursive Dance of the InterculturalChapter Fourteen The Critical Rhetoric of Being Critical