The most common meaning of it is "language above the level of the sentence" (p. 7), which refers to the way sentences are put together to express meaning. The research was conducted with "ethnographic methodology" (p. 18). Compare with social scientific approach which would use "certain theoretical value dimensions in explaining and predicting particular intercultural communication phenomena" (Ting-Toomey, 2010, p. 171), the authors of this book thought it would be impossible to predict what may happen when intercultural communication occurred. They held the opinion that choosing "a site of investigation in which you can observe people-in-action in a rather close-up or intimate way" (p. 22) is the right way to study the discourse system or intercultural communication. This can also be called as "fieldwork" (p. 19) which is the basis of ethnographic methodology. Instead of having some fake or unnatural interdiscourse communication in a laboratory or designed situation, researchers should go into the real, authentic world where all the communication happened. It would be even better if the researchers became part of communication and learned and experienced the different interdiscourse communication.
Now, here comes a question: should the researchers find a site full of communication between people from different nations to observe the intercultural communication or not? As Dreama G. Moon have pointed out, "cultural identity tends to still be manifested as national identity or in terms of collectivism/individualism and low-high context" (Dreama G. Moon, 2010, p. 41). Also W. Leeds-Hurwitz talked about "national character" when she did the survey of anthropology in the 1930s and 1940s. At that time, "the people within national boundaries were viewed as essentially homogeneous" and such assumption implied that "everyone in a particular nation shares certain core characteristics" (W.
