Publication: The effect of critical listening and viewing tasks on raising awareness of intercultural communicative competence
Date
2013
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Abstract
This study explores the possible meanings pre-university students attach to the concept of successful oral communication in an intercultural context and seeks to understand them in terms of Byram’s (1997) intercultural communicative competence (ICC). It then investigates the effect of the application of critical listening and viewing tasks on their perceptions and understandings of ICC. After reviewing current theoretical constructs that define ICC as characterised by effectiveness and appropriateness with an interface of knowledge, skills and attitudes, a deeper discussion of Byram’s model will lead to a review of some studies to which this model is applied. From this review, it will be posited that empirical enquiry into intercultural communication should be focused on the communicative as well as the intercultural competences of Byram’s model. Hinging on the perspective that ICC is an observed behavioural performance entailing evaluative aural and visual observation of authentic intercultural communication acts, this study proposes that listening and viewing should be viewed as integral skills of the communication process that realises communicative competence. Furthermore, positing the centrality of communicative competence in ICC, this study hypothesises that assuming a critical stance in applying these integral skills to observing and evaluating actual intercultural oral communication acts is effective in raising awareness of ICC. The perceptions and understandings of 20 participants from a pre-university institution in Singapore are first explored through a pre interview. After the application of critical listening and viewing tasks, these are then compared with a post interview for changes in the participants’ responses. The findings show that the listening and viewing tasks have a significant positive effect on changing the pre-university students’ perceptions and understandings of ICC, thereby suggesting that awareness of ICC may be raised in the classroom context.