Developing Intercultural Competence at UK Universities: the Effectiveness of the Course Transcultural Communication

The UK is now the second most popular country in the world for international studies. In this context, intercultural communicative competence (ICC)—the ability to interact with people from different backgrounds appropriately and effectively—is of particular importance. This research is intended to explore the effectiveness of an intercultural training course Transcultural Communication, currently run at one university in the North of England. Adopting the relational model of ICC (Imahori & Lanigan, 1989), the focus is on both sojourner (international students) and host national (home students). Firstly, through interviews the results show that the general difficulties for international students are the language barrier, communication difficulties and educational adaptation. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses have been performed on interview and video data to evaluate the effectiveness of the course. The results indicate that after the course the participants’ intercultural competence has been developed in four aspects—motivation, knowledge, skills and awareness. By comparing the performance of home students with and without such training, the results indicate the trained group were more interculturally competent than the untrained. This research also addresses the gap in the current literature in terms of the so-called “native speakers’ problem”, it is proposed that research needs to be focused not only on international students but also on home students in the field of intercultural communication.