Intercultural communication

Maximizing the Benefits of International Education Collaborations

“…Achieving mutual understanding can be difficult because only a proportion of meaning can ever be conveyed explicitly. Much has to be left for the participants to work out, and in intercultural interaction this can be particularly problematic because people may focus on different clues when inferring meaning and/or they may arrive at different meanings from the same clues (Spencer-Oatey et al 2011). Similarly, when people have different preferences for directness/indirectness and/or willingness to disclose opinions, each party can find it difficult both to interpret and to accept (e.g.…”

Benchmarking Intercultural Communication Competence Assessment Tools for ESP Teaching

“…This work continues in the line of a preliminary study on ICC for ESP students (Candel-Mora, 2015) from the perspective of attitudes and knowledge of intercultural communication competence, which, among other things, revealed that in addition to the traditional dimensions taken into consideration in most ICC theoretical constructs (Arasaratnam and Doerfel, 2005;Byram, 1997;Spencer-Oatey, 2014;Spitzberg and Changnon, 2009), special emphasis was made on the relevance of intercultural communication for the students' future business and professional contexts. Findings also revealed a strong association between intercultural communication and foreign language learning -some participants even pointed out intercultural communication competence as a means to learn languages-, and the need to adapt to international interactions in other languages apart from English, thus minimizing the current predominance of English as a global language.…”