<p> In this dissertation, I explore agricultural practices as a window into ecocultural communication. Using agricultural practices of villagers in Village G, Oman, as a case study, I explore the ways in which villagers and government officials conceptualize humanature relations and the forces that enhance and/or impede these relations. My specific goals for this study were: (1) to build an interpretive understanding of ecocultural orientations of villagers and officials in Oman and how they conceptualize their humanature relations; (2) to critically examine ideologies and uncover structural forces that enable/constrain humanature relations; and (3) to co-create community engagement work that honors the ecocultural wisdom of farmers, promotes economic viability, and enhances ecocultural sustainability. Accordingly, I ask a set of three questions: RQ 1: What grassroots core ecocultural premises do Omani villagers communicate?, RQ 2: What core ecocultural premises do official government documents and officials discourse communicate in Oman?, and RQ 3: How does analysis of core components of critical community engagement inform researcher-villager-governmental collaborations to design sustainable practices? To answer these questions, I collected data through focus groups, individual interviews, participant observation and official government documents. Using Cultural Discourse Analysis (Carbaugh, 2007) and Community Engagement Framework (Collier, 2014) I identify three ecocultural premises in grassroots discourse: (1) <i>Relations-in-place </i>, (2) <i>kinship-in-place</i> and (3) <i>nurturance-in-place </i>, and four ecocultural premises in governmental discourse: (1) Modern agriculture is more effective than traditional agriculture, (2) Imported food and modern technology feed a growing population, (3) Technologized farming attracts youth, (4) Modern agriculture and profit-motivated practices achieve sustainability but traditional farming is not sustainable. I offer a date palm metaphor as an organizing principle that depicts humanature relations and the contextual factors that enhance and/or hinder these relations. Because date palms have shown resilience over harsh ecological conditions when water was scarce in Oman and heat was high, in this project, I use the date palm as a metaphor that exhibits an alternative discourse to globalized neoliberal ideological discourses.</p><p>

This study explores Palestinian university teachers' beliefs regarding the concepts of culture and intercultural communicative competence (ICC) and the impact of their perception on classroom teaching practices. The study argues that in the age of globalization, spread of English as a lingua franca, and growing opportunities of intercultural communication, the focus on linguistic competence or literary competence may not be adequate to enable Palestinian university students to use English communicatively and interculturally. Further, the current objectives of teaching English as a foreign language (EFL), which seem to exclude the cultural/intercultural dimension, can be expanded through integrating ICC into English language classes. Using a case study of one of the leading Palestinian Universities, the study explores the aforementioned assumptions and investigates teachers' beliefs regarding the concepts of culture and ICC in the Palestinian university context. Analyzing data from interviews, observations, and documents, the study reveals that EFL Palestinian participants perceived culture as a way of life that comprises a shared system of values, beliefs, ways of thinking, and behaviors. To them, language and culture are interwoven components, and without culture, language acquisition might be difficult to achieve. Additionally, ICC was perceived as the ability to communicate with people from other cultures through gaining cultural knowledge about English /American culture and promoting personality traits. Data analyses disclose that the linguistic competence had the upper hand in classroom teaching practices, and that the target culture(s) was used as a background to assist language learning. However, ICC was absent in EFL Palestinian university classes, and it was perceived, to some extent, as an equivalent to communicative competence. The study concludes with sets of recommendations to local Palestinian English departments, teachers, international textbooks designers, and future research.