Intercultural Competence In Cross Culture Communication

The topic of intercultural competence have become very important in the past years of the globalization era where people of diverse cultures meet, study and work together. Conversation between culturally different speakers are more likely go wrong than between the speakers of the same culture. People need to obtain the intercultural competence in order to communicate smoothly with people from different cultural background and go beyond the conceptual meaning of the utterance. Misunderstandings can occur even between the speakers sharing the same culture when speakers wrongly interpret the pragmatic meaning of the utterance, but more commonly it happens in cross-culture communication. These kinds of mistakes are called pragmatic failures which …show more content…
Socio-pragmatic failures Even though we manage to mind all the possible linguistic mistakes and our grammar and phonology is perfect we cannot avoid socio-pragmatic failures without knowing the cultural background of the people we speak with. These mistakes results from various cultural, social factors and different customs. Leech (1983) introduced the Politeness Principle: A. Tack Maxim; B. Generosity Maxim; C. Approbation Maxim; D. Modesty Maxim; E. Agreement Maxim; F. Sympathy Maxim. Politeness Principle proposes how to produce and understand language based on politeness. Although pragmatic failures often result only in funny anecdotes, sometimes it may cause misunderstanding resulting in surprise, puzzlement, astonishment or even frustration and anger. In other case it can cause serious conflict, cultural friction, communication breakdown, cultural rejection or it can contribute to unfair stereotyping (Thomas, 1983)

To avoid such pragmatic failures people must obtain different communicative competences in the spoken …show more content…
The goal is to incorporate the cultural competence in all levels of formal, informal and non-formal education. There are three principles of intercultural education. 1) Respect the cultural identity of the learner, 2) provide every learner with a knowledge, attitudes and skills to fully participate in a society, 3) "intercultural education provides all learners with cultural knowledge, attitudes and skills that enable them to contribute to respect, understanding and solidarity among individuals, ethnic, social, cultural and religious groups and nations." (Leeds-Hurwitz & Stenou,