The Role of Cultural Competence in Intercultural Communication

Since I was very young, I have been taught through lessons at school that “travel forms a young man” or travel broadens the mind. Now it comes as passion for travelling to me that I have a plan to set my foot over the country in the twenties and even more ambitiously, all over the continents until the forties. After graduating from university, I intend to work for two year experience and prepare to study overseas. If I travel to another country or region, I will probably encounter different culture at host country or even within my own country. As far as I can imagine, I may experience a lot of difficulties. In fact, anyone travelling to another culture, within or outside of her or his nation of origin, may cope up with culture shock and go through some form of transition experiences, which helps make us more complex and complete individuals, to be better intercultural communicators. Janet Bennett (1977) suggests that when there is a “loss of a familiar frame of reference” — whether that is a move to another area, there are both loss and change: “Culture shock bears a remarkable resemblance to tensions and anxieties we face whenever change threatens the stability of our lives”. Since travelling to other cultures is not familiar to me, culture shock is inevitable; hence, I had better improve and build up intercultural competence concerning knowledge, skill and attitude to work on in myself to attain effectiveness and appropriateness in intercultural communication.

In “Conceptualizing Intercultural Competence,” Spitzberg and Chagnon define intercultural competence as, “the appropriate and effective management of interaction between people who, to some degree or another, represent different or divergent affective, cognitive, and behavioral orientations to the world”. Definitions of intercultural competence can be varied; however, by and large, as Arasaeratnam (2016) stated, intercultural competence is a combination of one’s personal abilities (such as flexibility, empathy, open-mindedness, self-awareness, adaptability, language skills, cultural knowledge, etc.) as well as relevant contextual variables (such as shared goals, incentives, perceptions of equality, perceptions of agency, etc.), which helps build a bridge into the new culture.

In terms of knowledge, there is a need of cultural self-awareness (meaning the ways in which one’s culture has influenced one’s identity and worldview), culture-specific knowledge, deep cultural knowledge including understanding other world views, and sociolinguistic awareness (Deardoff, 2006). Personally I am deeply impressed with a quote of Martin Luther King Jr. He stated nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. It can be inferred from his saying that only by feeding oneself with knowledge; they then become a useful person for humankind. Especially if we travel to other cultures, then an ocean of knowledge are required and we must bear them in our mind for cultural adaptation. Cross-cultural adaptation refers to one’s ability to negotiate the culture to accomplish tasks (shopping, etc.), to “fit in” by adapting some degree of aspects of the host culture. Experiencing unfamiliar cultural contexts asks for adjustment to adaptation or even higher level, integration. Even if one is an effective and appropriate intercultural communicator in one context, he or she might not be so in another cultural context. Therefore, it will never be redundant that we enrich ourselves with intercultural knowledge and learn how to adapt to cultural differences.

From my teacher’s experiences, she spent one year and a half on doing volunteer work in India. Even though she had made a serious study on indigenous culture, it did not get her familiar to do’s and don’ts that are at a widely accepted level in Indian culture. Once she came to visit a Hindu temple, she was not let to be in it because the temple guards told her she is non-Hindus. As a favor, he let my teacher come in to visit the outside but was not allowed to walk inside sacred precinct. In addition, she was warned of not taking any photos for respects to genies. It took her 3 hours from Jaipur to New Delhi to just sight-see the temple only because of inadequately thorough knowledge of religion in indigenous culture. However, the case of my teacher is seen almost not to affect anyone except her while I would like to take another example of a Chinese tourist who caused a head-on crash that left a Perth man with life-threatening injuries. Quingwei Li, 35, had arrived in WA the day before he drove on the wrong side of Indian Ocean Drive at Wilbinga, and crashed into a car being driven by Simon Treloar. Consequently, Mr Treloar suffered multiple injuries, including a fractured pelvis, a shattered femur and ankle, a broken nose and a crushed right foot. Three passengers in Li's car were also injured. The crash happened as he drove into a 'blind bend'. Li was on the incorrect side of the road, he arrived the day before the accident and he was required to drive on the left-hand side while he was in his comfort zone on the right-hand side of the road. Despite Li’s lawyer’s defending, Judge Simon Stone assured Li's lack of knowledge of WA's road rules was no excuse. From this case, I suppose that the accident might not have happened and he would not have been sentenced if Li had had the knowledge of the local road rules and practiced to get used to driving on the left-hand side. This also penetrates me with a lesson that “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”.

In the process of cross-cultural adjustment, which refers to the process one goes through in adjusting to another culture (Kim, 2001), there are struggles most people sense during their cultural transitions, which essentially demands skills such as observation, listening, evaluating, analyzing, interpreting, and relating. Brian Spitzberg (1994) lists dozens of different skills and attitudes that had been linked with intercultural competence and effectiveness. The list includes things such as charisma, flexibility, empathy, non-ethnocentrism, personality strength, optimism, self-efficacy, and ability to facilitate communication. From my perspectives, out of all of the skills I need to be a successful traveler, adaptability should be taken into significant consideration as it is the key to the door of the host culture and also the apartment for me to live in. Generally speaking, travelling often provide us opportunities to step out of our comfort zone and receive precious lively lesson. It really sharpens our existent skills and arouses potential ones to make us be ready for anything, be flexible and adapt to change. One of my friends studying in Japan said that in the very first day, she found hard to change her living habit to keep up with rushy pace of the city and slowly adapt to the bustling at work. She did a part-time job that required meticulousness and 100% no mistake from the employer. That was the moment she has learnt to put 100 percent of dedication into the work and also to be punctual at work with no excuse, which she never ever gained before.

After all, attitude seems to matter more than anything else. Intercultural competence can be learned if we always stay open-minded and curious about other cultures and effectiveness in intercultural communication can be achieved if we are willing to discover, to respect and to tolerate cultural differences. It is generally acknowledged that most travelers have ever gone through some sort of stress and been at a certain level of anxiety when moving to a new culture. This may lead to entho-centrism, a perception in which “one’s own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled with reference to it”. The solution to this negative attitude is reverse, which is ethno-relativism in which this first stage is acceptance. It should be better that travelers recognize other cultures and accept them as viable alternatives to their own worldview.

In conclusion, travelling is only beneficial to people when they have learnt something from the culture they move to. And only by equipping ourselves with intercultural competence, we can be a vivid traveler as we always long for.