Relational model of intercultural communication competence

Due to the ongoing internationalization of businesses more and more companies face the expatriation of managers. In order to meet the demands of such an undergoing, the personnel concerned must have one key qualification: intercultural competence. This qualification, however, has basically been researched by management consultants and practitioners, the scientific community hardly contributing to its conceptualization and validation. The authors summarize the state-of-the-art in this field of research. Based on this, they propose a concept of intercultural competence reflecting its multidimensional structure. Furthermore, they discuss the weaknesses of the integrative model of intercultural competence. Finally, guidelines for future research are proposed. This includes the empirical analysis of the influence of intercultural competence on expatriate success. In this context, “success“ as well as “intercultural competence“ are to be operationalized as multidimensional constructs and not as single item measures.

Interkulturelle Kompetenz als neuartige Anforderung an Entsandte: Status quo und Perspektiven der Forschung

Intercultural friendship provides one of the main avenues for meaningful interpersonal contact and is considered a catalyst for successful sojourn experiences and positive attitudes toward the host...

Adult Friendship: Examples of Intercultural Patterns

The UK is now the second most popular country in the world for international studies. In this context, intercultural communicative competence (ICC)—the ability to interact with people from different backgrounds appropriately and effectively—is of particular importance. This research is intended to explore the effectiveness of an intercultural training course Transcultural Communication, currently run at one university in the North of England. Adopting the relational model of ICC (Imahori & Lanigan, 1989), the focus is on both sojourner (international students) and host national (home students). Firstly, through interviews the results show that the general difficulties for international students are the language barrier, communication difficulties and educational adaptation. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses have been performed on interview and video data to evaluate the effectiveness of the course. The results indicate that after the course the participants’ intercultural competence has been developed in four aspects—motivation, knowledge, skills and awareness. By comparing the performance of home students with and without such training, the results indicate the trained group were more interculturally competent than the untrained. This research also addresses the gap in the current literature in terms of the so-called “native speakers’ problem”, it is proposed that research needs to be focused not only on international students but also on home students in the field of intercultural communication.

Developing Intercultural Competence at UK Universities: the Effectiveness of the Course Transcultural Communication

This paper analyzes the characteristics of exolinguistic communication, a type of asymmetric communication. The data base contains five dialogues between French speakers and Latin American Spanish speakers. The subjects did not have any knowledge of French before their arrival in France. The recording situations were as authentic and varied as possible.In exolinguistic communication two speakers actively work together with varying degrees of cooperation and complementary strategies to achieve mutual understanding. In this study we examine the role of repetition, simplification, and facilitation (breaking up information, paraphrases, types of questions which warn of difficulties, etc.) and analyze the characteristics of asymmetric exchanges made up of three- or four-turn sequences which allow speakers to check understanding and avoid misunderstanding.This leads to several hypotheses on natural second language acquisition and, more specifically, on the “guidance” offered by the native speaker and on the role of metalinguistic activities.

Christine Heredia de

Papers

Asymmetric Communication in Bilingual Exchanges.