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For intercultural language teaching, coaching students on how to perceive the cultural “other” is of crucial importance in order to avoid culturally based misunderstandings. This paper explores how perceiving the other can offer conclusions for perceiving and becoming aware of the self. Through that, a process of giving and taking ensues in which perceptions of the self and of the other are constantly fluctuating depending on the context in which the communication is taking place. At the crossroads between members of two different cultures, a dialogue emerges in which the points of view of both parties are changed. The paper outlines how perception is a construct in which one’s own origin, education, and emotions are blended in. Intercultural learning is the way to deal with this constructs in a flexible manner so as to create new interpretation patterns. It teaches how to sympathize with the other and how to better understand oneself.
Most of us receive numerous spam e-mails, texts that in one or the other way try to convince us to engage in the transaction of enormous sums of money, promising enormous benefits. In reality, such scam e-mails are fraudulent attempts to swindle money from unsuspecting Internet users. Language, its social contexts, and the composition of texts play a crucial role in the scammers’ strategies to approach their victims. This article uncovers and discusses some of the linguistic strategies by which scammers try to shape a sense of identity and mutual relationship – in the face of virtual anonymity –, and to involve their readers personally. In their attempts to get the recipients involved, scammers combine cultural indexicals, interactional roles, and narrative strategies. The analysis distinguishes three different narrative strategies in scam e-mails: Based on first, second, and third person stories, scammers establish links with the recipients by combining fictional content with real-world contexts. Some of the narratives display quite elaborate and artful traits and involve prototypical functions of traditional fairy tales. Hereby they implicitly connect the story content with the interactional roles of e-mail communication.