1.1A brief definition of intercultural communication competence

One definition of intercultural communication competence is that it is the complex of skills needed to perform effectively and appropriately when interacting with others who are linguistically and culturally different from oneself.

Whereas “effective” usually reflects one’s own view of one’s performance in the LC2 (i.e., an “etic” or outsider’s view of the host culture); “appropriate” relates to how one’s performance is perceived by one’s hosts (i.e., an “emic” or insider’s view).

These perceptions often differ, yet they are instructive when compared and contrasted because they arise from differing cultural approaches to the same situation.

The qualifications and skills required of ‘the sojourner’ or students who learn foreign language can be the componential elements of what to call “Intercultural Communicative Competence”.

This idea promotes the notion of communicative competence, but in more significant ways. FLT/SLT is expected to contribute to the development of what “a sojourner” requires to successfully communicate with others, but a student is more than a sojourner in that he/she is solely dependent on the school or institution where he/she is learning the hows and whats of communication in ‘other’ language. There might be claims that a student can confront other cultures through such other subject matters as geography, history, etc., but it can be stated that FS/LT has the experience of otherness at the center of its concern, as it requires learners to engage with both familiar and unfamiliar experience through the medium of another language.

Furthermore, FLT has a central aim of enabling learners to use that language to interact with people for whom it is their preferred and natural medium of experience, those we call native speakers, as well as a means of coping with the world for all concerned.

FLT/SLT is therefore concerned with communication, but this also has to be understood as more than the exchange of information and sending of messages, which has dominated communicative language teaching in recent years. Even the exchange of information is dependent on understanding how what one says or writes will be perceived and interpreted in another cultural context; it depends on the ability to de-center and take up the perspective of the listener or reader.

However successful, communication is not judged solely in terms of efficiency of information exchange but it is focused on establishing and maintaining relationships. In this sense, the efficacy of communication depends on using language to demonstrate one’s willingness to relate, which often involves the indirectness of politeness rather than direct and efficient choice of language full of information.

1.2 Intercultural competence is based on a process-oriented definition of

culture

In particular, the lively discussion about what defines intercultural competence has resulted from changing notions of culture and the difficulties these changes pose.

Intercultural competence refers to the real world in which we live and act, the world we have created together and continue to re-create daily. To that extent, it can only be defined by employing the “expanded” idea of culture that became prevalent in the 1970s in contrast to previous, narrower ideas of “the arts” and according to which culture must be understood within the overall context of human interaction.

By fixating on what was assumed to be an integrated, almost static whole of locality, group and culture, initially the expanded idea remained unexamined: culture was considered (and is still considered by many) to be the way of life of a certain group of people in a specific setting, people who—because of their culture—consider themselves members of the same group and who—because of their culture—are different from other groups in other localities.

This notion is often depicted as a global map with different discrete cultural groups, or as a mosaic, whose pieces are individual cultures.

Since Ulf Hannerz formulated the ideas of “culture as flux” and “culture as creolization,” sociologists in the 1990s have increasingly relinquished the viewpoint that culture can be understood as a closed, island-like entity, since globalization has shown the previous notion—that locality, group and culture exist as one unit—to be false.

Globalized markets for goods and financial services, global media structures and migrant flows have led to an exponential increase in the processes of cultural exchange. In the course of such contacts, numerous traditional forms of life have disappeared.

Local cultures are changing and are combining with others in new and unusual ways. The boundaries between what is known and what is foreign are becoming increasingly blurred. Social forms around the globe have become culturally heterogeneous.

What once was foreign can now be found next door. We live with immigrants and emigrants, with their languages, religions, attitudes all of which have become part of local communities across the globe.

The changed, process-oriented conception of culture therefore tries to accommodate the contradictions, the intermixing and the new diversity, which is based more on relationships than autonomy. “Culture is perceived not as a static, hermetically sealed system, but as a current of meanings that continually dissolves old relationships while establishing new ones”.

Newly advanced by academia, this procedural understanding of culture as a dynamic flow and ongoing process of negotiation between norms, values and lifestyles also leads to a dynamic conception of intercultural competence that is, as a result of its dynamism, difficult to communicate.