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Learning Dialogue in a Higher Education English Course - Mirja Hämäläinen and Eeva Kallio

With globalisation, workers today face challenges that language educators in higher education cannot ignore. As English is the globally shared language in working life, educators need to pay attention to the fact that interaction skills are one of the most called-for skills in any present-day job. Conventionally, English for working-life courses aim at providing students with such skills as telephoning, emailing, and participating in meetings and negotiations. The topic of socialising often only means learning native-like expressions for small talk. This, however, is not enough. Any consultant knows that problems at work are beyond such communication functions. In her analysis of Bohmian dialogue, Finnish philosopher Marja-Liisa Kakkuri-Knuuttila (2015) shows that David Bohm’s approach to dialogue has a strong ethical emphasis. Ethics will be in more and more demand as humankind as a whole and working life in particular deal with such issues as artificial intelligence. Ethical dialogue should help in workplace conflicts too. People with academic degrees should already have the opportunity to become aware of ethical questions when using English as their lingua franca at work during their studies, and students learning English as a foreign language in higher education are easy to reach. This paper focuses on teaching English as a foreign language, though concentrating on English as a lingua franca does not exclude the native English speaker.
In this paper, we will describe a university language centre course based on Bohmian dialogue through English as a lingua franca and we suggest ways that the course can develop ethical thinking and wisdom. Wisdom in organisations is an ever-growing area of interest in organisation research and it is a big challenge to human beings in general. Can a course on ethical dialogue through English as a lingua franca develop wisdom?

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