Listening as the field of language teaching speaks to itself - 9

This is the ninth post in a series reading a single issue of JALT Journal, the May 2026 number, for what the field shows about itself when it speaks in its own pages.

Review of a Review

The Art of Intercultural Business Communication: A Competency-Based Approach Bertha Du-Babcock and Richard D. Babcock · Routledge, 2024 Reviewed by Greg Rouault, Hiroshima Shudo University

Of the four reviewers, Greg Rouault is the least visible in his own review. He sets out the book's framework, notes its omissions and lapses, and judges it largely against the authors' declared aims. He concludes that, on balance, they have succeeded. A reader finishes the review knowing a good deal about the contents of the book, and much less about the position from which Rouault is judging them.

The book treats business communication not as the small-c communication of language-teaching materials, but as big-C Communication: a professional and academic discipline. It addresses the art and science of managing business communication in the global workplace. The authors' underlying assumption, as Rouault reports it, is that intercultural business communication cannot be imposed as an exact science, but must be tailored to specific needs in context.

The title contains a useful tension: the art of intercultural business communication placed beside a competency-based approach to it. Rouault does not press that tension. The book appears to resolve it on its own terms. Competence, here, is not presented as a simple checklist. Rouault reports the authors' conclusion that competence in this field involves both art and science, and more art than science.

But that reconciliation leaves a question open. If the science consists in models, categories, variables, and competences, what makes the art possible? It cannot be only the instruction to adapt the model to context. Adaptation itself requires a quality of perception. It requires the capacity to see what this situation is asking for, with these people, in this moment, under these conditions.

That is where the title becomes more revealing than the review allows. The word art points toward situated judgement, but the competency-based frame pulls the work back toward classification. The problem is not that competence is useless. It is that a list of competencies does not generate the quality of attention through which competence becomes responsive to the people and conditions actually present.

The clearest example appears in Chapter 5. Rouault writes that the chapter "contains occasional circular reasoning" because, after asserting that "culture should be seen from multiple perspectives rather than a single, static, dichotomous perspective," the authors "proceed to generalize about nonverbal communication" across broad cultural and national groups. He then notes a further claim that Cantonese bilinguals "consistently" shift between Western thinking patterns when using low-context language and Eastern spiral or circular thinking patterns when using high-context language, although the authors' own cited studies show inconsistent results across sub-samples.

As Rouault presents it, the book appears at that moment to practise the reduction it has just warned against. It names the need for multiple perspectives, then moves back into broad cultural classification. Rouault sees this clearly enough to name the problem, but treats it as one limitation among others rather than as something that might call the book's form of thinking into question.

That is what can happen when a book is judged mainly against its own declared aims. A contradiction can be noticed without becoming central. A fault can be registered without asking whether it reveals something about the form of thinking the book is using. Rouault's review is careful and professionally even-handed. But the even-handedness leaves the deeper question almost untouched.

Its particular value in this review of reviews is that the pattern appears in a small, manageable form. Rouault notices a contradiction between what the book says about culture and what, in his account, it goes on to do with cultural categories. But the contradiction remains a limited flaw rather than becoming a question about the book's way of thinking. That is what makes the review useful here. It lets us see how easily a deeper problem can be registered, named, and then contained.