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From Bridging Difference

By Gudykunst (1991)http://www.siu.edu/~ekachai/competence.html

Developing Intercultural Communication Competence

What could contribute to misunderstanding in intercultural encounters
--language barriers
--culture
--attitudes (e.g., prejudices) and stereotypes

Our expectations regarding how people from other cultures and ethnic groups are based on how we categorize them (she is Japanese, he is black, they are Mexicans). Our stereotypes affect our communication with strangers. Stereotypes, however, are less problematic in our communication with people from our own groups because they usually are more accurate and favorable than stereotypes of other groups. In order to improve our effectiveness in communicating with strangers, we must understand how unfavorable and/or inaccurate stereotypes affect the way we communicate.

We must become aware of how we communicate. Howell (1982) argues that awareness and competence can be thought of as a four-stage process:

1. Unconscious Incompetence where we misinterpret other's behavior, but are not aware of it.

2. Conscious Incompetence where we are aware that we misinterpret other's behavior, but we don't do anything about it.

3. Conscious Competence where we think about our communication behavior and consciously modify it to improve our effectiveness (Gudykunst calls it Mindfulness)

4. Unconscious Competence where we have practiced the skills for effective communication to the extent that we no longer have to think about them to use them.

Conflict between people of different ethnic and cultural groups is occurring throughout the world today (e.g., between Bosnians and Serbians, Israelis and Arabs, Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland). The causes of the conflicts differ depending on the situation, but all incidents share one thing in common, namely polarized communication--the ability to believe or seriously considers one's views as wrong and the other's opinion as truth. Polarized communication exists when groups or individuals look out for their own interests and have little concern for others' interests, leading to moral exclusion, where certain groups are perceived as outside the boundary in which moral values, rule, and considerations of fairness apply.

Gudykunst believes that human beings have a responsibility to try to deal with cultural and ethnic diversity in a constructive fashion, and not leading to polarized communication. To communicate effectively, we must try to construct our messages in a way that strangers can understand what we mean and we need to try to interpret strangers' messages to us in the way they meant them to be interpreted. In order to know how to improve our communication with strangers, we have to understand our normal tendencies when we communicate with them.

From http://www.dpb.dpu.dk/infodok/sprogforum/Espr18/byram.html

Intercultural competence

Briefly, intercultural competence involves five elements:

Attitudes: curiosity and openness, readiness to suspend disbelief about other cultures and belief about one's own.
Knowledge: of social groups and their products and practices in one's own and in one's interlocutor's country, and of the general processes of societal and individual interaction.
Skills of interpreting and relating: ability to interpret a document or event from another culture, to explain it and relate it to documents from one's own.
Skills of discovery and interaction: ability to acquire new knowledge of a culture and cultural practices and the ability to operate knowledge, attitudes and skills under the constraints of real-time communication and interaction.
Critical cultural awareness/political education: an ability to evaluate critically and on the basis of explicit criteria perspectives, practices and products in one's own and other cultures and countries.

In short someone with some degree of intercultural competence is someone who is able to see relationships between different cultures - both internal and external to a society - and is able to mediate, that is interpret each in terms of the other, either for themselves or for other people. It is also someone who has a critical or analytical understanding of (parts of) their own and other cultures - someone who is conscious of their own perspective, of the way in which their thinking is culturally determined, rather than believing that their understanding and perspective is natural.

Assessing knowledge is thus only a small part of what is involved and what needs to be assessed is learners' ability to step outside, to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange, and to act on that change of perspective.

Most difficult of all is to assess whether students have changed their attitudes, become more tolerant of difference and the unfamiliar. This is affective and moral development and it can be argued that even if we can assess it, we should not be trying to quantify tolerance. I would agree with this if assessment implies quantification and a judgement made by a teacher or examiner on a student, but this is only one kind of assessment. If however, assessment is not in terms of tests and traditional examinations, but rather in terms of producing a record of learners' competences, then a portfolio approach is possible and in fact desirable (Byram, 1997).

Intercultural competence: the teacher's own intercultural competence - a lifelong project

http://www.dpb.dpu.dk/infodok/sprogforum/Espr18/risager.html

Developing one's intercultural competence is an aspect of the lifelong socialisation process, or - to express it in more constructivist terms - a lifelong project. From early childhood and throughout our lives, we learn more and more about dealing with social and cultural differences and relating to them in developing our own identity. When we are involved in formal learning of a foreign or second language - at school or during teacher education - there is special focus on a particular kind of cultural differences, namely the national or the ethnic. We focus to a great extent on a national language, e.g. French, and on how life can be lived in France or in other French-speaking countries. We can be more or less aware of cultural, ethnic and linguistic variation - and of international and transnational relationships - but the national or nation-state framework normally asserts itself at some level or other - at least when it comes to language teaching in Europe. Themes such as 'the typically Danish' and 'Danishness', 'the typically German', 'the typically American', etc. are fairly common, and this naturally calls for a great caution and a critical sense if we in our own knowledge of the world are to avoid promoting national stereotypes that actually have little basis in fact.

It is important to stress that intercultural competence should not simply be perceived as 'bicultural'. All present-day societies are culturally complex at many levels, as a result of cultural developments and processes of dispersal over most of the world. Nation states attempt, generally speaking, to maintain an awareness of a common national culture and identity, though, in fact, cultural complexity reigns - a complexity that is characterised by the power structures that exist in the societies concerned and in the world. Intercultural competence is the ability to handle (productively and receptively) this cultural complexity in the micro-context and the macro-context: in the residential area, the burger bar, at home in front of the TV, out shopping, at the workplace, on the Internet, at the international seminar, etc. as well as at more general level in the multicultural and globalised world.

Intercultural competence is an active and productive ability, for, in actually using it, we create culture, i.a. in the classroom. In communicating, we create or confirm our identities, and understanding is an active process where one creates an understanding of what has been said from one's own perspective and own horizon. I think that it is productive to have such a social-constructivist approach to intercultural communicative competence. On the other hand, one must not forget that this liberty to create our own identities soon runs up against fairly solid systems that identify us against our will. Liberty encounters coercion.

http://www.uni-saarland.de/z-einr/efb/AHOI/Lima/Base/Chapter3.htm

DEFINITIONS OF CULTURE AND CLARIFICATION ON INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE

There is a plethora of scientific answers to the definition of culture. Since our focus is on practice, it will be useful to have an overview of what cultural differences are made of and what the problems and obstacles might be when dealing with migrants and refugees from very different cultural backgrounds. A very attractive example of how to illustrate the problem of cultural differences has been designed by Gibson in his model of the "cultural iceberg". It looks like this:

The idea of this model is quite clear: It shows that culture can be initially defined by those characteristics seen "above the water", with the more subtle aspects lying "under the water". For practitioners working in a cross-cultural environment, it is this subtle area that is most problematic, and which this training package wants to draw attention to.

INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE

1) Individual intercultural competence

Despite the fact that intercultural competence of individuals has always been emphasised as a necessary skill for dealing with migrant's problems, there is no common agreement over the components parts inherit in it. Scheitza has assembled various "ingredients" of intercultural competence from various sources. These are categorised under the personal attributes of attitude, knowledge, communication, self-confidence and social relationships. These components of individual intercultural competence are not only attributed to the migrant living in a host society, they are also needed for those dealing with migrants and refugees in their everyday life. These skills have to be learned by both sides.

For our purposes we can state that individual intercultural competence is the result of the development of interpersonal skills that arise from the following:

the motivation to communicate effectively with someone from a different culture;
being prepared to learn the skills needed for effective communication;
the ability to put this knowledge into use.(See chapter 3.4)

(2) Intercultural competence of institutions

In addition to the intercultural competence of individuals we also talk of the intercultural competence of institutions. Intercultural competence of institutions refers to the capacity of the institutions concerned to adapt their structure and performance (rules & regulations governing the interaction between employees and members of the target group, mono-cultural or multi-cultural composition of the institution's workforce, etc.) to the demands of intercultural encounters. (See Chapter 3.5).

(3) Intercultural competence of cultural groups

And finally we demand the intercultural competence in the interaction of the dominant culture via the different cultural minorities within the host society and vice versa. Within the globalisation process highly industrialised countries participate in an exchange of labour between the EU-countries and they are the target of migration influx from less developed countries. These migration processes need political guidance, but even more the willingness and the capacity of the different groups to respect the "cultural rights" of all cultural groups concerned (dominant culture and minorities).

INDIVIDUAL INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE

Principles

One basic precondition for individual intercultural competence is the need to allow one's attitudes to be challenged by recognising that the other has the freedom and the right to be different, whatever one's own opinion is.

Both partners in the exchange are experts of their respective cultures and should treat each other with mutual respect.

The practitioner is responsible for the process. S/He has to enable the different experiences and viewpoints to be identified properly and related to the problem they are talking about.

Being non-judgemental. In communicating with a migrant, the practitioner has to be aware of the fact that they are making an interpretation of what is being communicated to them and that they will never have the full picture.

Intercultural communication

To identify the positive attributes applicable to individual intercultural communication and the extent to which a developed intercultural competence can help a practitioner, we have to look at the opposite of intercultural communication, mono-cultural communication.

Mono-cultural communication is based on common behaviour, language and values. This means that the day to day interaction between members of the same culture are based on roughly common definitions. These similarities allow the members of the same cultural back-ground to be able to predict the behaviour of others and assume a common perception of reality (Bannett 1998). Mono-cultural communication therefore is based on similarities.

Intercultural communication does not allow for assumptions of similarity to be made that easily. If we define cultures by their difference of language, behaviour, and values, these differences have to be recognised. Intercultural communication therefore, is based on differences.

The issue of stereotypes and generalisations has to be tackled within this context. It is often a matter of expediency to work with generalisations and stereotypes, especially when working with migrants and refugees from not just one, but many different cultures. More important factors are, whether the stereotypes are based on respect for the other culture (positive stereotypes) or by disrespect (negative stereotypes). While the former can open the door to communication, the latter will inevitably impose sanctions and barriers to effective intercultural exchanges.

A related aspect is the assimilationist approach to intercultural communication. This is commonly connected to the notion that everyone is an individual and can only be dealt with as such. It normally implies that the individual should change to enable mono-cultural communication and that the host society should avoid the dangers, pitfalls and the hard work required by intercultural communication. Or, as LaRay Barna puts it:

"Another reason many people are lured into thinking that 'people are people' is that it reduces the discomfort of dealing with difference, of not knowing. The thought that everyone is the same, deep down, is comforting. If someone acts or looks 'strange' (different from them), it is then possible to evaluate this as wrong and treat everyone ethnocentrically." (Barna in Bennett 1998)

What then are the attributes needed to establishing effective and meaningful intercultural communication?

Firstly, there is language. It does not only serve as a tool for communication but also as a "system of representation" for perception and thinking (Bennett 1998).

Secondly, there is non-verbal behaviour or communication. In some cultures the non-verbal way to express things is much more common and much more important than in many European cultures. Non-verbal communication can be something, as Hall defined, "in which most of the information is already in the person, while very little is in the (...) explicit transmitted part of the message" (Hall 1998). Therefore, the understanding of the "hidden" messages of non-verbal behaviour in some cultures can be absolutely essential in dealing effectively with members from these backgrounds.

Thirdly, is communication-style. There may be quite a difference between the way a European might describe a problem, than someone from an African background. Some cultures may go straight to the point whilst others may circle round the topic. The difference between a linear and a more contextual way of expressing things can cause anger, impatience and misunderstanding. This can be avoided or at least limited by some basic knowledge of different communication-styles.

Fourthly, are values and assumptions. Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck have developed five dimensions of cultural assumptions: people's relationship to the environment, to each other, to activity, to time, and to the basic nature of human beings (Kluckhohn/Strodtbeck 1973), operating either individualistically or collectively. Knowing that someone operates as an individual with an apprehension towards authoritarianism or operates as a member of a group, with an inherent subservience towards a superior, provides insight into how someone may adapt to a workplace or job in a different culture.

There are four underlying assumptions that ensure the success of individual intercultural communication:

The smaller the similarities between two cultures, the more problematic intercultural communication is.
Intercultural interaction offers the possibility of social change arising from new ideas and insights that will not always be immediately apparent.
Only if you operate as partners from different cultures action on an equal basis will be ensured.
These plans for action will be more successful if a high degree of cultural awareness, i.e. of intercultural competence is available.

HOW TO GAIN INDIVIDUAL INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE

We define:

Intercultural competence is

the overall capability of an individual to manage key challenging features of intercultural communication: namely, cultural differences and unfamiliarity, inter-group dynamics, and the tensions and conflicts that can accompany this process.

To answer the question how to gain intercultural competence, we have to differentiate between the intercultural competence of migrants and refugees and the intercultural competence of any practitioner working with that target group.

(1) Migrants and refugees

Gaining intercultural competence is for most migrants and refugees, generally an informal process. It emerges through the challenges of daily life and is a necessary precondition for a successful integration in the host society. The introduction of formal ways and means to improve intercultural communication can help migrants and refugees to improve their skills to deal with their problems.

Very often, some of the individual intercultural competence is gained by attending a language-course. Many language books are designed to give information on cultural and especially behavioural aspects of day-to-day-life in the host country. In the Netherlands for example, migrants and refugees are normally subject to an integration programme which includes also courses on Dutch culture and society. Because of the special emphasis on integration this programme is quite outstanding within the European context. It is one of the few centrally organised attempts to develop intercultural awareness in a European country.

For migrants and refugees also, intercultural competence is indispensable for integration into the labour-market. They often get initial information on their host-culture through contacts with compatriots living in the country. Compatriots offer an informal system of advice and counsel and often direct migrants and refugees to institutions that can help. This method of attaining intercultural competence can be positive in that it is based on trust and is often more relevant to the migrant newly arrived. A negative aspect is that the advise given by fellow compatriots might be biased and they might not be in possession of all the relevant and up-to-date information regarding migrants and refugees.

Many organisations specialising in the field of migration and refugees have developed translated information materials to counteract this kind of misinformation.

Migrants and refugees acquiring intercultural competence through their own organisations can face difficulties when the political activities of the organisation overshadow the benefits to be gained from their advice.