Teaching intercultural communication in university level.pdf

Intercultural Education, Vol. 14, No. 4, December 2003 Teaching intercultural communication in the university setting: an Australian perspective SUSANA A. EISENCHLAS SUE TREVASKES ABSTRACT Part of the tasks of internationalizing the university curriculum involves developing into courses and academic programs generally, activities and assessment practices that provide opportunities for linguistic and cultural input through interaction between local and international students. In this paper, we discuss the challenges and pitfalls of internationalizing the curriculum through the description of an innovative course that we developed to teach Intercultural Communication to languages and linguis- tics students. The program’s innovation lies in the way in which teaching and learning strategies from disparate areas of academia are brought together under the rubric of teaching culture within a university culture. We conceptualize culture broadly in this course as the experiences of everyday living and we argue that students best appreciate the connection between communication, language and culture through the immediate micro- level of everyday living with and in culture. Introduction Intercultural communication (IC) and how to teach it are subjects of increasing interest internationally and of a growing body of literature. Much of this literature focuses on the macro issues of culture and communication. This paper offers insights into teaching IC derived from somewhat different premises. We offer an innovative approach to teaching IC as a component of the university teaching program. To teach IC at the university level, we first problematize the concept of culture and its place in communication and consider both the macro and micro levels of culture within the immediate context of students’ everyday experien