Interdisciplinary Communication: Intercultural and Interlinguistic Challenges

Interdisciplinary communication issues are akin to those in intercultural communication, more evident in collaborations where some of the partners use a learned international language such as English. This presentation will discuss the implementation of intercultural communication strategies to ease the difficulty of interdisciplinary collaboration faced to the increasing specialization in fields. I illustrate my presentation with the results of an action research project carried out in a ten-week workshop of English abstracts writing attended by Spanish speaking professors and graduate students of the Facultad de Estudios Superiores Zaragoza, UNAM. The participants were from different disciplines (psychology, psychiatry, education, chemistry, chemical engineering, biology and public health). At the end, the participants reached interesting conclusions regarding the relationship between content, language and disciplinary cultures in national and international perspectives.