Intercultural Communication Paper (and INCA Survey) Instructions

native-language skills by adapting to different levels of foreign language competence or by using meta-communicative strategies for clarification. iv) KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY

The significance It is not always possible to predict where and how people will find themselves in an unfamiliar situation, interacting with people of another culture. People cannot always prepare in advance for a new situation. It is thus important to have the skills of finding out new knowledge and integrating it with what one already knows. People need especially to know how to discover practical information, and also how to observe how people of other cultures act in accordance with their underlying and often unconscious beliefs, values and behaviours. The skill of knowledge discovery is the ability to acquire new knowledge of a culture and cultural practices and the ability to act using that knowledge, attitudes and skills under the constraints of real-time communication and interaction When two or more people interact with each other, either face to face or at a distance, they have certain expectations of each other based on previous knowledge. If they know that they are to meet ‘an English person’, ‘ a woman’, or ‘a teenager’, they will use knowledge of that person or of that type – and sometimes it is a stereotype – to anticipate the nature of the interaction and communication. Even when they meet for the first time, and have no previous knowledge of each other, their expectations will form immediately – based for example on the apparent age, gender, ethnicity and social class of the other person. In situations of interaction which are not face to face – reading a letter or e-mail – there are other clues that lead to formation of expectations, sometimes deliberately given but sometimes evident from the paper used, the style of writing etc. Even if we have been prepared or taught in advance about the people in question, this can never be complete or anticipate all circumstances, and we need to know how to ‘find out’ about others and what they assume to be ‘natural’. The main difficulty is that other people are not aware of what we need to know. They are not aware for example that some allusions in what they say are recognised by people of their own culture but not shared by us. We need to be aware of what kinds of differences there might be, what the common hindrances to understanding are, and then develop skills of asking appropriate questions. In other words, we need the skills of ‘reading’ the

INCA – Intercultural Competence Assessment – www.incaproject.org 8