Intercultural Competence

This research investigates intercultural communication competence (ICC) and its main components (affective, cognitive and behavioral) in relation to academic mobility. It also discusses the value of assessing intercultural competence in higher education and points out the relationship between academic mobility, foreign language learning and the development of intercultural competence. The discussion then leads to the development of an intercultural communication assessment tool for academic mobility: Mobile Students’ Intercultural Competence Scale (MSICS). This tool focuses mainly on analyzing Turkish Erasmus students’ intercultural competence before and after their study abroad experience. Even though many intercultural competence assessment tools exist in the present literature, there is a lack of materials in this context which mainly focus on analyzing mobile students’ intercultural communication competence.

It seems that the current English textbook developers are not only interested in developing their audience's communicative competence but also willing to improve the learners' intercultural competence. This shift in instructional goals is in line with the emerging shift in the learners' need to use English as an international language rather than a second or a foreign language. It is noteworthy that there has been considerable research on the cultural content of high school textbooks in Iran; however, little attempt was done to adopt a comparative intercultural perspective to them. Having noticed the weighty contributions of the locally developed textbooks in Iran and India with regard to their expansive distribution and use among English learners, the researcher investigated Iranian high school textbooks (Prospect and Vision) and the official high school textbooks in India (Standard English) from a comparative perspective based on intercultural communicative competence emphasizing critical awareness, and discovery and interaction skills as its defining criteria. Through content analysis, the whole contents of the Iranian and Indian high school English textbooks, 12 volumes in all, were analyzed and the instances the intercultural communicative competence were quantatively recorded, classified and discussed. The results revealed that, Standard English, the textbook developed in outer circle in India, to little extent, included intercultural communicative competence, especially, critical cultural awareness. By contrast, the Iranian high school English textbooks totally were deprived of intercultural communicative competence components since there was not a plausible example of interculturally communicative tasks in Prospect and Vision.

In today’s globalised world, businesses operate on an international level. Most business and economics graduates will interact with colleagues, clients, and partners from diverse cultural backgrounds. Intercultural competencies are essential for their success and effective collaboration in the labour market. A special questionnaire was compiled to investigate students’ intercultural competencies. Based on the statements and responses of the questionnaire, the examination aimed to establish the principal components of the intercultural communication competencies of the students of a Hungarian university. In the next phase of the research, the principal components served to create student clusters which were analysed from a labour market point of view, focusing on advantages and disadvantages. The crucial question was: which cluster is in demand the most in the labour market? By utilizing a principal component analysis, the dataset was reduced to three key components. Subsequently, to classify the students into groups, a multivariate statistical procedure, i.e., cluster analysis, was used to reveal the structures by clearly considering the similarities of a relatively heterogeneous population and to create a relatively homogeneous subset. The study revealed five distinct student clusters, each with varying advantages and disadvantages for employers. In this context, the Interculturally Active and Open with Good Language Skills cluster proved to be the most competent, with the least ideal collection indisputably being the Interculturally Reluctant in Cooperating cluster. The research underscores the importance of intercultural communication competencies for employees and enriches our understanding of the dynamics between intercultural communication competencies and workforce readiness. Developing these competencies in foreign language classes will significantly facilitate our students’ employment.

Teaching cross-cultural knowledge in language teaching is drawing more and more attention nowadays. This study investigated the effect of integrating teaching cross-cultural issues and teaching listening skill on students’ intercultural competence. The participants were 30 Vietnamese students of English as a foreign language (EFL) who participated in the course on Listening 2 in the second year of their MBA program in Kien Giang University, Vietnam. The study consisted of an experimental study based on a pretest-posttest research design on integration of cross-cultural issues and teaching listening. The intercultural sensitivity self-assessment questionnaire (ISSAQ) that serves as a pre-test at the beginning of the semester is based on the theoretical framework put forth by Bennett and Bennett (2004). It is to elicit a self-assessment of their intercultural knowledge, behaviors and attitudes. During the ten-week intervention, besides helping students master the language and listening skill, the researcher helped promote students’ cross-cultural competence with the process-oriented intercultural teaching mode by Li (2016). At the end of the course, the posttest was given to measure the effects of the integration model on students’ intercultural communication competence. The results of the study suggested that integrating cross-cultural knowledge and language teaching could improve EFL students' intercultural communication competence (ICC).

Foreign Language (L2) teachers’ intercultural communicative competence (ICC) and their awareness and understanding of the intercultural similarities and differences is the key to their professional success. One of the indispensable components of communicative competence, which is highly influenced by L2 teachers’ ICC and its impact on the classroom practices is considerable, is pragmatic knowledge of the L2 learners. Accordingly, the current investigation has sought to explore the relationship between L2 teachers’ intercultural competence and their students’ knowledge of common English speech acts. Participants were 85 EFL teachers and 610 upper-intermediate to advanced proficiency-level students. The participants had been studying English at language institutes from 3 to 5 years and they had almost completed American File conversation book series. These participants were selected based on the results of a Michigan Language Proficiency Test. First, the teachers filled out Jaou’s (2011) ICC questionnaire. Then, Tajeddin and Malmir’s (2015) multiple-choice test of frequent English speech acts was administered to the students. Data analysis using multiple regression revealed that all four components of teachers’ ICC were significant predictors of their students’ speech-act knowledge. Intercultural skills were the strongest predictor followed by intercultural knowledge as a mediocre predictor. However, intercultural attitudes and awareness were poor predictors of speech-act knowledge. These findings imply that L2 teachers can enhance their learners’ pragmatic knowledge regarding common speech acts by increasing their own intercultural communicative competence.

Understanding the interrelations between cultural empathy, intercultural communication competence, and the psychosocial adjustment of international students in Canada: A longitudinal examination

Techniques Developing Intercultural Communicative Competences in English Language Lessons

Scholars generally agree that intercultural competence has cognitive, affective, and behavioural dimensions. Because of the wide interest in intercultural competence in multiple disciplines, nuanced and varied labels of this concept are prolific. This has caused a measure of confusion, exacerbated by little cross-referencing between disciplines that research intercultural competence. Bradford, Allen, & Beisser recognised this in their attempt to synthesise existing definitions and labels of intercultural competence and concluded that intercultural communication competence and intercultural effectiveness have been used interchangeably in literature. This chapter presents the Process Model of Intercultural Competence, the Integrated Model of Intercultural Communication Competence, the Intercultural Competencies Dimensions Model, the Intercultural Competence Model by Byram, the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity and the Anxiety/Uncertainty Management (AUM) Model in more detail. Research in intercultural competence spans over several academic disciplines as well as in applied fields. There are, of course, some challenges to pervasive and effective development of intercultural competence across multiple levels of society.

ABSTRACTOne of the goals of foreign language (FL) education is to produce intercultural speakers. Telecollaboration can act as a catalyst for promoting language skills development, intercultural communicative competence (ICC), and multiple literacies. The significance of multimodal communicative competence (MCC) on the success or failure of a telecollaborative project and its interdependence with intercultural communicative competence (ICC) have already been established. The very few systematic reviews on ICC and second language (L2) or FL learningdo not take into account the different modalities through which learners interact and co-construct meaning and intercultural competence. Drawing on ecological linguistics (EL) and semiotics, the present review contributes to the field of applied linguistics by reviewing online intercultural exchanges (OIEs) and ICC development in relation to the modality used for each exchange that is reviewed. Features of the context of each study that was conducted in either a K-12 or a university setting were coded according to a coding scheme and analysed quantitatively using descriptive statistics. The findings of studies conducted in university contexts, were reviewed in-depth inductively in relation to the impact of Web 2.0 tools – and especially multimodality – on learners’ development of ICC. The exclusive focus on university contexts in the in-depth review stems from the frequency at which universities serve as contexts for OIEs, comprising in this case more than two-thirds of the reviewed studies. Analysis of the data suggests that multimodality in Web 2.0 tools and applications affects ICC development in multiple ways but more research on ICC and L2 and FL learners in multimodal environments needs to be conducted.

The book titled Intercultural Communicative Competence for Global Citizenship. Identifying cyberpragmatic rules of engagement in telecollaboration brings novel approaches to Computer Mediated Communication, based on practical outcomes from a small-scale online international learning (OIL) project, i.e., CoCo, carried out during the academic year 2015–2016, between UK and France. It provides useful insights into the contribution of OIL projects to the internationalisation of the Higher Education (HE) curriculum as well as to the development of global citizenship competences, with a focus on intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in the digital era. The authors structured the book into seven chapters, concentrating on essential pragmatics concepts revisited within the cyberspace and describing the project methodology and findings. Chapter 1, Introduction provides an overview of the topics presented in the volume, with clear definitions and eloquent examples, i.e., Online International Learning (OIL), Intercultural communicative competence (ICC), Telecollaboration, Internationalisation of the curriculum (IoC), Threshold concept (TC), Global citizenship, and Cyberpragmatics. Chapter 2, Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) Revisited brings forth an account of the historical evolution of the concepts of Communicative Competence (CC) and Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC), while at the same time examining the impact of the World Wide Web, coupled with the extensive use of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) on the re-conceptualisation of ICC and its reassessed characteristics. It emphasises the value of integrating telecollaboration into the Higher Education curriculum with a view to creating global citizenship competences for the digital age in Higher Education. Chapter 3, Cyberpragmatics advances a comprehensive definition of cyberpragmatics seen as a professional as well as an academic genre-specific online ‘savoir-être’. It explores the theoretical foundations of the term, coined by Yus (2011), and brings forth examples of cyberpragmatic findings from similar research. Moreover, it gives an overview of the politeness theory (Brown, & Levinson 1987) and politeness principle (Leech 1983, 2014). The authors explain the blurring line between oral and written language that may occur in the case of online communication and how this affects students. The chapter also provides a clear-cut definition of the threshold concept (TC) pedagogy, upholding that Intercultural Cyberpragmatic Communicative Competence (ICCC) may be subsumed to TC. The authors advocate curricular scaffolding in HE in order to assist students with reflecting on and practising ICCC. Last but not least, the chapter presents the research question that this study aims to address. Chapter 4, The ‘CoCo’ Telecollaborative Project: Internationalisation at Home to Foster Global Citizenship Competences presents the CoCo (Coventry Colmar) telecollaborative course, along with the tasks devised and/or adopted for it, e.g., the Cultura Quizzes. It demonstrates the successful integration of CoCo into the curriculum and assessment of the two participating institutions and how students managed to apply critical digital literacies for global citizenship through active learning. The authors make an overview of research instruments and materials, including the frameworks of analysis and their application. Useful figures and tables illustrating the telecollaborative project structure, the politeness frameworks and strategies applied are also included. The fifth chapter, ‘CoCo’ Research Questions and Answers, delves further into the research questions of this study, at the same time offering a rationale for the analysis decisions taken as part of the asynchronous discussion forums with reference to tasks devised for the CoCo telecollaborative project. It tackles the impact of linguistic politeness theory frameworks on how project participants manage to negotiate politeness online. As for the asynchronous interactions in the CoCo forum, politeness strategies and facework employed by the CoCo interactants are interpreted from a cyberpragmatic standpoint through the application of Brown and Levinson’s and Leech’s politeness frameworks of analysis. Chapter 6, Emerging Online Politeness Patterns, brings forth a thorough account of the results obtained from the analysis of interactants’ exchanges carried out on the asynchronous discussion forums, with respect to the tasks devised for the telecollaborative CoCo project. In particular, three online exchanges were used in order to highlight patterns of linguistic behaviour, i.e., type and frequency of politeness strategies or maxims. The final chapter, Conclusion, presents the summary of findings, limitations and further research suggestions as well as pedagogical implications for teachers and students alike. The politeness frameworks of analysis provided by Brown and Levinson (1978) and Leech (1983), applied to cybercommunication are outlined and explained. The results revealed particular problematical areas in the field of cyberpragmatics, underpinning the challenges that students may face in telecollaboration, leading to the conclusion that detailed and structured task scaffolding is necessary in such collaborative activities. All in all, the book is an extremely useful tool for all stakeholders in the tertiary education landscape. It is a must read for language teachers, teacher trainers, trainees and educators from all educational systems across the globe.

This paper conceptually discusses why it is essential to foster intercultural responsiveness through learning a language other than English (LOTE) and developing intercultural communication competence at Australian universities. Learning a LOTE is meaningful and helps second language learners develop social skills and cognitive competence, understand the linguistic system of the LOTEs, and sense differences between their home language/culture and target language/culture, and then pave the way to developing intercultural communication competence. However, a LOTE as a compulsory unit has little presence in Australian university curricula. No Australian universities require that students need to learn a LOTE to meet the course requirements. Learning a LOTE is conducive to both bilingual/multilingual and intercultural communication competence development. Furthermore, most current work studies intercultural verbal communication competence more than intercultural nonverbal communication competence. While intercultural verbal communication is audio-oriented, voiced, and externalized with open messages, intercultural nonverbal communication is visually oriented, silent, and internalized with hidden cues. Only when both components are considered can people achieve effective intercultural communication. The implications for learning a LOTE and developing intercultural communication competence are discussed.

With the deepening reform of intercultural communication competence cultivation for practicality-oriented talents, the traditional intercultural communication competence cultivation mode for the practicality-oriented talents can lead to an increase in the factors and constraints that affect the intercultural communication competence efficiency of the practicality-oriented talents. In addition, the situation of teaching resource scarcity can occur. In the traditional application talents intercultural communication competence cultivation mode, it is required to consume a lot of time of the staff. Also, it is not suitable to adjust the second classroom model constructed for the cultivation of the intercultural communication competence for the practicality-oriented talents. Hence, it can no longer meet the intercultural communication competence cultivation needs for modern practicality-oriented talents. According to the analysis of problems in the existing intercultural communication competence model for the practicality-oriented talents, combined with the particularity of the intercultural communication competence cultivation for the practicality-oriented talents, the appropriate algorithm is used to analyze the constraint conditions required in the design of the second classroom model for the cultivation of intercultural communication competence in the practicality-oriented talents. Relying on the characteristics of hierarchical teaching for the students based on the state transition matrix, the state transition matrix is applied to the cultivation of the intercultural competence in the practicality-oriented talents. The results in the practical case show that the state transition matrix can effectively improve the learning efficiency of the students.

The English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education (2022 Edition) (from now on referred to as "the new standards") mentions students' intercultural communication many times in the curriculum objectives. Under the requirements of the new standards, teachers should pay attention to cultivating students' intercultural communication awareness and ability. In the era of economic globalization, diversified modes of thinking, and information networking, the practice and exploration of cultural self-confidence have become vital prerequisites for cultivating students' cross-cultural communicative competence. Therefore, this paper explores the enhancement and development of junior high school students' intercultural communicative competence from the aspects of the meaning of intercultural communicative competence, the problems and challenges encountered in cultivating students' intercultural communication, the current situation of the cultivation of junior high school students' intercultural communicative competence, the necessity of improving junior high school students' intercultural communicative competence, the principles of the cultivation of junior high school students' intercultural communicative competence, as well as the strategies of the cultivation of junior high school students' intercultural communicative competence.

<p>Intercultural Communication Competence is essential in creating healthy relations and prevent conflict across numerous cultures. It also emphasizes the essence of accurate and proper information transmission among people. This study aimed to analyze existing literature and derive the perfect formula for learners to develop their Intercultural Communication Competence. A theory on Intercultural Communication Competence was generated using the deductive axiomatic approach. After the analysis and synthesis of related literature and studies, twelve axioms were formulated. From there, four propositions were identified: (1) Intercultural Communication Competence entails cultural actualization; (2) Intercultural Communication Competence calls for a comprehensive curriculum and assessment; (3) Digitalization boosts Intercultural Communication Competence; (4) Upskilled instructors are confident in refining learners’ Intercultural Communication Competence. With these propositions, the Interdependent Theory of Intercultural Communication Competence was generated. This theory highlights the importance of the interdependence among cultural actualization, comprehensive curriculum, digitalization, and upskilled instructors in realizing the full potential of Intercultural Communication Competence of learners. </p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0897/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

In the contemporary world, intercultural competence is vital to fostering understanding among people from diverse backgrounds. Therefore, the acquisition of intercultural awareness has become a fundamental component in all language learning programmes. Through directed qualitative content analysis, this study investigates to what extent the content of the Grade 11 English Language textbook in the Sri Lankan government school context contributes to develop ‘intercultural communicative competence’ (ICC) in learners. The contents were analyzed against Byram’s (1997) Intercultural Communicative Competence Model, types and categories of culture, and representation of ethnicities in the selected textbook. The findings revealed that the textbook represents different ethnicities through its characters (e.g. Vikum, Chamindu, Farah, Kamalesh, Nithya, Rikaz, etc.) although it does not reflect the actual religious/ethnic makeup of Sri Lanka. Moreover, the textbook most often refers to the big “C” (visible culture) while less attention is paid to the small “c” (invisible culture). Additionally, the contents predominantly represented universal cultural aspects and the source culture while briefly referring to target and international cultures. In addition, the cultural content was presented as factual knowledge with fewer opportunities for critical analysis and reflection. Consequently, students do not get the opportunity to reflect on stereotyping and counter pre-formed biases. Hence, it would be better to go beyond portraying the religious/ethnic groups through characters to enable a more analytical approach to learning about other cultures. Based on the findings, the learning material developing authority should make certain amendments to the ESL textbooks to increase their content value and quality. In conclusion, culture teaching should be integral in language programmes and material developers should represent different ethnicities.